As dentists, we know that patient experience matters. Few patients may not think too much of it, but most do. A positive patient experience keeps them coming back for years and years. It also encourages new patients to visit you. How, then, do you ensure that your patient experience is a positive one? Here are a couple of our favorite tips.

Update Your Waiting Room

As we state in our article about how to modernize your dental practice, efficiency and modernity are essential and often synonymous. Patients may choose a competitor if they feel like your waiting room doesn’t meet their needs. The best way to remedy this is by taking their needs into consideration. 

For example, are you solely a pediatric dentist? Your waiting room should be bright with adequate toys and storage, but you should also have it in the view of where parents will sit so they can relax while still keeping an eye on their kids. Ensure their seating is comfortable and perhaps offer bottled water, books, or magazines as well. Additionally, if those parents work, it’s a great idea to have free wifi and possibly a table with outlets on top and chairs so they can get some work done.

Make Use of Available Technologies

Incorporating technology in your dentist office makes your team’s individual jobs easier, but it also makes your patients’ visits a breeze. Some technological features you may consider investing in include online scheduling that your patients can book if it’s more convenient for them, digital billing, medical practice management software, or OrthoPhoto App if you’re a dentist that also offers dental braces. You may also choose to download other smartphone applications for dentists that focus on patient education.

OrthoPhoto app is an affordable smartphone application that automates how you track your patients’ braces progress with dental photography. Using the app, you can take clinical images of your patients’ braces progress and OrthoPhoto will automatically crop and sort them into a template designed in the correct format for dental patient records. Now, instead of spending a lot of time after-hours organizing your braces images, you can focus on enjoying that time with loved ones. You can buy it here. 

Better Patient Experience Means Better Patient Retention

We have more tips coming, but this is certainly a good starting point for giving your patents a more pleasant visit. Dentist appointments are dreadful for some, but they don’t have to be.

As states prepare to open back up and dentists gradually open their doors to patients once again, it’s a good idea to consider the future of your practice and act accordingly. It may be difficult to know where to start, and there is no denying this is a stressful time for dentists, but here are some tips for easing the transition back to normal as we continue to fight COVID-19.

Take Advantage of Financial Relief Packages

The government’s financial relief packages are exactly what dentists need right now, and because this is new territory for everybody, everyone can learn from this and help one another survive.

Keep Your Current Team Close

Many businesses are laying their employees off and some medical practices and dental practices are considering doing the same in order to reduce their financial burden. However, in the long run, getting rid of your current staff will be costly if you bring in new staff and have to train them. If your team works well, gets along, and prioritizes creating a positive patient experience, then keep it as is. At a time like this, being close with a team you trust is crucial to recovering from any losses and continuing to run your practice.

Take Advantage of Free Time

Whether you have decided to open back up on limited hours, or are holding off, you have a chance to take advantage of free time. 

Future Technology

If possible, it’s a great idea to brush up on skills or consider new dental technologies and mobile apps for dentists to introduce in the future. Some new technologies may include practice management software that automates billing, keeps track of tasks, and keeps your team more organized and efficient overall.

If your practice offers dental braces treatment, another technology you may consider is OrthoPhoto App, our app that snaps clinical braces photos, automatically places them in a template with the right image sizing and order, and automatically organizes them into patient files so you don’t need to spend hours doing it yourself. This app makes it much easier to keep track of your patients’ braces progress, improving record-keeping, your quality of life, and the patient experience. 

Sterilize and Clean

This is something most dentists already do in their dental practice, but COVID-19 has made consumers and patients much more cautious of germs and cleanliness, so they are becoming more and more familiar with this concept. This also means that people may consider switching dentists if they feel their current one isn’t doing enough. Take this time to thoroughly sterilize and clean your entire practice and be sure to share that with your followers on social media so they know you are taking precautions and prioritizing health and safety. When it’s time to re-open and see more patients, they will gladly return.

We’re In This Together

COVID-19 has certainly flipped everyone’s lives upside down, but the good thing is we as humans are learning to be more cautious. Additionally, dentists are fortunate enough to be so essential that they may not get hit as badly as other professionals in other industries. Because of this, now is the time for you and your team to work together to really, truly assess your practice and grow from this experience.

We often get used to how our workplace looks and feel comfortable in it, so we don’t think about making any changes. However, first impressions are always going to be important, and any new competition that arises will make the effort to ensure their workplace is more modern. In today’s competitive landscape, modernness and efficiency are additional traits that your target audience is factoring in when deciding which dentist to go to. This may be due to the fact that modernity and efficiency suggest a better patient experience, so here are some signs that indicate it may be time to modernize your dental practice.

Your front desk team is swamped with paperwork and taking a long time to get patients signed in or out

Filing papers away in cabinets and drawers was once efficient, but now this method of record-keeping is asking for clutter. Often, the dental office staff are more focused on sorting through these documents, which is fair, except for the fact that this isn’t ideal for the patients that come and go. 

A good starting point would be putting new-patient forms on your website so that patients can be that much more prepared when they arrive. In the future, you may consider investing in software that helps you manage your entire practice in terms of appointments, team members, tasks, and patients. This will be handy when it comes to records, billing, and booking.

Your team seems scatter-brained and all over the place when attempting to complete tasks

Dental practices can get very busy, and while this is a good sign, being too busy may result in your team members not performing their jobs as well as they normally would. To remedy this, we recommend introducing scheduling blocks. Scheduling blocks allow team members to streamline their focus on one type of task instead of dedicating minimal attention to multiple tasks. 

For example, you may block 3 hours in the morning for treatments only relating to Invisalign Clear Aligners and dental braces, while your front desk team focuses on billing. This helps everyone at the office get more to-do’s done successfully.

When working on braces progress photos, you spend too much time after hours

Dentists and orthodontists often use a DSLR or a point-and-shoot camera for their dental photography, which highlights their patients’ braces progress. However, once they take the clinical images, they work after-hours to upload, crop, place them in a slideshow, and sort them into specific patient files. 

OrthoPhoto App automates this process so dentists can manage their clinical photos in less time. Using your smartphone, take your patients’ braces images right on the application. It automatically places the images into a template that formats them correctly into their respective patient albums. OrthoPhoto App was created by a dentist for other dentists so they can enjoy more quality time with their loved ones instead of being hunched over a computer.

Photography is a crucial component of dentistry that is sometimes overlooked and seen as unnecessary. However, dentists who photograph their work will find they greatly benefit from doing so.

What Do Dentists Gain From Dental Photography?

Marketing

Taking photos during a patient’s dental or orthodontic treatment is a fantastic way to market themselves to those who may be considering that same treatment. Real patient photos showcase the before and after so potential patients can see the value in your work and become a lead.

Your Patients Will Understand You Better

Through all their schooling, dentists understand their patient cases far better and more in-depth than the patient would. Unfortunately, the dental jargon may not resonate with patients, which is why there are so many mobile apps for dentists that successfully help educate their patients. By showing patients their own clinical photographs, though, they will gain a much better understanding of their case and how treatment will help. 

Record-Keeping is Easier

Images are a fantastic way to keep track of your patients’ teeth before, during, and after treatment. Overall, being more diligent in record-keeping helps make your dental practice more efficient, therefore making for a more positive patient experience.

Recommended Cameras for Dentists

DSLR Cameras for Dental Photography

DSLR’s, such as those by Canon or Nikon, take beautiful pictures, as well as HD video. Newer cameras even shoot video in 4K, which is excellent for testimonials that you can then upload to your website and social media. Combine a DSLR with a macro (close-up) lens and you will take great photos of your patient’s teeth. The downside? They are pricey and tend to offer too many features that go beyond a dentist’s needs.

Point-And-Shoot Cameras for Clinical Images

Point-and-shoot cameras offer just enough for dentists to get the most use out of them, and they are far simpler than a DSLR because, as their name suggests, all you need to do is point it and shoot the picture. The trade-off with these is that the photos may not be the best quality.

OrthoPhoto App Smartphone Camera for Braces Progress Images

OrthoPhotom, an iOS app that you can download here, has successfully automated the time-consuming process of capturing and sorting progress images for dental braces patients, affordably. With a typical camera, dentists have to take the photos, upload them, manually crop and organize them into a file, and then place them into a patient’s file.

With the mobile application, however, dentists can take photos right on their smartphone camera, and today’s smartphones have astounding camera capabilities that keep getting better. Next, the mobile app automatically places the braces progress photos into a template with the correct crop, size, and order and then places them in a specific patient file. This significantly cuts down the time it takes to organize braces photos so dentists can dedicate their energy on other aspects of their job.