Running a dental office can be a big undertaking. Understanding how to provide the best care to your patients. While also being business savvy enough to take payments and have legal agreements that patients sign can be pretty daunting to deal with. However, not paying attention to how to secure your business from malpractice suits, theft, or cybersecurity can kill your dental practice with one negative event. Here are a few things you can do to help protect your dental practice.
Reduce Cybersecurity Attacks
Every dentist office has access to the internet, thus every practice is at risk of cyber attack. Making sure the computers that your employees use have security software installed is extremely important. Also locking out certain websites can help to mitigate the risk of attack. While an employee may download a funny video at lunch time which may seem harmless to do. This sort of thing can quickly turn into a malware nightmare if you download the wrong thing is accidentally.
Making sure that you have safety measures in place via policy or software is a good way to help mitigate the chances of getting hacks. Getting hacked is awful as you run the risk of your patient data getting out on the web which can lead to lawsuits and the dealing of statutes of limitations.
Making sure your software is up to date is another way to help reduce the risk of attack. Software updates frequently to patch security holes and threats that creep up as new threats appear.
Insurance
While a person can do the best job they can to avoid things from happening, and they should, the truth is that sometimes bad things happen. When they do, you need to make sure you have really good insurance to help protect you in these instances so that you can proceed with your practice without having to grind your business to a halt.
Malpractice insurance is one of the most important types of insurance that a dental office should have. This sort of insurance protects you, or your partners, from putting the business finances at risk in the event of a malpractice lawsuit. This insurance can also cover you in the event of errors by a partner or employee.
While you want protection from the patients you will be serving, you also want to protect from the employees. Having employment practices liability insurance can help protect from discrimination, wrongful termination, harassment, and failure to promote lawsuits from employees.
Business overhead insurance is also something to consider as life happens. For example, a car accident, hospitalization, or hand injury may quickly make your ability to practice dentistry impossible. Business overhead insurance can help to pay your practice’s monthly expenses until you can return to work, or can find a replacement for yourself at your practice. This sort of insurance can provide a life line in hard situations like this in order to keep your business afloat.
Accountability
Dentist offices across the country are plagued by embezzlement. You have to trust employees to accept payments and to pay the bills of your office. Too many employees are tempted to pocket some of that money thinking that you’ll never know it was even there. Dentists must take the time to check their books and make sure their employees know that they are looking at the number. You can quickly deter employees who may take a little money here and there.
As you can see, there are several ways to protect your dental practice from many different things. Make sure that as the dentist, you hire trustworthy people to help you reach these goals to your practice.
