The Journal
laptop or PC) and make sure to read it the next
time, before the patient sprawls on your chair.
The history taking yields facts and information
which help for reference at future appointments
and also makes the patients feel valued beyond
just being another OPD ‘number’ as he
acknowledges that the dentist has his entire
dental ‘information’ stored with him. As patients
develop a long-term valued relationship with
their dentist, they are less likely to leave them.
Studies have ascertained that 58% of the
patients stay with their dentist for five years or
more, if taken care of properly and are not just
treated like a ‘subject’. It has been rightly said
that improving the bond with your patients is
one of the most important ways you can grow
your practice. This in my opinion is one of the
biggest practice builder tools and of course,
saves your butt from a lot of medico-negligence
problems as well. Always keep the patients
updated whilst taking an informed consent,
don’t do anything just in good faith and as they
say ‘An educated patient is a satisfied patient
and a satisfied patient is a loyal patient’.
3. Financial Management : Dentists are
usually deemed intelligent having cracked
some of the toughest entrance exams to get
admissions in medical / dental colleges. Some
of them, therefore, think they can make great
monetary decisions too, but most of them make
mistakes, sometimes, even blunders leading to
huge financial losses sometimes. A common
thought is that dentists are often neglectful with
their money. They stack up loans, usually spend
out too much of what they earn and hardly save
for their retirement. After years of studying,
exams and struggling on a tight student life
budget, they are ready to be extravagant when
they start earning well. Dentists sometimes do
fall into the lure of living life lavishly and usually
beyond their means. Be it a credit card
installment or paying back the student loan
installment, poor debt management habits
quickly forge a significant problem for
them.Some of us are in huge debts due to
student loans or loans taken for setting up of our
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practice and don’t know how to manage these
loans. Tax is one of the grey areas for people
like us and should involve a systematic and
planned investment with a handsome
retirement strategy, yet many dentists lack that
coherent effort to build up a well-defined tax
strategy. Many of us are so busy managing the
patient side of their practice that they end up
neglecting the financial elements of their
business while a few are just complacent about
their finances. Regardless of the reason, not
being on top of your practice’s finances can lead
to costly errors that can damage your long-term
financial situation and create a much higher tax
liability than you would have otherwise
envisaged. We see most of the dentists running
helter-skelter on the call of their CA or financial
advisor in March (the fag end of the financial
year) to literally throw money (a hard earned
one) in one scheme or the other just to save tax
which is in fact, a very wrong strategy.
4.Balancing the rising cost of health care
services vis-à-vis pricing in practice : There
is no magic formula for right pricing especially in
our field. The biggest and the most common
mistake, we guys do in our clinic pertaining to
pricing is under-pricing of our services. We don’t
have any statistical data to prove it, but as
taught by our parents and seniors, somewhere
in early phase of our careers at the back of our
mind, we still get stuck in that mistaken idea that
startup clinics are supposed to win by having
the lowest price. We are really sorry to say, that,
it just isn’t true. Pricing is a matter of situation,
strategy, costs, competition, services,
categorization, season, weather, instinct and a
combination of a few or all of the above. Believe
me, it is difficult to tell, how to set the right price,
but it is easier to tell how not to set your price or
which mistakes, we commit and are not to be
committed. We got to realize our own worth
ourselves while pricing any particular service or
while introducing a new product line. India is a
vast country with huge demographic variation
and different strata of population and
furthermore, each dentist having specific target
Vol. 14 No. 2
May-August 2018