American dental practices are undergoing tectonic changes. According to The Journal of the American Dental Association (ADA), many of these changes correspond with a dramatic increase in the number of dental schools and their increased enrollment. Recent graduating classes have been as much as 35% higher than those just a decade earlier. But fewer of these new dentists are opening their own practices.

Larger, group practices need more assistants. Younger dentists with less experience managing a practice are more likely to rely on office administrators to handle staffing and workforce management. This, in turn, means administrators will need more help. So, what does that mean for dental assistant hiring?

A comprehensive study by the ADA showed that participation in assistant training programs is declining. While formal education is not required in all states to become a Dental Assistant, the study suggests a declining pool of assistants ready to step straight into that role.  The study found that shortages have caused an estimated 11% reduction in dental practice capacity.

On the positive side, these new dynamics may inspire opportunities for new ways of recruiting and rewarding the staff that the dental profession needs now more than ever.

Dealing with the Shortage

The staffing challenge is so severe, the ADA has devoted a number of studies to the problem. One of these notes that 82.7% of dental practices are having difficulty staffing assistant roles. As a result, nearly 50% of dentists find themselves performing those duties. Obviously, this is not a scalable solution.

More durable solutions proposed by both the ADA and the Dental Assisting National Board involve increasing pay rates, improving benefits packages, and ensuring a positive work environment that will attract more workers to the profession and reduce employee turnover. While pay and benefit increases can have an immediate effect, the economics of dental practices may need to be tuned to support such a move. So these are probably not the quick fixes the sector would like.

Additional measures proposed by the assistant community involve standardizing the credentialing process. This would create a pipeline of prospective staff to simplify recruitment. It would also relieve much of the on-the-job training that can impact practice productivity and might be wasted if a green hire decides the profession is not for them.

In short, industry participants all recognize these are systemic problems that need a new way of operating to truly address.

Group Dynamics in Dental Practices

The conventional path for dental school graduates to acquire patients is to join an existing practice. This may be why so many are joining group practices: Those practices have more patients and those patients are not necessarily attached to a specific dentist. Those practices also promise to minimize any one dentist’s responsibility for overseeing operations and business affairs.

It’s a credit to dental office administrators that they recognize the scope of their responsibilities and the depth of the challenges each represents: from recruiting staff and scheduling shifts to processing payroll and overseeing billing for patients and insurance companies. The list of duties is so exhaustive, these team leaders even have their own organization, The American Association of Dental Office Management, to provide counsel and perspective on the various aspects.

But operating on the front lines of any profession can cloud a broader view of the best way to tackle the work to be done. Point solutions have proliferated to address dental practice challenges like finding and hiring assistants, payroll processing, and benefits administration. While these might reduce the training required, they don’t necessarily reduce an administrator’s task list because each provider must still be managed.

The Value of Outside Support

A more comprehensive solution is to employ a Professional Employer Organization (PEO). They administer every aspect of HR and personnel operations for businesses of all kinds. This frees administrators to focus on managing the staff and the unique needs of the practice. A PEO is a particularly desirable solution for a group practice which has a staff large enough for the outsourcing of HR and payroll responsibilities to make financial sense.

Offloading critical and complex business operations – like payroll and benefits administration – to a specialist organization can reduce or even eliminate the stress levels on assistant generalists. Two other critical factors make such an arrangement especially desirable for a dental practice: obtaining employee benefits and acquiring HR technology.

By virtue of their group buying power, PEOs can obtain more favorable rates than a practice ever could on its own for employee benefits like healthcare, vision and dental care (of course!), retirement funds, wellness programs, and more. This can address one of the chief recommendations of the ADA studies: Practices should offer better benefits to attract more support staff and mitigate turnover.

To increase efficiency and further lower costs, the best PEOs connect to clients through Human Capital Management (HCM) software. These systems streamline the entire employee lifecycle, with features like:

• Applicant tracking to find and hire assistants more easily
• Intelligent schedule-building and time-tracking
• Payroll integration to speed processing and reduce or eliminate errors
• Employee self-service for PTO requests, pay stubs, and tax documents
• Performance management and employee records maintenance

Rather than asking team members to master a variety of point solutions, PEOs give practices a single intuitive tool to keep operations running smoothly, compliantly, and more profitably.

How VensureHR Makes Group Practices Stronger

VensureHR is the largest privately-held PEO in the nation, and part of America’s leading PEO technology company. Because the focus of VensureHR’s business is small and mid-sized companies, they are an ideal partner for dental group practices.

In addition, VensureHR offers business process outsourcing (BPO) services that can handle specialized tasks like coding and processing insurance claims and reconciling accounts. They also have dental and healthcare recruitment capabilities to support staffing activities; everything you need to help fill in the gaps in your back-office operations.

This unique combination of software and services can be packaged in whatever way works best for your practice. And it can take much of the pressure off your team, playing to their strengths and avoiding burn-out.

Find out how a PEO can help keep your people happy and help you attract new ones while taking care of the bottom line. Schedule a no-cost practice evaluation from VensureHR today.