Practice Growth Series Event Recap: ZenDental + NexHealth

This Practice Growth Series, hosted by NexHealth, gave dental professionals in the San Francisco area the opportunity to network with each other, as well as hear from a peer – a dental practice owner who has direct experience growing their own practice, Prabesh Regmi.

He was able to highlight the solutions and methods he uses to increase appointments, limit no-shows, and engage patients at Zen Dental Studios, a dental practice that he owns and operates with his wife, who is the operating dentist. Guests were welcome to ask questions and gain insights into growing – and sustaining – their own practice.

Main Contributors & Speakers

Prabesh Regmi, Owner and Operator of Zen Dental Studios in San Francisco, partnered to lead this fireside chat with NexHealth’s Head of Marketing, Aditya Vempaty. With personal experience, Prabesh was the perfect guest to lead the discussion on strategies dental professionals can use to accelerate their business.

Aditya shared how NexHealth attempts to develop the best tool for dental practices, believing that the best tools deliver a patient experience that results in patient engagement, practice growth, and retention.

Networking & Dental Practice Insights

After arriving, guests were able to enjoy cocktails and hors d’oeuvres while networking. The highlight of the evening was a discussion between Aditya and Prabesh, discussing challenges his dental practice faces, how they handle these issues and work towards solutions using technologies that deliver amazing patient experiences.

Following the discussion, guests had an opportunity to network with each other and the speakers, sharing their unique experiences and swapping tactics for how they engage patients with their own practice.

Throughout the fireside chat, Prabesh was able to shed light on some of the following core topics:

How they built their practice

Prabesh explained how they built their practice, and the main principles that drove their practice forward – transparency and service. He explained that he started working years ago on wall street. After having a change of heart, he got an MBA and began helping startups, leveraging his marketing and business acumen to help small businesses grow.

Prabesh now uses these skills to help his wife grow Zen Dental Studio, of which he is Owner & Operator, and she is the head Dentist.

Challenges conquered through innovation and technology

One of the biggest challenges Zen Dental Studios faced was related to their location in San Francisco. When you’re operating a business in a major city, patients have an abundance of choice. It becomes that much harder to make your business stand out so that you attract patients.

In this type of market, the question becomes “How do you differentiate yourself from competitors?”. To do this, Zen Dental Studios focused on providing the best in-class patient experience, centered on two core principles:

• Transparency: Every patient should know what they are signing up for.
• Service: Every patient should receive the best in-class service.

To achieve this, Zen Dental Studios relied on NexHealth as their patient management and experience solution. With online booking and virtual communication options, NexHealth made it extremely easy for Prabesh and the Zen Dental Studios team to focus on providing care by automating processes, enabling convenient communication, and offering online booking for patients.

To ensure that Zen Dental Studios stands out, Prabesh highlighted the importance of adapting to new technologies, such as offering online scheduling to patients to make their experience better.

“We wanted to provide the best service possible – online booking is the one that seems the most obvious, right? You know, we’re living in this day in age where we can make reservations to go to restaurants, but why not offices?”– Prabesh Regmi (Owner & Operator of Zen Dental)

Prabesh points out that while online booking has a number of advantages for the practice, such as filling missed and cancelled appointments and limiting no-shows, their motivation to adopt it was to provide the best possible experience for patients and to reduce friction in the booking process. When you focus on offering top-of-the-line service, patients want to use your services – and are satisfied enough to stay with you!

Adapting to COVID-19 and post-COVID patient expectations

Like many businesses, COVID-19 posed a number of challenges. Prabesh found that for Zen Dental Studios, the biggest change that came about from COVID-19 was that it drastically changed the expectations of what patients experienced at dental offices. As dental offices had to adapt to the struggles of the pandemic, they had to shift their services to be more like DoorDash and Amazon, offering touchless service to patients and making services and responses instantaneous.

Throughout the pandemic, patients began to expect this level of convenience, accessibility, responsiveness, and engagement in their dental care as well. With many dental offices unequipped to offer these quality of life features that enhance the patient experience, dental practices willing to adapt – and adopt these technologies – were able to make themselves stand out.

Zen Dental Studios has adapted to this using NexHealth’s patient experience solution, which helps automate and streamline communication via patients’ preferred method. This convenience and accessibility keeps their practice thriving during the pandemic, and ensures they are poised to provide these services well into the future!

Learn how you can grow your practice with NexHealth

See how you can take the methods discussed in the Practice Growth Series, and get running with these yourself instantly using NexHealth’s modern patient experience solution. As Prabesh discussed, online scheduling is one of the most important current solutions. With NexHealth, you can get 1-Click Booking that saves time for patients (and your practice!).

If you want to see the entirety of what NexHealth has to offer, try a demo today!