Against growing dental market competition, dental training consultant Belle DuCharme, CDPMA, understandably said in a recent interview with DentistryIQ that having an effective recall system “should be number one on the list” for practices to increase patient retention, reduce no-shows, and grow practice revenue. Yet in the same interview, DuCharme noted that while most patients “do not keep up with their recall due dates,” many practices did not have an effective recall system in place to improve recall while enabling staff more time for things like filing dental insurance claims, treatment planning, and scheduling production.
The Ideal Dental Recall System
The above may not describe your practice, but if it does, here are five essentials to an effective recall system:
Communication Choices to Reach All Patients
Though some patients will always appreciate phone calls, others may prefer appointment reminders or other practice communications by email. Others may prefer text messages or postcards. The more communication choices your recall system provides for your dental practice, the more you reach patients with the right message on the right channel at the right time.
Automated Patient Communications
In the 1930s, industrial engineer Allen F. Morgenstern created a work simplification program to increase productivity using less effort, and coined the popular phrase, “Work smarter, not harder.” Today, this still-relevant phrase directly applies to automated patient communications. It’s one thing to have the previously mentioned communication choices. Yet if dental staff are manually sending out even some patient communications, the time and labor required to do so takes away from other important administrative tasks or creates stress to get everything done on time.
With a patient communication system providing a complete choice of automation to send appointment reminders by email, text, postcards, and phone messaging, your practice team saves time, and your practice operates more efficiently (not harder) to send timely communications, keep your production schedule full, and increase revenue.
How much time can the right system save practices?
On average, automated patient communications by ProSites save practices 40 hours a month on patient communications and add 2.5 appointments per day.
Analytics to Measure Communication Success
It’s all well and good for a company to offer dentists an automated patient communications system. Yet if you can’t see how well your patient communications are performing, it’s difficult to know whether some system truly has value.
ProSites’ automated communications system includes easy-to-understand analytics like pending appointments, reach, and completed appointments so you can see the value and your ROI.
Choose The Best Patient Communications Provider
To further help you choose an automated patient communications provider, download our free whitepaper, Ineffective Recare—The Black Hole of Recurring Revenues.
This whitepaper further dives into what to look for to maximize overall practice profitability.
Here’s to your practice success.
