Yankee Dental Congress: 5 Promising Practice Management Classes

This year the Yankee Dental Congress runs from Jan. 25-29 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. The Congress is New England’s largest gathering of dental professionals, including more than 450 exhibitors, more than 30 free continuing education course, and hosting more than 28,000 dental professionals.

We at Dentist’s Money Digest tend to be a bit obsessed with the business side of dentistry. With that in mind, here are five business-centric continuing education sessions that look promising. We’ll be covering them to bring you the highlights, in addition to sitting down with other lecturers for video interviews on their given topics.

1. How Not to Fail Miserably at Private Practice: Thursday, Jan. 26, 8-10 a.m. — We get it. Business training in dental school, if it happened at all, was probably an afterthought. This free course should prepare you if you’re looking to join the approximately 80 percent of dentists who own their own practices, according to the American Dental Association’s Health Policy Institute. Topics in this session will include controlling overhead costs and making more effective use of your schedule.

2. Making the Most of Your Dental Investment: Thursday, Jan. 26, 10 a.m.-12 p.m. — Maybe you’re thinking of finally buying that cone beam radiography setup. Or maybe you’re thinking about expanding into sleep dentistry. Regardless, you’ll want to make sure that there’s a demand for those services in your market, and you’ll want to know how to effectively market those services to patients. This free session should help with both.

3. Expanding Social Media Reach for Patient Acquisition and Patient Retention: Friday, Jan. 27, 9 a.m.-12 p.m. — Marketing your dental practice used to start and end with putting an ad in the Yellow Pages. Those days are long gone. Your patients are on social media now, and that’s where you need to be if you want to stay in touch with them. It’s also where you need to be if you’re looking to bring in new sessions. This $75 session looks to offer social media tactics you can put in play right away.

4. Keeping Your Practice Pulse by Using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Saturday, Jan. 28, 9 a.m.-11 a.m. — This free session looks to promote a by-the-numbers overview of flow of patients and revenue through your dental practice. You might know that what gets measured gets managed, but you might not know what, exactly, to measure. That’s where the Key Performance Indicators will come in.

5. Overcoming Obstacles to Practice Ownership: Saturday, Jan. 28, 1-3 p.m. — You don’t need to be afraid of the challenges of practice ownership. This session looks to equip you with the tools you need to handle the business-centric role of running your own practice. The speakers in this free session will review creating the business plan and team that you need to get where you want to be.