The Practice Management Toolkit: An Online Resource for the New Graduate

To share the rationale for, development, implementation, and demonstrate an www-based Practice Management resource for the dental profession.
While a dental curriculum includes instruction in practice management, significant numbers of recent graduates indicated additional training and information in this area would be highly beneficial. Effectively developed computer-based resources have been shown to enhance learning and are applicable in dental education. Even veteran practitioners have an interest in improving the management of their practices.  In a practitioner-academia-industry collaborative effort, a web-based Dental Practice Management resource, "The DRN Practice Management Toolkit", has been developed as an easily accessible, intuitive, multimedia resource. The collaborative effort resulted in a multi-perspective rationale for the site's content, maintenance, and future development. Content areas for the site include a variety of management topics such as Effective Scheduling, Treatment Plan Presentations, and Four-handed Dentistry for the "Patient Management" component of the site. The" Business Management" area contains information on Business Plans, Selecting an Office Location, Insurance Processing, Third Party Payments, Associateships, and the Selection of Technology to support a practice.  Under the "Personnel Management" component one can find resources covering hiring and management of staff, effective interpersonal communication, and creating positive laboratory relations. The robust site utilizes internal and external hyperlinked content, streaming video, graphics and animation, and offers downloadable resources, such as an Office Manual, Practice Guidelines, and Budget workbooks that can be modified by end users. Pilot use of the site by users indicates that the presentation of material is intuitive and a beneficial resource to the new dentist. Logging of activity on the website will be utilized to analyze the level of access to different content areas files for aid in planning future efforts. Additional effort is will be directed at increasing the number of downloadable resources and multimedia content.
Through collaborative efforts, an effective online Practice Management information resource has been developed for the dental profession.