We live in a highly digitized world and can do most of our tasks with a few clicks. It only takes a few taps on your smartphone to order food, call a taxi, shop, or make an appointment. Despite all the benefits technology brings, some industries have been slower to incorporate these modern tools that can help us do more with less.  

Let's look at dental offices, for example. Patients are often required to fill out cumbersome paper forms in the office before appointments, slowing patient flow and creating a less enthused patient experience. The staff, too, is wasting a lot of time processing all that paperwork. The scheduling process is often disjointed from the paperwork updates, appointment reminders, and post-appointment communication. Fragmented processes like these make dental practices less effective and lead to more time and money spent on training staff, less communication between all of their tools, IT hurdles, and slower operations. 

The good news is that you can easily avoid problems like these with an “all-in-one” patient engagement software solution. Dental Intelligence's all-in-one solution helps dental offices reduce overhead and repetitive tasks while improving patient experience. Let’s explore what constitutes an all-in-one patient engagement solution and why all offices can benefit from one, regardless of size, resources, or patient demographic. 

‍

Your Most Glaring Gaps Without an All-in-One Patient Engagement Solution

Digital patient engagement solutions aim to help practices streamline their operations and get a better view of everything they need to operate smoothly, from paperwork to patient management and even marketing needs.

However, even if you have an app, system, or website for every need your dental practice has, you may still be tasked with juggling several different tools to communicate with your staff and patients. It makes the entire process disjointed when you are piecing together several different software solutions, and it could have repercussions both on your practice and your patients.

How the Lack of an Integrated Dental Management Software Affects Your Practice

Going back and forth between multiple applications that are technically supposed to make dental practice management a lot smoother ultimately increases the risks of mistakes and miscommunications.

If the apps are not integrated, the practice staff must constantly bounce between different applications and dashboards. Operations must be divided between each relevant platform.

How Lack of Integration Affects Your Patients

Consider a first-time patient and all the information they must provide before you start treating them. This information is essential to ensuring they get the best care, can stay updated with their dental needs, and ultimately have a good experience with your practice, allowing your business to grow.

A lengthy and complicated patient management process has the opposite effect. If they must go through a complex form-filling process or thumb through 10 pages of paper on a clipboard, there is a lot more room for mistakes and gaps that could affect their experience and dental health. For example, a lost paper form or failure to transfer data into the patients' chart could lead to patients being forced to fill out forms they’ve already completed or even the omission of important medical history updates that could put the patient at risk in a procedure. 

How Does an All-in-One Dental Solution Fix This?

An all-in-one patient engagement software will consolidate all the aspects of patient relationship management into a single interface. Tools like digital form management, automatic reminders and confirmations, voicemail drops, a patient-facing app, online scheduling, and more are all wrapped into a central tool that easily integrates with your PMS. 

So as your office evolves and needs change, systems like Dental Intelligence offer the capabilities to automate repetitive tasks and improve your communication quality and frequency with patients, all while saving your staff valuable time. 

Here are just some of the things you can achieve with an all-in-one patient engagement software:

1. Increased Efficiency

An all-in-one patient engagement solution brings together several management needs into a single interface, which can translate into a lot of benefits for the dental practice:

• Less strain on staff to juggle multiple tools and processes

• Less need for training to teach staff how to use each tool

• Fewer IT complications

• Improved operations as the all-in-one solution can offer distinct ways to increase efficiencies across the patient journey from pre to post-visit

• Decreased expenses overall

2. Better Patient Engagement

Patient engagement is a big deal for dental practices to ensure all their patients follow recommended treatment plans, come to their scheduled appointments, and remember to stay on top of regular hygiene visits.

Happier patients are also more likely to refer your practice to friends and family. As hard as it is for practices to build patient bases in today’s competitive landscape, strengthening patient loyalty can be your best bet for both sustainable revenue and referral-assisted outreach. 

Having an optimized way to engage patients is just as beneficial for your patients as it is for your practice, as it ensures that fewer appointments are missed. You can tap into multiple opportunities to re-engage patients.

Read On: 10 Ways to Strengthen Patient Relationship Management

3. Supports DSOs and Group Practices

Many individual practices are consolidating into groups or DSOs, which makes using multiple different management applications a lot more complicated. When you have to collaborate with several other practices, it makes it all the more difficult to deal with a fragmented management process.

Dental Intelligence offers benefits to DSOs and group practices like: 

• Easily replicable processes and settings for each new office
• A single login, giving you access to all locations
• Unified experience regardless of PMS
• Ability to easily communicate with staff at other locations in direct messages or group chats

What to Know Before Implementing an All-in-One Solution

One of the biggest perks of an all-in-one patient engagement solution is that it can address a specific need your practice might not even have yet. You can start just needing an efficient way to contact your patients individually or in mass, but as your practice grows, other needs will likely arise, such as:

• Reputation management
• Office communication
• Virtual check-in
• Digital consent forms and other paperwork, etc.

These can all come in different applications, or they can be included in a single, fully integrated solution like DI.

Final Thoughts

An all-in-one patient engagement software is simply a much more efficient way to run your dental practice. It removes the administrative and patient management burdens that take up so much time and allows you to focus on offering patients the best possible care and running a profitable practice.

For all it sets out to accomplish, an all-in-one engagement platform delivers on its promise to increase staff productivity, grow your bottom line, and create happier patients.