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Best Practices for Effective Patient Education Content

Providing your patients with patient education content is an important service. From informing patients about the breadth of your services and oral hygiene tips to pre- and post-procedure instructions and details about procedures themselves, there’s a lot that goes into keeping patients educated and well-informed. At the same time, content must be engaging so patients retain information.

How to Educate Dental Patients

To accomplish this, here are some top best practices for dental patient education content:

Make sure your content is easy to understand. 

As a dental professional, you may understand dental jargon, but dental patients are easily confused and even frightened by terminology that dental professionals know and use. For this reason, Dentistry Today recently repeated the advice of the Dental Defense Union, advising “professionals to use plain English and avoid the use of jargon when communicating with patients.” Make content as simple as possible for patients to understand.

Use high-quality visuals. 

To support content comprehension and information retention, use patient-friendly visuals or videos alongside content. Make sure images aren’t so detailed and graphic that you frighten patients away but keep them engaging and relevant. When using video, keep the length as short as possible while providing images to support and reinforce the content.

Make patient education easily accessible.

If you’re writing blog articles, for example, make sure to share new posts on your website and social media channels. If you’ve created a new educational video, add the video to the applicable pages on your website, social media pages, and (if possible) play it in your waiting room. The more you showcase your patient education content, the more useful it will be for patients.

Communicate the full story. 

In all your content, make sure it tells a story. Include the benefits of the service, answer common questions patients have around a service, or explain a treatment and the risks of not having the treatment. Most importantly, include a call to action, and be direct and clear. Tell patients exactly what to do, such as, “Schedule your dental appointment today using our new online patient forms.”

Benefits of Dental Patient Education

By providing valuable, high-quality content, you both elevate your practice reputation and improve your website’s performance, which ultimately encourages more prospective patients to schedule an appointment with your practice. The challenge for dental practice in creating effective patient education content naturally involves time but also the tools and resources to blend content with the right images or create videos. To provide practices with effective patient education content while saving practices time and trouble, practices with a ProSites website have access to an extensive library of customizable, patient-focused content. Professionally written, ProSites patient education content covers a full range of dental practice content needs, including:
  • Cleanings and prevention
  • Cosmetic dentistry
  • Periodontics and endodontics
  • Dental anxiety and fear
  • Dental emergencies
And much more.

How Prosites Assists with Patient Communication

To ensure practices have the best patient education content available, ProSites periodically adds and updates content so patients have the most up-to-date and relevant content. If you’re currently a ProSites member, simply log in to your ProSites website and click the Edit icon for your Procedures (services) page. The full list of content options are shown toward the bottom of the page. If you don’t have a ProSites website, find out why more than 7,500 practices trust ProSites to attract more patients, retain patients with seamless communications, and increase ROI. >> Read more about Patient Education Ultimately, ProSites patient education content has one purpose to best serve dental practices and their patients. See how ProSites can assist in your patient education strategy today. See more of Prosites’ Patient Relationship Content
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Xris Bland

Xristopher Bland has been helping B2B and B2C businesses measurably grow for 35+ years. As copywriter and content writer for ProSites, Xris believes a good writer is a good listener, and effective writing results from asking why before determining the how. When not writing, Xris enjoys creating freelance album artwork for musicians, meaning you may have seen some of his work.