The Concerns of the Specialty Practice
It takes a lot to succeed as a specialty dental practice. Patient anxieties are often high, which can make patient engagement challenging. Plus, treatment plans are often quite extensive, involving a lot of pre- and post-appointment instructions. And in addition to this, forms, payment reminders, and referrals to consider. This all involves messaging, delivered through patient engagement strategy.
Let’s look at some of the pain points in running a specialty practice – and how they relate to patient engagement.
The Pain Points of Patient Engagement
Referrals
Referrals can get very complicated – even messy. Usually, a referred patient initially comes to your specialty practice for a consultation. Getting the referral from Point A to Point B can be a real exercise in futility. This also interrupts patient engagement, and creates a great deal of frustration for patients and staff alike.
Forms
Forms can be a real challenge for many specialty practices. Not only can manual forms often contain illegible handwriting, they can be time-consuming, taking up precious time in the appointment. Or, often, patients forget forms that have been sent home with them.
Patient Readiness
Let’s face it – we’ve all had that one patient show up drinking Starbucks when they were supposed to be fasting for an important procedure! Ensuring that patients have followed pre-procedure instructions is a key part of patient engagement, and compliance can be a real challenge.
Post-Procedure Instructions
For many specialty practices, post-procedure instructions are as important as pre-procedure instructions. Ensuring the right instructions go home and are accessible to your patients is an essential component of a positive appointment outcome.
Social Reviews
Gathering social reviews from patients is the main contributing factor in building reputation. But, getting your patients to write a social review is often harder than pulling teeth. Asking them at the desk really isn’t enough!
How to Create Solutions
This is why patient engagement software can be such a huge benefit to specialty practices. With automated, customizable messaging, many of these pain points become challenges that you can overcome.
Improve Patient Preparedness. Utilizing automated reminders, especially by text or email, you will be able to send instructions like pre-medications or fasting to help with appointment outcomes.
Ensure Positive Appointment Outcomes. Utilize that automated, customizable messaging cadences to make sure your patients’ post-procedure instructions are easily accessible in their phone or computer! Make it easy for them to succeed.
Get Those Social Reviews! Request a social review automatically with patient engagement software – even include a link to the platform of your choice. (Although, we recommend Google!) This is also an opportunity to ask for feedback, in case there are things your practice can work on.
Save Time with Digital Forms. One way patient engagement software can really save time at your practice is through digital forms. Gone are the days of typing manual answers into a computer and trying to decipher everyone’s handwriting!
Make Referral Management Easy. Managing referrals digitally allows you to keep track more easily and include pertinent details about the patient all in one place. Moving patients smoothly between practices is a key part of patient engagement!
Where Intiveo Fits In
At Intiveo, this is something we know a lot about! Our patient engagement software has saved specialty practices many hours of time by creating efficiency and streamlining processes. By leveraging both our core software and our Referral Management, Social Review, and Forms Add-Ons, you can see these good effects on your own practice!
Just book a meeting today to see what Intiveo can do for you.
