Dental Practice Management - Patient Concerns

The patient experience is one of the most defining aspects of your dental practice. Your patients’ experience starts when they book offsite and ends when they receive their payment invoice or insurance notification. Cloud-based dental software features have helped streamline the patient experience from a complex multi-step endeavor to a clean and simple process.

Scheduling

One of the most stressful aspects of any dentist appointment is finding a time to book a consultation. Internally, each dentist or hygienist may have different time allotments, calendar styles or scheduling preferences. Each employee may keep a different style calendar than the other. Likewise, there never seems to be a singular and synced space to look up your practice's availability. Cloud-based dental practice management software has a solution to all these problems.

By housing multiple calendars in one place, it is easy to select times, dentists, patients and procedures quickly and efficiently. There is no need to place your patients on hold while you track down calendars or dentists. Instead, it is simple to select the synced calendar and schedule who, what, when and where in seconds. But the cloud doesn't stop there. After an appointment is booked, the system sends a text or email reminder to the patient with all the need-to-know details, including the dentist, time and location of their next scheduled visit. Automated text and email reminders help minimize the number of missed or late appointments your office experiences.

Payments

Patients are also concerned with the paperwork, wait times and invoices that come with after-appointment responsibilities. Payments can be the most painful part of the consultation for many patients who are confused about insurance, deductibles or other initial fees.

The cloud makes it easy to create walkout statements that provide patients with all the information they need to help them feel more knowledgeable and comfortable with their dental payments. A walkout statement includes the payments they made (or will need to make), along with their current insurance information. This copy can be printed or emailed digitally, whichever the patient prefers, to ease payment stress.

Insurance

Insurance is another intensely stressful part of any medical visit. Not only do insurances change and expire often, they can also be confusing for your practice administrators and patients. Often, it takes multiple invoices, calls and research to find out which insurance covers which appointments. This complex system leads to late payments, lost invoices and lots of negative feelings from your patients.

Dentrix Ascend houses up to 10 insurance plans per patient, meaning if their insurance is changing, expiring or upgrading, it is easy for you to keep track of what procedures, check-ups or drop-ins they are eligible for. Insurance information can be located and updated within seconds, making invoicing, individual billing or understanding a plan extremely simple for less experienced front–office team members.

Cloud-based dental software is changing the way patients experience dental appointments. Patients rank service as one of their top 10 least favorite parts of visiting a dentist’s office. But with the cloud, centralized calendars, easy payments and organized insurance information, you can transform your patients’ dental experiences from a hassle to a pleasure. Help troubleshoot your patients’ concerns by upgrading to the cloud today.