Review of Key Strategies for Dental Patient Satisfaction
All dental practice owners, and dental care providers, strive to maintain dental patient satisfaction as satisfied patients remain loyal to their dental provider and recommend them to their friends and family members.
This article reviews 4 key ways in which dental practices keep their dental patients satisfied, as well as methods to use a dental software solution along the way to streamline the processes for nurturing and enhancing patient satisfaction.
1. Develop relationships with your patients
People like to feel important to someone and like they’re being heard. This is no different for your dental patients. When they’re sitting in your chair, before treatment starts, they want you to ask about their day, and how the family is doing. Essentially, they want to have a conversation with you, and feel like you actually care about them and their well-being. Therefore, it’s important, as a dental care provider, that you make the time to have one-on-one conversations with your patients while they are in the clinic and give them that attention.
With a sophisticated, high quality dental software solution like ADSTRA, you can streamline treatment billing due to electronic claim submission and the ability to charge for a specific treatment that has been completed from a patient’s predefined treatment plan. You can also speed up report and email creation with several predefined templates and the means to create your own templates. Appointment booking can be made more efficient as you can preset appointment types and details such as units and fee. Additionally, you can obtain certain patient information quickly by hovering over patient alerts icons and read the notes in the tooltip that generates. Integrating these dental software features in your daily processes, will save you time on mundane tasks, making it possible for you to spend more time with your patients, building those relationships.
2. Maintain relationships with your patients
Developing relationships with your patients is the first step in keeping your patients satisfied. However, you also need to nurture and maintain those relationships. To nurture your patient relationships, your patients need to continuously feel that they matter to you and that they are valued members of your dental practice. The simplest things can do that: sending them an email on their birthday, holiday greetings, keeping them up to date with important changes in your dental practice, or following up with them after an appointment.
The right dental software solution, like ADSTRA, will have the tools to develop communication templates that automatically insert patient specific information and can be used to send email to patients individually or as a mass communication. An advanced dental software will also contain the ability to automatically send appointment confirmations, reminders, as well as, follow-ups via email or SMS text message. Using such tools increases efficiency within these core business processes, while also helping maintain relationships with your patients.
3. Present patients with a solid treatment plan
When presenting patients with dental treatment options, the first things that come to their minds are cost and what the end result will be, in order to determine whether treatment is worth it. Presenting your dental patients with a detailed plan of action that allows them to visually see the end result as well as what each step of treatment will be. In addition, if the treatment plan has been pre-approved by insurance, it will help patients understand the associated cost. Addressing both aspects thoroughly increases patients’ level of trust in you as their dental care provider. They will also feel more satisfied with the choice they made having decided to make you their dental care provider.
An effective dental software solution such as ADSTRA, will contain several predefined patient education tools like infographics and before and after photos for common treatments. The software will provide the means for you to develop treatment plans and do visual treatment presentations. It will also contain a billing module with the ability to electronically submit proposed treatment plans for pre-approval directly to the patient’s insurer. Utilizing these tools and features that are in your dental software solution will allow you to present a solid treatment plan to your patients.
4. Keep waiting times to a minimum
It is evident that patients do not like to wait for long periods of time in order to see any healthcare professional, including the dentist – especially when having booked an appointment. As a dental care provider, you should do what you can to keep your schedule, in order to keep your patients satisfied. Yes, you want to converse with your patients in order to develop a relationship with them. At the same time, you also need to keep in mind that you have other patients that could be waiting, leaving you to find that balance. When scheduling appointments, tell your front desk staff to allot 5 minutes for conversation, plus the amount of time it will take to complete the treatment – this will help you stay on track.
The right dental software solution will allow you to preset the number of units you need to complete a particular type of appointment when scheduling. It will also provide an inter-office communication tool so that front desk staff can notify you, the provider, when your next patient has arrived. Moreover, the clinical component of your dental software, which is used in the operatories where you spend most of your time with patients, should have different tools that are geared towards the specific needs of providers; for example, a provider panel that displays the patient list for the day with icons beside each patient that indicate whether patients have arrived. Taking advantage of features like these will help keep you mindful, and waiting times down. Luckily, the ADSTRA Dental Software solution has these features and capabilities, plus more.
As you know, satisfied dental patients are crucial to the success of your dental practice. Therefore, as their dental care provider, you are striving to ensure patients’ maximum satisfaction. Having the right dental software solution implemented in your dental practice, will assist with and streamline various processes, helping make such an endeavor possible.
If your current dental software solution is not doing enough to satisfy your dental patient care and relationship management needs, it’s time to make the switch to one that does.
Contact ADSTRA to learn about its all-inclusive cloud based or on-premise dental software solution!
