How to Automate Your Dental Office and Keep Growing

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The Connect the Doc Team
June 14, 2023
4
min. read

Your relationship with your patients extends beyond the dentist engine. A lot goes into successfully running a dental practice, and in today’s digital era, the quality of your dental services isn’t quite enough to ensure patient satisfaction. It’s more holistic than that, and by automating your dental office operations, you can position your practice to offer the best service possible. 

You need efficient systems to meet your existing and prospective patients’ needs while saving cost and time. A typical dental office requires inputs from both the administrative and clinical staff to keep it running. But if you want to prepare your dental practice for growth now and in the future, you should consider investing in dental office automation tools. 

Dental office automation is the application of computer systems and software to enable your dental team to be more productive. It involves using digital tools to close gaps in your team’s workflows, save time and ensure no communication or operations slip through the cracks. 

There are many dental office automation tools out there but before we get into them, let’s briefly discuss the benefits of using these tools. 

How Dental Office Automation Improve Productivity

  1. It Saves Time and Operating Costs

As a business owner, you know how vital it is to save time and money. There are so many dental marketing strategies you could invest in, and some marketing campaigns take longer than others to achieve their desired outcome. So, you should implement processes and tools that help you maximize time and operating costs. 

With the right automation tools, you can ensure your team focuses on the most important tasks and save money otherwise spent on time-consuming activities. 

  1. It Ensures Patients Are Attended To

There are tools that allow you to automate your patient communications such that all patient inquiries and requests are fielded on time. These automation tools could be the difference between a high or low patient acquisition rate and cost. Some days, there’s just isn’t enough time to respond to all new and existing patients’ requests. Automation tools act as digital assistants and ensure all patients are attended to. 

  1. It Turns Patients to Brand Ambassador

Your patients have the potential to play a significant role in your dental marketing process. If they share glowing reviews about your work online or refer their network to your dental practice, it wouldn’t be long before you start seeing more patient leads

Asking patients for reviews and referrals might seem challenging and daunting for you. The good news is there are automation tools that can automatically ask your patients to review your practice or spread the word right after each successful appointment. This way, you can focus on delivering excellent dental service while your dental office automation tools help you secure more leads. 

5 Ways to Use Dental Office Automation Tools

Now that you understand the benefits of using dental office automation tools, let’s highlight five ways to use these tools. Here are five common uses of dental automation tools. 

  1. Appointments

Scheduling appointments is likely the most popular way of using dental office automation tools. The number of appointments booked in a period is a key metric for several dentists and their teams. With several dental appointment scheduling tools like Dentrix, NexHealth, LocalMed, and ZocDoc available, it’s never been easier to schedule appointments automatically and faster. 

  1. Referrals 

Referral marketing is a great way to spread the word about your dental practice, and with dental office automation tools like Connect the Doc, you never have to ask patients to refer their friends and family to your practice. Instead, Connect the Doc will automatically make the ask for you and facilitate the referral process to ensure that the referrals result in new leads.

  1. Reviews

Similar to referrals, it’s not always easy to ask for reviews. Ideally, you want your high-value patients to be the ones leaving reviews. Connect the Doc’s reviews tool can automatically ask patients for feedback and reviews and, with their permission, publish these comments on top dental reviews sites. 

  1. Patient Communications

Your patients should be able to access information about your dental practice, dental services, or their oral health easily. It is important to invest in tools that can close communication gaps and ensure patients receive the information they need when they need it. Tools like Live Chat and Chatbots can help you automatically respond to patient requests and inquiries made on your dental website. 

  1. Internal Communication

Lastly, you should invest in dental office automation tools to improve the way your team works and communicates with each other. Excellent internal communication is key to being more efficient and productive as a team. Consider using tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams to keep your team in the loop. 

Automation enables you and your team to work better, which could have a domino effect on the quality of service you offer your patients. The happier your patients are, the closer you’ll get to achieving your business and marketing goals. Invest in the right tools that can help you be more productive as a team and in business.  

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