Jill Nesbitt

“So, what do you do?”

In this month’s From the Office Manager’s Desk column, Jill Nesbitt describes her practice’s experience with an unclaimed funds audit and explains why it’s important for every practice to have an organized system to handle patient refunds.

As part of DPR’s From The Office Manager’s Desk Series, Jill Nesbitt tells you how to use your ledger to manage and increase case acceptance in your office.

  As part of DPR’s From the Office Manager’s Desk series, Jill Nesbitt tells us what products she’s most excited about after this year’s Midwinter Meeting.  

Do you have a specialist practicing part time in your office? Most specialists these days are traveling to more than one office to increase their productivity by reaching out to new patient populations. This approach works!  

All your marketing dollars go to waste if your secretary isn’t well-trained to handle new patient phone calls. You may invest thousands in direct mail, website upgrades or tens of thousands in television commercials because you need new patients.

Dental Consultant and Office Manager Jill Nesbitt, MBA, offers up 10 fresh ways to put those older items to use in your practice.

Dentist peer reviews can help make this happen. Here’s how.

Halloween is my favorite holiday. Kids costumes at trick-or-treat, pumpkin carving and, of course, loads of candy! There are all sorts of delightful opportunities for dental practice marketing in October. So, if you’re looking for ideas to have fun and market your practice at the same time, don’t be afraid to...

An office manager's take on how to solve team conflict and achieve team harmony in your dental office.

As dental practice marketing completely transforms from the simplicity of running a few ads in the Yellow Pages to the complexity of updating your website and regularly contributing to social media, photographs are becoming more and more important to your practice.

For a practice to run smoothly, we office managers need to know how our dentists feel about the following types of questions and we need to be clear on what the dentist’s guidelines are for the practice. So Doctor, what is your office policy for financial arrangements? When do you feel it’s appropriate to send an account to a collections agency? How do you want your emergency patients scheduled?

One of the most critical responsibilities an office manager has is to manage the schedule. The dentist wants it to be productive. The hygienists want it to be full. The assistants want it to have enough time to turn over rooms and catch up on cleaning instruments. The secretaries are busy trying to fill the schedule when it has holes and confirm and take care of patients when it’s full.

Do you have some great vendors that support your dental practice? Perhaps your computer technician does a great job coordinating all the technology in the dental office plus he’s saved the day in an emergency once or twice? Has your dental supply vendor rushed an order for you or given you a product out of her own personal stash when you were in a pinch?

In October 2010, I attended the American Dental Association’s annual conference in Orlando. Just a few months before, I started a Facebook page for our practice and was struggling to come up with new and interesting posts. So, while at the conference, I attended a presentation on Social Media to learn how to use Facebook to benefit the practice.