Dental practice automation is changing the current landscape of dentistry. Automating time-consuming tasks such as sending follow-up messages or appointment reminders is enhancing productivity and efficiency in dental practice.
Moreover, introducing robotics for automating dental tasks promotes the development of invasive dental treatments. Robots for tooth arrangement, drilling, and crown preparation are coming up to simplify the treatment processes. Automation plays a considerable role in improving patient care, staff-patient communication, staff management, and patient engagement.
Let’s move further and look at how dental practice automation can simplify workflows.
1. Automated Reminders
Clinic productivity and patient retention can both be surged by automating reminders. Dental practice management software can have automated reminders across various settings. For instance, automated appointment reminders, treatments, and patient recall. Patients can be contacted automatically through emails, SMS, or notifications, whichever option they prefer.
Additionally, automating follow-ups will relieve dentists from constantly meeting the needs of people post-care. Front-desk staff can schedule automated e-mails with detailed treatment instructions that patients need beforehand, thus saving valuable time.
Furthermore, dental practice automation offers flexibility in reminder frequencies. For example, set up patient-specific reminders on an hourly, weekly, or monthly basis. This way patients who need reminders can receive them without invading the privacy of others. It also helps to customize the experience further.
2. Improved Patient Recall and Reactivation
Dental practitioners implement patient recall and reactivation systems to ensure continuous patient retention, and care, and minimize no-show rates. Dental practice automation can help to automate communication channels for better patient recall and reactivation systems.
Automated messaging, emails, phone calls, etc. helps to decrease no-shows and cancellations. It also eliminates the need to manually check patient treatment records to determine if they are due for a check-up. Automation of patient recall and reactivation aids in:
- Better patient-dentist relationships
- To save money and time
- Early bookings
- Transparency with patients
- Regular patient visitations
A proper patient recall and reactivation strategy can take ample time, so be sure to plan them, and keep engaging with patients. Compared to automation manual recall isn’t just inefficient, but also takes up plenty of resources and time.
3. Send Out Treatment Plan Follow-Ups Automatically
Sending out treatment plan follow-ups is one of the ways to keep patients engaged and offer world-class patient satisfaction post-care. It is a gesture to show that you care about the well-being of your patients. They are more likely to come back to dentists who show care and commitment towards their patients.
Consider a scenario where a patient is done with the dental care and upon check-out a staff member hands out a treatment plan, and upon reaching home another follow-up instruction is sent over mail. These gestures can be personalized via automation and they carry weight cause they’re from the doctor. Patients can either keep a copy of the printed sheet or review the care routine from the email PDF.
4. Streamlined Patient Intake Experience
A manual intake process with a clipboard can be replaced with something more efficient and less time-consuming. Automating patient intake can streamline the administrative department of the dental clinic.
Firstly, going paperless with e-forms can help manage a database from servers. Patients can just fill out an intake form before even setting foot in the clinic. This reduces waiting lines at the dental clinic and makes up for a sleek intake system. Also, intake forms automatically merge with a practice’s management software, thus saving check-in time for patients and ensuring that dentists stay on par with their appointments. Digital intake forms are a way forward to automate a dental practice.
5. Payroll Management
Payroll management comes with its cons – huge paperwork:
- Organizations may spend ample time looking over paperwork
- Time consumed over generating tons of invoices, balance sheets, and expenses.
- Paperwork takes up plenty of space in the cabinets.
This is just the beginning, there’s also a scenario of missing or lost files or papers filled with errors. Furthermore, security issues arise when it comes to money matters; who is responsible for paperwork; who has access to the cabinets? Gathering data for payroll purposes can be cumbersome. So, automating payroll for dental practice can simplify the process of collecting and organizing data in one place.
Automation helps to integrate timesheets, accounting software, expense tracking, invoices, budgets, etc. in one database. Dental practice automation can easily generate invoices and send dues to patients over messages or emails automatically.
6. Workforce Management
Tracking and managing the workforce has become more vital than ever as every practitioner or front-desk staff has specific work routines. Dental practice automation can support planning, managing, scheduling, and tracking staff work routines, along with leaves and weekly offs. Staff can leverage automated dental management software to input their availability.
The software manages working hours, vacation schedules, labor requirements, and time off. Last-minute changes can also be dealt with by the software by sending real-time updates to staff members and practitioners. Software also allows to integration of other aspects such as payroll and human resources. Workforce automation frees up valuable time, and patient care gets the entire attention.
Wrapping Up
Dental practices that do not modernize will not be able to keep up with the times. Traditional dental management methods have been replaced by more technological approaches. So, it’s essential to keep on par with the current technological state of the country and embrace it.
If you’re looking to incorporate dental practice management software in your clinic or organization, then just connect with Arkenea, one of the leading healthcare software development companies in the USA. From healthcare application and website development to a range of software products, we offer it all. With over 13 years of experience in the industry, we understand what the sector demands and we deliver world-class products that match your standards.