You might be surprised just how much patient engagement software can streamline day-to-day operations at your dental practice. Check out these 8 essential tasks patient engagement software simplifies for you:
1. Automate Dental Appointment Reminders
Managing a dental practice schedule is no small feat, a balancing act of timing appointments and planning availability. Missed dental appointments throw off your schedule and cost money. In the past, reminding patients of upcoming appointments depended on costly mailers, or required your staff to exhaustively list and call upcoming patients. Patient relationship management takes this burden off your front office, checking your schedule, and reminding patients of their appointments so your chairs stay filled. When a patient responds to confirm an appointment, patient engagement software automatically sets the dental appointment as confirmed inside your practice management system. An additional email confirmation can be sent to your email so you can keep track of appointments without checking your dashboard.
2. Replace Last-Minute Cancellations
Last-minute cancellations are a problem that many dental offices struggle to handle. Not only do they hurt office morale, but they’re expensive, costing your practice tens of thousands of dollars per year in lost revenue. Patient engagement software can help by identifying gaps in your schedule left by cancelled appointments, enabling you to contact everyone on your ASAP list at a touch of a button. The result is quick and easy booking that keeps your schedule filled, saving front office time and helping you see more patients.
3. Implement Paperless Dental Forms
The first appointment can be very stressful for first-time patients–in a new office, with new faces, and the first thing they’re asked to do is fill out paperwork with their detailed medical history. Patient engagement software can make this easier on everyone, allowing new patients to provide medical history via paperless dental forms prior to their first appointment. Your office staff gets the information they need, and your patients have one less thing to worry about on the first step of their journey.
4. Recall & Reactivate
Once your patients have completed treatment, it’s easy for them to forget about regular cleanings or follow-up appointments. That’s a long list of potential patients, and it’s money left on the table if you don’t follow through and contact each one. Patient engagement software keeps track of each patient’s needs and can remind them to schedule follow-ups — bringing in new appointments while saving your front office valuable time.
5. Make Unscheduled Treatment Scheduled
When a patient expresses interest in—or even accepts—a treatment, but doesn’t schedule right away, contacting them again can easily fall through the cracks. With a tool like Treatment Opportunities , you can easily isolate and view patients with incomplete or outstanding treatment needs. You can then send them nurturing content using templates loaded into your patient engagement software, encouraging them to schedule an appointment and increasing treatment acceptance rates.
6. Increase Quality Reviews
Patient engagement software that automatically requests reviews on your behalf. Review requests deliver patients directly to platforms like Facebook and Google, making it simple for your satisfied patients to leave high-quality reviews for your dental practice that in turn boost your SEO and social proof.
7. Boost Referrals
Referrals are the lifeblood of every dental practice; however, a lot of practices struggle to generate or even ask for them. Patient engagement software can boost the amount of referrals your office gets by enabling you to isolate and ask those patients who are most likely to refer. Additionally, you can track referrals and provide rewards once fulfilled straight from your software, improving the efficiency of your front office team.
8. Send Emails
Patient engagement software can take care of email communications beyond appointment reminders. Email campaigns can send everything from new blog posts and marketing materials, to birthday greetings for your patients. Materials are loaded into your dashboard and are ready for manual or pre-scheduled monthly delivery with just a few clicks.
Not only does patient engagement software make work easier for you and your dental team, it also enables you to provide a great patient experience and helps fuel amazing growth.
Think patient engagement software might be right for your practice? Schedule a demo today.