Dr. Dental is Booked Until 2022. Here's How They Did It Using NexHealth.

Dr. Dental is a 40-office dental service organization, but Sally Acosta, its VP of Operations, had goals of growing it even bigger. But she was struggling with flat year-over-year growth and wanted a way to increase earnings, promote new services, and expand existing plans.

To address these challenges, she turned to a centralized scheduling platform, NexHealth, to consolidate bookings and initiate patient outreach efforts. NexHealth, with features like 1-Click Booking and automated text and email messages, helps practices simplify administrative work and grow their business. Check out how NexHealth helped Dr. Dental expand.

Let patients book appointments online

Booking medical appointments can often be a frustrating process. At many clinics, patients must call, wait on hold, and work with a receptionist to wrangle an appointment that fits their schedule. But by adopting NexHealth, Dr. Dental eliminated these steps and let patients book on its website as well as through text messages and emails.

One of NexHealth’s key features is 1-click booking, which reduces the booking process from an average of 15 minutes to one click. When practices send texts or emails, their schedule is embedded in the message with open slots that can be clicked and immediately reserved. Instead of asking active patients to fill in a form with their information, NexHealth automatically pre-populates the information while scheduling the appointment.

It’s a critical step for Dr. Dental that let it meet patients where they are. As a result of digitizing scheduling, Dr. Dental saw a 147% increase in appointments.

“We have so much traction; it’s insane,” Acosta said. “Patients can easily book appointments, and we see the actual revenue that comes with it.”

Allowing patients to book online also serves the administrative side of the practice. Per research from Accenture, “it takes just under a minute to schedule medical appointments online, as compared to scheduling an appointment by phone, which takes an average of 8.1 minutes – with staff transferring patient calls 63% of the time.” Staff can reallocate time to other critical practice work, such as submitting insurance claims and coordinating providers’ schedules.

Eliminate double bookings with two-way integrations

NexHealth features two-way integrations that connect practice management systems to NexHealth for seamless integration. In Dr. Dental’s case, the practice connected its patient management system, Dentrix Enterprise, to NexHealth in order to minimize duplicate appointments and reduce other manual errors. The bidirectional service comes at no cost to NexHealth users and is quick and consistent, updating information every 30 seconds.

“NexHealth is just getting things done,” Acosta said. “All I have to do is check my notifications.”

Administrative errors in healthcare are unfortunately common and can be costly. The World Health Organization has done extensive research in this area and estimated that 5% to 50% of medical errors can be traced back to administrative errors. The consequences of these errors can be serious. While the study notes that some might consider administrative errors to be less problematic than medical or diagnostic ones, administrative errors can actually be the root of these issues, ranging in severity from delayed diagnoses to a failure to flag patients with abnormal test results.

Promote new services with a centralized marketing platform

Part of Dr. Dental’s expansion plans included offering more orthodontic services and adding to its existing treatment plans. It turned to NexHealth to craft a text and email campaign detailing the new offerings for the practice’s patients.

With NexHealth, virtual reminders and messages are fully customizable. The Smart Command feature lets offices personalize messages with the patient’s name, send messages according to the patient’s communications preference, and choose which time and frequency messages should be sent. Put together, these features allowed Dr. Dental to execute a successful campaign that “recovered 15% of their total revenue from recall and marketing campaigns.”

Email marketing is a critical marketing tool across industries and is growing in importance in the healthcare industry. “From obtaining new patients, onboarding and retaining them to building trust, email marketing places a vast opportunity for brands to interact seamlessly with their customers and prospects,” according to experts at ReferralMD, a referral management platform. “Moreover, the relatively low cost and the exceptionally high return rate have helped healthcare professionals humanize their medical practice as a trusted partner.”

Centralized marketing is also a tactic that benefits your business operations. It gives practices brand consistency, offers a better customer experience, and improves the efficiency of your marketing ops. Without it, you might have patient outreach marketing that comes from different sources and is confusing or unappealing. Centralized marketing’s goal is to create brand cohesion and thoughtful timing of messaging. For a large practice with multiple locations, this means saving time and money.

NexHealth can bring your practice into the digital age

So much of healthcare is stuck in the past, with a bulk of the administrative work being done on paper or over the phone, which comes at a cost to both practices and patients. With the introduction of NexHealth’s platform, Dr. Dental saw an influx of patients and improved revenue. Additionally, Dr. Dental served patients by modernizing its practice with digital booking and outreach options.

NexHealth takes practices to the next level with its online booking and seamless integration with patient management systems. If your practice is looking to stand out among clinics in your community, explore NexHealth as an option to launch it into the future of healthcare.