If you’re like most practices out there, you could walk in tomorrow morning, run some good reports in your practice management system and easily find $500,000 to $1,000,000 in diagnosed treatment that your patients never completed. Why didn’t they? Well, everybody’s got their reasons: they didn’t have time, they didn’t think it was important enough, they couldn’t afford it, they were scared of the procedure; you name it. You know what the main reason was, though? Chances are, if the patient didn’t leave your office with a future appointment to start treatment, you didn’t do enough to follow up with them and get them back into the chair.
And who can blame you? Following up on diagnosed treatment is one of the hardest things to do at a dental office. You have to run all the right reports, you have to know the patient’s history, you have to possess enough clinical knowledge to have an intelligent conversation with the patient about it, and most importantly, you have to find time to get this done. That’s why it just about never happens.
But what if some of this follow-up could be done automatically? What if you could send every patient an email or a letter that re-presented the pending treatment plan to them, offered a compelling reason to begin treatment and asked them to schedule an appointment right away? Believe it or not, this is exactly what a growing number of RevenueWell users are doing with much success.
RevenueWell has developed an industry-first solution that continuously monitors your practice software in instances when patients have diagnosed treatment with no future appointment to get started, and automatically sends them personalized email, letter and SMS communications to urge them to get the care they need.
Here are some cool things about this feature:
– You can configure out how many times to send your patients these communications, when to do it and what media to use
– The treatment plan follow-up program includes pre-built content with an escalating urgency of messaging to strike the right notes with the non-compliant patient
– The email treatment plan presentation includes videos for many procedures that explain in fine detail (in English and Spanish), what the procedure entails
– It can even recognize multiphase treatment plans, stop follow-up when an appointment is scheduled to complete Phase I, and restart follow-up if the patient hasn’t scheduled for Phase II.
Pretty neat, huh? You can see a short video of this feature here, or request a demo to get more details.
I see this kind of automation as the key enabler of dental practice profitability in the coming months and years. Thing is, there’s a tremendous amount of intelligence built into your practice software – enough to run your recall & patient reactivation program, automate your post-op instructions, etc. – and the technology is now catching up to be able to use this intelligence to do the work for you. And it’s not that any piece of software (anywhere, ever) can do as well as a human does at these things. A hand- written note is always better than a stock postcard; a personal call will often beat an appointment confirmation SMS. But for most busy, understaffed, cost-conscious offices that I speak with every day, such automation makes the difference between things getting done or not. Once you’ve crossed that mental bridge, the real question becomes: what would you do with the extra $500k?
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