United Dental Partners selects NexHealth to digitize the patient experience for 24 locations

Challenge

Coordinating care with patients is time-consuming, expensive, and people-intensive. United Dental Partners was started by two dentists who believe in delivering high-quality yet affordable care. To achieve their mission, they needed technology to create efficiency while improving the patient experience.

"It is quite costly and time consuming for an office team to accept a paper form, read it, and re-enter the information into Open Dental. It also opens up risk of human error with the information entered," said Ashley Gibson, Chief Marketing Officer at United Dental Partners. “We need the right technology platform that saves us time, is cost effective, and improves the lives of our doctors, office staff, and patients.”

United Dental Partners didn’t want to work with a bunch of vendors and get poor service, they needed a customer-first platform that could support practice growth, operations, marketing, and communications.

“Our objective was to invest in technology to reduce the net cost of operating our business. Those costs could be redirect to enhancing the patient experience,” said Ashley.

Solution

After evaluating several solutions, United Dental Partners selected the NexHealth platform, taking advantage of the full suite of products: Online Booking, Two-Way Messaging, Online Forms, Recalls, Marketing Campaigns, Reviews, Support. NexHealth also offered a bidirectional integration with OpenDental.

"We have a very small marketing team," said Ashley. "NexHealth is a turnkey solution that arms us with marketing and communications tools that delight our patients, reduces operational costs, and saves our team hours every day."

United Dental Partners uses Online Booking to create a frictionless patient scheduling experience.

“Patients love the instant gratification of booking online with NexHealth. In less than a minute, they can get an appointment scheduled,” said Ashley. “What’s impressive is that NexHealth Online Booking is growing organically, and we now have hundreds of patients scheduling online each month.”

Online Forms are one of the best ways United Dental Partners has found to save time. They digitized the form experience making it easy for patients to fill in appointment-specific forms before coming into the office, with the data auto-updated into OpenDental.

“Our office team absolutely loves NexHealth Forms. They talk about them every day,” said Ashley.

But the power feature for Ashley is communicating efficiently with patients through NexHealth messaging and templates. NexHealth automates email and text communication for new or existing patients, so they're ready for appointments and less likely to no-show.

"We’d likely never see 10-15% of patients again if we didn't connect with them through marketing," said Ashley. "We use NexHealth like a patient CRM, and it makes it easy to run 1-Click recall campaigns, automate reminders, and more. NexHealth helps us keep all our patients coming back."

Results

Adoption of the NexHealth platform has been fast across the 24 United Dental locations. The intuitive user experience and pre-populated templates makes training simple.

"Our patients love the text and reminders. Now, they even feel left out if they don't get a reminder sequence for any reason to remind them of their appointment," said Ashley. "We've elevated the patient experience to the point that our patients may get frustrated working with a dental practice not offering NexHealth."

United Dental Partner's investments in the patient experience have improved an already "world class" Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 81, to an NPS of 88. The team has improved the patient experience by working with NexHealth’s support team to customize the platform, train new office team members, and identify future optimizations like appointment-specific patient journeys.

"Every interaction with NexHealth support, I give 5 stars. It feels like a true partnership, and that can't be undervalued," remarked Ashley.