There are always reasons to not make a change, and it’s easy to stick to the status quo rather than address them. You may not realize exactly how many hours are drained from your staffs’ days on routine work and how that affects the patient experience.
Understand how automated appointment reminder software actually integrates with dental practices and restore a powerful human-factor in your patient experience.
When dental offices are asked why they avoid automated appointment reminders in communication, a few of the same reasons come up:
- Change is scary—and if it’s not broken, why fix it?
- The patients are older and won’t like a new system
- They love their staff, and don’t want to see them replaced with a machine
The most important one is that last one. People like who they work with. Even if a new system sounds great, there’s often hesitance when someone’s livelihood might be on the line.
The misconception here is that offices swap seasoned staff for software. Actually, in practice, automated appointment and messaging systems simply support and augment staff, helping them deliver more personal attention to patients.
Your practice and its people are the real superheroes. Patient communication software is the handy sidekick. It’s there to lend a much-needed hand—but it’s not taking centre stage ahead of the human element.
Appointment Software Helps You Be More Human
Your staff have talents and qualities a software program doesn’t have. Empathy—the human connection to patient care—is at the top of that list, and it’s one of the most important aspects of your practice. But when menial tasks get in the way of quality patient care, it’s time to find a better solution.
Handwritten dental recall cards (the kind that get pulped in the laundry) and manual calling are fast becoming a thing of the past. Instead, practices are opting to send automated reminders straight to the patient’s phone—avoiding the wash cycle altogether!
Reminders sent straight to your phone, with a one-click calendar link to help keep the schedule clear, bring modern convenience to medicine. Patients love the user-friendly nature of digital reminders and handy extras like pre-treatment advice, whilst your practice benefits from greater efficiency and more successful appointments. The customizable messaging settings mean you don’t have to take a one-size-fits-all approach, whilst the appointment reminder templates ensure you don’t spend time agonizing over message content.
Here's Where Your Staff Comes In
First off, though the software does automate routine tasks, it does take a guiding hand. Your staff may be making fewer phone calls, but they’re still monitoring and actively using this new system to ensure that patients are making it through the doors.
When it comes to the automated reminders themselves, they don’t diminish human interaction. In fact, they help increase your staff’s ability to talk with people and give them more personal attention, since they aren’t overwhelmed by massive reminder call lists.
For those few patients that do still need a phone call, the experience is less rushed, so they don’t feel like they’re hassling your practice.
Automated Appointment Reminder Software and Patient Satisfaction
Patient satisfaction is key to patient-centred care, as the NSDA is keen to point out: in their patient communication guide, they note that “evidence has demonstrated a positive association between a patient’s satisfaction with the care they receive and their provider’s ability and willingness to communicate and empathize with them.”
Of course, automated reminder software doesn’t just have a positive effect on the patient experience and dentist-patient communication. It can transform your office’s productivity and dramatically reduce no-shows and cancellations. The University of Rochester Eastman Dental Center, an urban academic dental centre, published an internal study in the Journal of Dental Education, where they describe the effect that an automated confirmation system had on their practice.
After implementing the system, they reported the following:
“The clinical areas that have benefited the most are General Dentistry, where the no-show rate dropped from 23.67 percent to 19.77 per cent, and Pediatric Dentistry, dropping from 29.42 per cent to 25.25 per cent. Given the volume of patient visits these improvements represent, we estimate that we have increased our patient care revenue by $473,000 during the twelve-month period. With the increase in attended appointments, our resource utilization has improved, and our front-end staff have been able to focus their attention on face-to-face customer relations.”
Patient communication software helps to foster a more holistic approach to running a dental practice and improving patient care. As the doctors at Eastman Dental Center say at the end of their study: “The ability to place confirmation calls after normal business hours, to have a consistent routine of confirming each appointment, and to be able to refocus front-end staff on tasks that create a more patient-centred approach has made a consequential difference.”
Is change so scary with those results? The reality is you can tailor your automation software to efficiently deal with a large segment of your patients. Email, phone calls, text messages—these are all technologies people of all demographics use. And if you have a few outliers who just don’t like the system, go ahead and maintain a smaller manual service for them. You’re still going to come out ahead overall.
Want to find out just how far ahead you can get? Book a free demo of our software right here.
