How Patient Alerts Simplify Your Day

Running a dental practice is far from formulaic. Patient needs vary from person to person, which sometimes presents barriers. Language barriers, for example, are common issues that dental teams need to address for a portion of patients. Ensuring that you have the necessary tools and resources to communicate with your patients effectively is crucial. Having solutions prepared ahead of time limits stress for both parties and allows for a more rewarding experience for both your team and your patients.  

The reality of running a dental practice is that individual needs must be addressed by the team. Some patients require certain settings or protocols that other patients might not need. With many patients coming in per day, it is important to have a quick and obvious identifier for any patients that have specific needs for the team to prepare for.  

Our new video shows you how your office can use one of our newer features, ‘patient alerts’ to bring these special needs to your attention. Patient alerts show symbols that indicate a patient’s specific condition or need. Your team can quickly glance at the screen and identify existing conditions or special issues that require more hands, extra attention, or additional prep time.  

The video also demonstrates how you can add in patient alerts for patients who may have developed a special condition, for example, an allergy, or a medical condition. Another example that shows this tool’s practicality is if your practice treats a patient who is very anxious or apprehensive, you can add a note in their patient record which can quickly be viewed by hovering over the symbol that you added to their chart. This way, when anyone on your team notices that the patient has an assistance symbol, the team member can quickly adjust to fit the patient’s needs, rather than going into a situation blindly. 

As always, we hope you enjoy our video about patient alerts. We look forward to continually providing you with valuable information to help you better use ABELDent’s features. If you have any questions or would like us to make a tutorial about a specific topic, please let us know.  

Getting Back on Your Feet: Optimize Review Management Software for Effortless Feedback

In March 2020, popular review websites, including Google and Yelp, temporarily disabled business reviews to avoid misconceptions and bad reviews due to COVID-19 spreading in North America. While this measure did not last long, it reinforced the impact that public reviews have on small businesses such as dental practices. 

We have discussed the prevalence of reviews for dental practices before. Online reviews and public ratings of your practice are a significant factor for appealing to prospective patients. Learning about your patients’ perspectives also help your team improve their social skills and treatment quality by providing an opportunity for more empathy and understanding, which, in turn, may alleviate patient anxieties. On top of using reviews to improve patient experiences, reviews are an excellent resource when establishing your practice’s KPIs. Understanding patient perceptions can often be just as insightful as numerical data.  

Reviews are just as important as ever, but dental providers and their teams do not have much time to focus on reputation management. Catching up on dental treatments has taken the forefront for thousands of offices where patients are months behind their due dates for hygiene, restorations, and various other procedures. Having a review management system in place works in the background while your team focuses on providing outstanding treatment. Having a review manager is generally simple to maintain, especially if incorporated directly into your practice management software.  

How does review management software work? 

There are different processes for different review management systems. Typically, emails or texts prompt patients to select a pre-made rating (for instance, a thumbs up/thumbs down option) or ask patients to click a button, leading them to a web page where they can leave their review. Webpage reviews allow for more in-depth reviews but may result in fewer responses. 

Once you have your software set up to fit your office’s unique needs, you can send a follow-up email or text message to patients that you have treated on a specific day. Sending same-day emails and texts is typically the best course of action because the experience is still fresh in your patient’s mind. The email messages invite patients to navigate to a page where they can rate their experience at your clinic. 

Positive reviews result in encouragement to post online, such as to Google Business or Yelp. Negative or neutral feedback encourages the patient to reach out to your office by leaving a comment or calling your office instead of posting a harsh review. Your team can personally reach out to any ratings that are not positive, allowing the patient to feel heard. Personalized responses to bad reviews also provide an excellent opportunity to evaluate which aspects your practice may require improvement.  

If you are interested in ABELDent’s review management software, feel free to reach out to get in control of your practice’s online reputation.  

How to Effectively Insert Insurance Bulk Payments

This week, we are bringing a new video tutorial to the table for you.  

Tracking finances can be tedious sometimes, but having the right practice management system in place may alleviate some of the stress. In our new video, we address some common issues that can impact the entry of bulk insurance payments. These include receiving an unexpected amount, the consolidation of carriers leading to payments arriving from an unexpected source, and complications arising from mistaken information. This video discusses how recent changes in ABELDent CS and LS+ allow you to work around those issues in order to accurately and efficiently enter your bulk payments. 

We hope you find our videos insightful for utilizing ABELDent in your dental practice. If you have any feedback or want us to talk about any specific topics, feel free to reach out to our team by leaving a comment. 

Why You Should Keep Track of Your Practice’s Performance

Business decisions are a part of daily life for dental professionals. Whether you are a provider and owner, or you have a different role in a practice, you have an impact on and are impacted by the practice’s business decisions.   

COVID-19 brought economic stress to most industries, including dentistry.  While most practices in Canada are open to some extent, whether to see emergency patients or to offer a wider variety of services, it will be some time before things are “back to normal”.    

As your practice gets back on its feet, it’s as important as ever remember the words of management thinker Peter Drucker, who said “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”.  While the business environment will improve as the negative impacts of COVID-19 subside, some practices will recover more quickly, in part by measuring their practice performance and finding opportunities to improve at all stages of the recovery.   

Key Performance Indicators (abbreviated as KPIs) are measure the most important indicators of practice success.  During this unusual time, it might be beneficial to look at the KPIs you measure to ensure that they are well suited to your needs in the coming months.  For example, tracking the potential for non-essential treatment may help you to determine how quickly to add hygiene hours to your schedule.    

In late 2019, we discussed three options for measuring KPIs for your dental practice by generating reports. The three methods included using Microsoft tools such as Word, Excel, and Power BI, and also doing it manually by extracting key information from standard reports. If you use our practice management software, we have a solution that doesn’t require third-party software. 

ABELDent Insights is an upcoming integrated data measurement tool from ABELDent that generates viewable statistics based on ABELDent data. Viewing the KPIs and data trends in ABELDent Insights can help ABELDent users to determine their practice’s strengths, weaknesses and progress toward goals. Measuring these critical success factors helps practices to know what is working, and to plan adjustments where there is an opportunity for improvement.    

ABELDent Insights provides simple displays simple infographics on such measures as production, including often-used KPIs such as the ratio of production generated by dentists compared to hygiene providers. ABELDent Insights also shows scheduler downtime, including statistics regarding no-shows, cancellations, and inactive patients. This can help to identify which days or times are hard to fill in order to adjust provider hours or try to fill those gaps.

Once you have identified your practice’s KPIs, you can work towards finding solutions that are feasible for your practice, and ideal for your team and your patients. Maybe a provider needs to focus on taking on a few more patients, or perhaps some inactive patients need to be contacted for their hygiene appointments. Regardless of what your practice’s needs are, there is a huge benefit to knowing your areas for improvement, as well as knowing what your office does well.