Getting Started
Dental practices have a duty to provide the highest quality of dental services possible. But, in today’s world, it is crucial to provide a positive patient experience at your dental practice.
Maintaining a good patient experience has several benefits, including attracting new patients, improving visibility in search engine algorithms, and enhancing the practice’s reputation. In this blog, we will talk about the nuts and bolts of the patient experience and the steps to take to build a patient-first dental practice.
Make Sure Your Patients Are Prepared
The patient experience begins before the patients visit the practice. Ensuring that your patient comes prepared is an important part of the patient experience. This reduces frustrations for patients and staff alike. It also reduces the need to reschedule appointments because your patient came unprepared.
Firstly, they have to fill out intake, medical history, and consent forms. This is an important part of the patient experience, because it’s impossible to deliver great oral healthcare without the right information. But, this process can be time-consuming and uninviting. To combat this, dental practices can integrate digital forms that patients can fill out before the appointment. These forms should be:
- Accessible. Ensure that whatever way you hand these forms off to the patient, they are easy to fill out. Often, the best way to do this is to send the forms in advance of their first appointment, if possible! Forms are especially accessible if they are sent by text or email, because the patient can fill them out anywhere. By providing communication options, staff members can promote accessibility and enhance patients’ experience.
- Concise. Be sure to ask for relevant information. With a digital conditional form, you can collapse certain sections, depending on what the patient checks off, allowing them to only fill out sections that are relevant to them.
- Easy to understand. Ensure the forms are clear and use straightforward language.
The patients also need to know the location and parking or transit information before they arrive at the office. Dental practices should provide this information on their websites, social media pages, and Google My Business listing to make it easily accessible – or just text or email it to them!
Get Your Team is On the Same Page
It can be hard to deliver a great patient experience if your staff is not on the same page about how important it is! Dental practices must have a clearly defined workplace culture and core values that align with their patient experience objectives.
For example, patients want to know that they are in a dental practice that values their well-being. Consistent core values within the team promote staff alignment and ensure that patients receive the same level of care every time they visit. Such values might include:
- Transparency. For the most part, patients want to understand what’s happening with their health! Provide them with information as they need it, so they can see how much you value their decision making.
- Dedication. Being committed to growing as a practice and using new technology or new methods as they arise shows your patients how committed you are as a practice.
- Encouraging Feedback. Your patients have things to tell you! Showing your patients that you have an open door policy about feedback will make them feel valued.
In these examples, we can see how essential it is that your staff is proceeding from core values to deliver a great patient experience. Consistent core values within the team promote staff alignment and ensure that patients receive the same level of care every time they visit.
Know How Your Patients Feel
The power of patient feedback doesn’t begin and end with having an open door policy about it. It can be key to creating a great patient experience at your practice.
Sending patient satisfaction surveys can help dental practices gather feedback and gain insights into how to improve their practices. Patients appreciate practices that seek feedback and use it to make changes. Building a satisfaction survey into your messaging cycle enables accessible feedback for you to analyze. Plus, there is an added bonus of asking satisfied patients to leave you a review!
How your patients feel really matters. Listening to patients’ concerns and fears and answering their questions thoroughly is essential to maintaining a good patient experience.
Prioritize Your Patients
Prioritizing core values, providing accessible communication options, and responding promptly to patients’ concerns can improve the patient experience and lead to positive outcomes. Practitioners should also stay up-to-date with the latest techniques, technologies, and treatments to provide the best care possible.
At Intiveo, we can help with that! Our world-class patient engagement technology supports your practice in delivering exceptional patient experiences. Don’t take our word for it – check out what our clients have to say!
Curious to learn more? Book a meeting today!
