The Importance of the Patient Experience
A great patient experience is essential to ensuring success for any multi-location dental practice and DSOs. It’s not just the quality of care that counts, but how your practice makes patients feel when they enter your clinic and leave with a smile on their faces. Delivering exceptional service requires attention to detail, from start to finish for each patient. To help you achieve this goal, we’ve created a 5-step roadmap to ensure excellence in customer service across all locations of your multi-location dental practice.
Step #1: Identify the Roadblocks for Your Patient Experience
Providing a seamless patient experience can be a challenging task, especially for dental practices with multiple locations. Identifying common challenges within the patient experience can help practices develop strategies to improve their services and retain loyal patients.
One of the main issues facing multi-location dental practices, or dental support organizations, is an unaligned brand. In other words, the patient experience is vastly different at one location than at another. This undermines the professionalism of the dental practice.
Other issues your multi-location practice may be facing are:
- Long wait times
- Confusing appointment scheduling
- Inefficient communication
Each of these issues can negatively impact the overall patient experience. Patients want consistency and reliability when it comes to their dental care, regardless of the practice they visit.
Once you have identified the challenges, you can move toward finding a solution!
Step #2: Create Cohesive Policies & Procedures
Creating a seamless patient experience can make all the difference in multi-location dental practices. It’s the cohesive policies and procedures that are implemented for the patient experience that will truly set your organization apart. For multiple dental practices, maintaining a consistent approach can be a challenge. With careful considerations in place, creating a consistent experience can be achieved.
This is an important time to consider your values, since these will show up in your patient experience. Patients want to feel valued and comfortable when receiving dental care. For this reason, empathy, dedication, and patience should be among your organization’s core values.
Important considerations for your policies include:
- How are different locations communicating with each other?
- Are they using the same software tools?
- Are they aware of the organization’s values?
- Will the same strategies be used to manage inefficiencies, including appointment scheduling and wait times?
- What communication protocols can you implement to eliminate confusion?
When you begin to answer these questions, cohesive policies and procedures will allow you to deliver a patient experience your practice can be proud of.
Step #3: Use the Right Patient Experience Tools
Patient engagement and patient experience go hand in hand. In the world of dentistry, multi-location practices that are bogged down in outdated and time-consuming processes have a harder time ensuring that their patients have the best experience possible.
That’s why it’s crucial for dentists to embrace software solutions that can streamline their workflows and improve overall efficiency. With the right software in place, dental professionals can focus on providing the highest level of care to their patients without worrying about administrative tasks.
Patient engagement is a key factor in any dental practice, and utilizing software to enhance efficiency is an excellent way to improve the patient experience. Automated, customizable messaging is especially key here! When patients feel that their time is being valued and respected, they are more likely to return and recommend their dentist to others. By improving workflows and lowering wait times, software can help dentists prioritize patient needs and create a welcoming atmosphere that keeps patients returning.
Step #4: Centralize Data to Streamline Your Staff’s Work
One of the other significant advantages of software is the ability to centralize data. This offers many advantages, including an improved patient experience. No longer will patients have to worry about their records being scattered across different systems or locations. This can be especially useful in the case where a patient moves closer to a different location. They can be assured to have the same experience at all of the locations your practice is responsible for.
This centralized data system helps to ensure that the information healthcare providers need is readily available, which leads to better, more thorough patient care. With all of this data stored in one place, it’s easier for staff to access important information, such as appointment scheduling and patient history. Ultimately, the centralization of data allows dental practices to deliver a more seamless patient experience.
Step #5: Bring Your Staff on Board for Your New Patient Experience Strategy
Once your team has formed their new patient experience strategy, it’s time to implement that! Bringing every member of your staff on board, at every location, is key to success. It’s important to emphasize to your team that the patient experience is not just the responsibility of the front desk, but of every team member. From the dental assistants to the hygienists, everyone plays a role in creating a positive experience for the patient.
Ensure that your staff has the following to successfully deliver a great patient experience:
- Access to the plan. Present the plan to the team. Make sure the plan is outlined somewhere accessible after the presentation, such as in a shared Google Drive or posted on the wall of a communal staff space.
- Training. If you are implementing new tools, training is needed. If you are emphasizing empathy and conflict de-escalation with patients, training is needed!
- The right tools. After training, ensure any new software has a great support team and is ready to use.
By getting everyone on board with the new strategy and emphasizing the value of the patient experience, your dental practice can build a reputation for excellent patient care and align every location.
What Intiveo Has to Offer the Multi-Location Practice
At Intiveo, we focus on providing patient engagement software that works at every practice. We work with the patient experience in mind. Our software is designed to be customizable to fit the unique needs of your multi-location practice or for your DSO, while still providing a seamless patient experience. From appointment reminders to post-appointment follow-ups, Intiveo streamlines communication and frees up staff time to focus on providing quality care. Check out what our clients have to say about the Intiveo experience!
Curious to learn more? Book a meeting today.
