Simplifying your practice: 6 ways dental software can help

Looking to streamline your practice's everyday tasks but unsure if dental software is worth the investment? 

It’s easy to say software can help you ‘boost efficiency’ – but how specifically? And is it really worth the price? 

In this article, we’ll cut through the jargon and take an honest look at how dental software like PracticeHub can help address common practice challenges and improve daily operations. 

If you’re like many dental and healthcare practices, you may use spreadsheets, Word documents and emails to manage daily tasks. 

There are plenty of advantages to these ‘traditional’ tools. They’re familiar, cheap (often free) and straightforward to use. 

But they also come with hidden costs and inefficiencies as your practice grows, such as: 

• Difficulty finding the latest version of documents or updating the wrong one 
• Endless email threads to share or update records 
• Risk of errors or information slipping through the cracks 
• Complex task delegation and tracking of compliance with policies. 

While inexpensive, traditional tools can lead to hidden costs – time-consuming admin, errors and frustrated staff – that can make them a less viable solution long term.

Let’s address the cost factor: dental software like PracticeHub isn’t free, but when broken down to a daily figure, it’s roughly equivalent to the price of your daily coffee.  

For that small investment, you can significantly reduce the admin that takes up much of your team’s time and provide a far less frustrating way of working. But how does software help achieve this?  

Let’s look at the top ways dental software can help your practice reduce admin, improve teamwork and reduce risk for your practice: 

To meet the National Safety and Quality Primary and Community Healthcare Standards, you must provide evidence of regular equipment maintenance. 

Software for dentists like PracticeHub helps support this with a digital equipment register that centralises all your user manuals, warranties, insurance and supplier details.  

With PracticeHub, you can assign equipment upkeep to team members, who receive instant alerts for their tasks. It also lets you set reminders for important dates like calibration, maintenance and warranty expirations.

Tracking risks, incidents and patient feedback using traditional methods can be inefficient and unreliable. 

Lost documents or lengthy email chains increase the chance of missed details, which can delay responses and potentially expose your practice to risks.  

Dental software like PracticeHub helps you avoid these challenges. Its Quality Registers module allows you to:  

• Enable any staff member to log and respond to feedback, incidents and risks in a consolidated digital register (see the image below) 
• Assign corrective actions and track progress via automated notifications 
• Simplify patient feedback collection using a QR code for digital submissions, eliminating manual data entry 
• Avoid the hassle of using multiple documents and emails, with everything in one place 

Creating policies and procedures from scratch is time-consuming. Dental software like PracticeHub helps simplify this with over 100 expertly written, healthcare-aligned policies that can be customised to your practice.  

PracticeHub helps you easily assign policies and procedures and track signoffs with automated notifications, which helps eliminate the need for chase ups. 

These pre-written policies and procedures are one of the biggest benefits for the over 1,000 healthcare practices using PracticeHub. 

As Kerri Haines, Practice Manager at Flinders Street Dermatology in NSW, said: “We implemented PracticeHub for our policies and procedures, which saved us a huge amount of time and stress.” 

Ongoing training is critical to ensure compliance and minimise risk, but organising and completing training can be challenging in a busy dental practice. 

Dental software like PracticeHub helps simplify this process, offering a convenient, flexible way for your team to stay up to date with essential knowledge. 

PracticeHub includes eight e-learning modules on critical topics such as infection control, patient privacy, and workplace health and safety (WH&S). 

Your team can complete training in the platform at a time that suits them, reducing disruptions to daily operations. 

Automated reminders prompt staff to complete courses and let you know who’s due for a refresher. 

With PracticeHub’s e-learning capabilities, you can: 

• Assign targeted training to team members based on their specific roles and responsibilities (see the image below) 
• Track progress and completion with automated notifications and an intuitive dashboard 
• Maintain thorough training records to demonstrate compliance, offering a clear record if any incident occurs. 

Onboarding new team members can be a chaotic and time-consuming process without a reliable system in place.  

PracticeHub helps you create a standardised, efficient onboarding experience that gets new hires up to speed quickly and supports compliance from day one. 

Here’s how PracticeHub helps support seamless onboarding: 

• With all critical policies, registers and procedures in one place, new hires have everything they need at their fingertips. 
• You can allocate policies to new team members, with real-time notifications prompting them to sign each document and informing you if they haven’t 
• You can assign mandatory training on WH&S, privacy and confidentiality, and other core areas, allowing new team members to complete these courses digitally at their own pace. 

PracticeHub also supports compliance by providing daily notifications on all clinicians’ Ahpra registration status. 

It also sends automated alerts to clinician’s when their indemnity insurance renewal date is approaching, so they can upload all their indemnity documents to PracticeHub themselves. 

Often, employee satisfaction comes down to the tools and workflows they use daily. 

PracticeHub helps reduce the need for lengthy email chains, scattered documents and frustrating processes, assisting in making daily tasks easier and more efficient. It provides: 

• A central dashboard for quick access to essential documents and tasks 
• Automated reminders, reducing the need for follow-ups 
• In-platform messaging that can help ensure everyone’s on the same page 
• An intuitive platform that doesn’t require a steep learning curve. 

This centralised approach improves collaboration and ensures everyone has the information they need, leading to smoother, more efficient daily operations. 

If you’re wondering whether PracticeHub could make a tangible difference, why not see it in action? 

Schedule a free 30-minute demonstration with our team, who will tailor the demo to your practice’s unique needs and answer any questions you may have, at a time convenient to you.