ClearDent AI

Following the footsteps of the retail and finance industries, omnichannel healthcare is gaining traction. An omnichannel dental practice results in improved patient retention, increased revenue, and streamlined processes.

What is omnichannel?

Before we delve into what an omnichannel dental practice looks like, let’s talk about what omnichannel is. In Latin, “Omni” means “all.” Essentially, an omnichannel experience is seamless and consistent across all channels. This means whether through a brick and mortar location, by phone, online, or via social media, the quality of service is always the same.

An omnichannel dental practice helps create deeper relationships at all points of the experience, improving patient retention for your dental practice.

Patients expect an omnichannel experience

Patients may not recognize that they want an omnichannel experience, but the experience they’ve come to expect is an omnichannel one.

The dental experience is no longer as straightforward as it once was. Patient touchpoints start even before they step into your practice. Patients start researching their healthcare providers online; 90% of patients will choose another provider entirely if they don’t like what they see through online research. This is why dental marketing for your practice is critical.

Reminders to patients before their appointments are a given to reduce no-shows and late cancellations. However, these days, more and more dental practices are catering to their patients and contacting them through their preferred contact method such as text message or email.

The dental experience doesn’t end when the patient leaves the practice – follow-up calls, social media posts, and email marketing are all ways to keep top-of-mind and create lasting relationships with your patients across multiple channels.

The rise of the omnichannel experience was in response to how people interact with businesses these days. Patients want their dental experience to travel across devices and channels with them. And that’s the heart of omnichannel – a great patient experience that occurs across channels but ultimately feels seamless.

[Create your omnichannel experience the easy way – book a ClearDent demo today]

What patients want

In an overall omnichannel healthcare experience, mobile is becoming increasingly important. Consider this information that was found in regards to hospitals:

In a related field, like dentistry, we can expect that similar figures would be found. What this means is that a mobile-optimized website or a mobile app for your dental practice takes higher priority than ever before.

In the age of instant gratification, convenience and speed will be rewarded. Patients want their healthcare interactions to be fast and easy.

Some tips to offer fast, convenient service:

Value of an omnichannel dental practice

With an integrated dental software, you can significantly improve patient experiences at your practice and by extension, increase your revenue.

Consider this new patient experience at an omnichannel dental practice:

  1. Booking: A patient books their appointment online
  2. Pre-appointment: Patient receives a text message reminding them of their appointment
  3. Check-in: They get to the office and fill out their patient information on a kiosk tablet at the front desk
  4. X-rays: The dental assistant takes the patient’s x-rays with digital imaging technology, and the images are immediately transferred and appear on the dentist’s screen
  5. Treatment plan: Using the x-rays, the dentist explains to the patient the proposed treatment plan
  6. Payment: Up at the front, the office manager pulls up the treatment plan the dentist entered and lets the patient know how much the treatment will cost and how much their insurance will cover
  7. Follow-up: Post-appointment, the patient receives an email, thanking them for their business

The experience occurs across multiple devices and involves the integration of imaging and dental practice management softwares – but all the patient experiences is a smooth appointment.

Integrated dental software can enable omnichannel experiences

To be able to offer your patients an omnichannel experience, you need an integrated dental system that has all of your patient information and dental technology in the same place.

ClearDent has everything you need working together in one convenient place:

An omnichannel dental practice provides a connected experience across the entire patient journey. An integrated dental software can help you provide exceptional, omnichannel patient care, setting you apart from the competition.

ClearDent can help you offer an omnichannel patient experience

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Traditional marketing is no longer cutting it and more and more clinics are turning to online dental marketing to attract new patients.

By 2020, there will be just shy of 220,000 dentists in the U.S. alone. This means patients have plenty of options when it comes to dentists so it will be that much more important for you to stand out among the crowd.

The way people conduct research these days has changed dramatically. Gone are newspaper ads and billboards. Now, patients research online before even stepping foot in a dental clinic. With 3.5 billion searches on Google a day, you can no longer afford to slack on your dental online marketing.

There are many different tactics when it comes to digital dental marketing. You can pay for online ads. You can boost your search engine rankings. You can share valuable content on social media. You can set up targeted email campaigns.

There are three main benefits when it comes to dental online marketing over traditional marketing:

The dental industry is projected to be worth around $36.8 billion by 2021 so in order for your clinic to stay competitive, you need to establish a dental marketing strategy that involves a mix of paid advertising, search engine optimization, social media, and email marketing.

Dental marketing ddvertisements

There are three different types of paid advertising: search, social, and display.

Search ads are also known as paid search, search engine marketing (SEM), or pay-per-click (PPC). They allow you to use advertising platforms, such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads, to get your content in front of people who are searching for relevant keywords. Search ads operate on a pay-per-click basis, which means that you only pay when your ad is clicked on.

Although PPC ads come at a cost, this type of online advertising is beneficial because you can control the messaging of your ads, track your campaign results, and set a maximum daily limit so you don’t go over budget.

Social advertising, also known as paid social ads, are ads on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. With social ads, you pay the social media platform to boost your posts, offers, or promotions to a targeted list, ensuring your content is seen by potential patients. By 2019, Facebook ad revenue is expected to exceed print ads.

Display ads appear in sections specifically reserved for paid advertising such as at the top or on the side of the web page.

Through Google Display Networks, display ads have a far reach across millions of websites and as a result, your ads can be seen by many potential patients.

Dental SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is crucial to attracting new patients.

Dental SEO helps those looking for a dentist find your website. Good dental SEO ensures your website ranks higher in search results, ensuring people discover it. This is important because while 51% of people search Google to find a dentist, few will click past the first page of results.

To help ensure your website appears on the first page, there are a few technical SEO foundations to have in place, such as a mobile-optimized website and fast page speeds.

After you set up a foundation, you’ll have to put effort into creating keyword-rich content to increase traffic and keep visitors on your website.

Below are some tips on optimizing your content to improve your dental SEO:

Another tactic to improve your search rankings is to enhance your local SEO. This is particularly valuable for dental clinics as patients will typically look for a dentist near them. 85% of searchers use the internet to find local businesses.

You can improve your local SEO by claiming your Google My Business profile and ensuring you have good reviews. There is nothing more powerful and persuasive than social proof to convince a prospect to become a patient.

Social media marketing

Social media opens a dialogue for you to talk directly to both current and potential patients. The healthcare industry is realizing that social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are a goldmine for discovering new patients, interacting with current patients, and gaining brand loyalty.

Social media is also an effective platform to share the content that you create, such as blog posts and videos. When you share relevant and useful content, you build trust and stay top of mind.

Instead of trying to use every social media platform under the sun and spreading yourself too thin, choose one or two to focus on. Facebook and Twitter are the most commonly used for dental clinics.

Email marketing

Email marketing involves sending targeted emails to a house list. Emails can include newsletters, promotions, birthday wishes, holiday greetings, and special announcements. Email marketing also includes sending appointment reminders to avoid late cancellations or no-shows. Reminders are very effective tactics to get patients who are due for a checkup to book appointments, keeping your dental schedule populated.

In today’s day and age, dental marketing strategies are far more effective than traditional marketing tactics and can lead to substantial growth and increased revenue for your dental clinic.

If you’ve made it this far, you are actively seeking to improve your practice. Schedule a meeting with one of our Account Executives to get up to speed on all the ways ClearDent can help you accomplish your goals.

When it comes to growing dental clinics, new patient acquisition is often what comes to mind but improving patient retention rates is just as important and crucial to the success of any dental clinic. Returning patients provide a greater return on investment. It costs 5 times more to obtain a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. Happy patients also improve your bottom line as they are your best advocates, bringing you more business by referring family and friends.

On average, dental clinics have an attrition rate of 10-20%. While some factors like people relocating may be out of your control, there are certain patient retention strategies to help ensure they’re happy and continue to come back to your clinic – because at its core, improving patient retention is about keeping them happy.

Make it easy

Patients these days lead fast-paced lives and are used to ease and speed in everything they do. This means you have to ensure their dental experience is as convenient as possible for them. You can do this by:

1) Extending your office hours

It can be difficult for patients to make appointments during normal working hours. Consider opening your clinic earlier in the mornings or keeping it open later in the evenings to better accommodate their busy schedules.

2) Sending appointment reminders

Appointment reminders are often expected and appreciated by patients. It also helps you reduce late cancellations and no-shows. Many dental software systems allow you to send appointment reminders automatically.

[Set your clinic up with ClearDent to take advantage of ClearConnect, our patient messaging system. Book a ClearDent demo today]

3) Scheduling enough time

Research shows that longer wait times are negatively correlated with patient satisfaction, perception of the provider, and confidence in the quality of care. Be sure to properly optimize your dental schedule to allow sufficient time for each patient.

Build trust and create value

Part of improving patient retention is ensuring that they understand the value of your dental services and to do that, you need to build trust. Trust and value are gained when you take the time to explain everything very thoroughly and clearly, whether it’s the next steps in their treatment, why they need the treatment, or even explaining the procedure itself.

Some patients may think that they don’t need dental services because their teeth feel fine, it’s too expensive, or they’re scared. You can combat this by talking them through the x-rays and explaining why they need certain procedures, the proposed treatment plan, and the dangers if they don’t take action.

Or, if the patient is known to be uneasy about dental procedures, take extra care to reassure them, let them know what to expect, and guide them through the process to help settle their concerns.

Whether patients are feeling weary about the cost, process, or need, they’ll appreciate you addressing their concerns directly.

Ensure patients feel at ease

How patients feel while they’re at your clinic contributes a great deal to improving patient retention. When they feel at ease and comfortable, they’re less likely to go to another dental clinic.

1) Create a welcoming waiting room

While you should try to reduce the time patients spend waiting, you can at least ensure they’re comfortable. Some things to consider having in your waiting room include:

2) Be friendly

Patients often don’t jump at the chance to go to the dentist; procedures like root canals or wisdom teeth extractions are not appointments that they look forward to. To cancel out potential negative connotations, make sure every patient feels welcome and that they’re more than just a number to you. Below are some tips to create a friendly environment:

3) Empower them

Help empower patients to take responsibility for their dental health:

Stay in touch

Of course, you always want to ensure that patients leave feeling happy and tended to but the patient experience doesn’t just end when they leave. Staying in touch and engaging with patients is another patient retention strategy.

1) Follow up

A quick phone call to check how a patient is feeling after a procedure can go a long way in improving patients’ perception of your clinic. This also gives you the chance to turn any bad experiences around, reducing the chance your patients will take their business elsewhere.

2) Monitor reviews

These days, if patients are not happy, there’s a high possibility they’ll write a review online. When you monitor reviews on your clinic, you have the opportunity to address negative comments and make it right. And since the communication is public, it also shows potential patients that you care about providing great service.

3) Send a newsletter

The healthcare industry has an average email open rate of 33%. This means it’s a prime opportunity to send patients useful content such as promos, clinic updates, or educational information about oral health.

4) Send seasonal greetings

Birthdays and holidays provide a chance to stay top of your patients’ mind. Send patients a birthday email or remind them to use their remaining insurance before the end of the year.

5) Patient surveys

Sending patient satisfaction surveys is a great way to gain valuable feedback that can improve your clinic. The results will uncover what’s working and what’s not, which you can then use to take action.

There isn’t one thing that you can do to improve patient retention overnight; it’s a combination of several patient retention strategies that everyone in your clinic can contribute towards

This article uses information from the insightful book by the long-time dental consultant, Bianca Dornan at Practices Made Perfect about setting your course in a dental office. If you would like access to the entire eBook, click here to download it for free.

Staff at your practice (or any company) can be sorted into 3 basic categories; drivers, survivors, and hiders.

Drivers are employees who do things for the good of the company, even if that means they have to do things the hard way. They look for ways to improve the company and are engaged and invested in the successes or failures of your practice.

Survivors are those who want to do what’s best for your practice, but may not go out of their way to seek out ways to do things better. Survivors can be very helpful employees but likely need a little more motivation and coaching from their management.

Hiders are the underachievers of the bunch. These are people who are doing the bare minimum to complete their job, resist change and are unaffected by successes and failures of the practice.

Fortunately, these labels are not for the people themselves, but rather for the level of engagement that those people are feeling. That means that if you feel like you have an office full of Hiders, there is still hope. There are changes you can make to convert those same people into Survivors or even Drivers. Likewise, if you are working with some Drivers, it’s not guaranteed that they will continue to be Drivers forever. In both circumstances, work needs to be done to maximize your employees.

The best way to push your employees away from being hiders, and towards being drivers is to make sure that they are invested in the direction that your practice is heading. The best way to do that is to be clear and concise with where the company is headed, and exactly what each person/team/role needs to accomplish.

Setting your practice’s direction

When setting the direction of your practice, do not focus on what you want to do. Instead, focus on WHY your business is operating. Your employees and customers alike will be drawn to a ‘why’ much more than a ‘what’, making it easier for each group to engage with your company. When setting your ‘why’ don’t rush it. Think long and hard about a ‘why’ that truly and genuinely represents the reason your company is operating. This ‘why’ if used properly will emanate throughout your company from top to bottom.

Once you have your ‘why’ get support by giving your staff goals that support your ‘why’. When they can see how their set of goals fits into the much larger direction of the company, they will feel like they are making meaningful contributions.

Set your goals

The often repeated, and still the best way is setting your goals using the S.M.A.R.T. acronym.

S – Specific. Ambiguity creates confusion.

M – Measurable. Success should be pass/fail with no grey area.

A – Attainable. Keep goals grounded in what’s possible.

R – Relevant. How does your goal relate to your ‘why’?

T – Timely. By what date/time should this goal be completed?

Creating a ‘why’ and setting SMART goals are certainly not the only ways to push all your employees toward becoming Drivers, but they will definitely help. Try implementing this at your practice and see what profound effects it could have on the way you operate.

This article uses information from the insightful book by the long-time dental consultant, Bianca Dornan at Practices Made Perfect about delegating tasks in a dental practice.

In your dental practice, there are hundreds of tasks that can be done at any given time to improve the business. Knowing how to use concentration tricks to uncover these tasks is the first step. Having the capacity to accomplish them is the next one. 

Unfortunately, not one person can hope to have enough capacity to accomplish every business-boosting tactic on a regular basis. You’re going to need help! Delegating these activities to the people within your practice accomplishes a number of things on top of the actual jobs. Things like;

  1. Uncovering the hidden talents of your employees
  2. Increasing buy-in from your team around business growth
  3. Adding accountability for task completion
  4. Opportunity to learn and expand abilities

For many practice owners or office managers, the problem isn’t with the concept of delegating tasks, but rather the execution of it. Especially in cases where your practice has been operating in a certain way for a long while, people in the practice can often be, or appear to be, resistant when asked to take on more duties. To tackle this, Bianca Dornan has developed a 4 part strategy for asking for help.

Step 1: Begin the ask with an action statement and an objective. Make sure your action statement is specific enough that the direction of the task is clear. 

“Can you please help me with marketing? I would like to use social media [action] in order to get our name out to the community [objective].”

Step 2: Include key factors in order to further specify exactly what you’re looking for with this task, and make the results measurable.

“I would like to make sure that our personality shows through in every post [key factor]. I can commit to a budget of $100 per month from now until September [key factor]. My end goal is to have 150 new followers by September 30th [measurable goal].”

Step 3: Ask for their opinion on this new task. Perhaps they will need further clarification, or training, or will have an objection. In any case, it’s important to get their feedback so that they feel included in the decision and buy-in to the results.

“What are your thoughts on this project?”

Step 4: Find out what they need in order to get started, and make a plan to provide them with it.

“What do you need from me in order to get going with this project?”

Every employee is different, and there may still be pushback. By using this guide to delegation, the stars in your office will become more obvious, and the weaker members that may require more management/training will too. In either case, this exercise provides you with an opportunity to get your whole team moving towards better business outcomes.

This article uses information from the insightful book by the long-time dental consultant, Bianca Dornan at Practices Made Perfect about identifying opportunities in your practice.

When in the daily grind of running your practice, figuring out all the possible ways to improve your practice can feel overwhelming or even unproductive. You have enough on your plate, how can you be expected to set aside time to think about ways to add more work? If, however, you aspire to make the most out of your practice and possibly even expand it, brainstorming about what the issues are and how to address them is a necessary investment for you to make.

Steps to find opportunities

Identifying opportunities in your practice is so difficult because you are concentrating on something that you spend all day working on, your dental practice. If there are glaring issues and inconveniences, you have probably made an effort to address them already. Here are four tried and true ways to unlock the type of thinking that you need to uncover hidden potential. (Hint: none of them involve concentrating harder)

  1. Do something unrelated to your industry: You are consumed by the dental industry. And, within that industry, there may be people doing great things that you can apply to your practice as well. But, if you want to become truly inspired, it is useful to take a step outside dentistry and see the ways that other industries are dealing with issues and creating more possibilities; they may apply to you. Attend a lecture for an industry you’re not familiar with, visit and read about businesses in different industries, and talk to people who have had success in their careers! You never know what will spark an idea that you can use.
  2. Find inspiration online: Inspiration doesn’t need to take a lot of your time. Identifying opportunities can be done by finding unlimited inspiration for any topic online. Create a repository of interesting or inspiring articles, websites, images, and videos that you find online. When you have that, you can revisit these things to get your mind out of its routine and see things from a different perspective.
  3. Be creative: Working to find inspiration online, being creative on your own can also open up your thinking to new possibilities. It is said that problems often get solved only when you stop thinking about them. Doing something creative that is out of the ordinary will force your mind to concentrate on something new. Try something new, or revisit a hobby that you haven’t done in a while; anything that breaks the cycle that you may have fallen into.
  4. Map out your thoughts: Sometimes what is stopping you from figuring out the solution is the sheer amount of information that the problem has. To combat that, there is a process called mind mapping. The idea is that you take a large issue and break it down into smaller, more manageable, chunks. Then, you take those chunks and break them down even further. With that completed, all the action items or individual issues can be identified and addressed easily. Give it a try. Canva has a really useful, free mind map creator.

Which of these ideas appeals most to you? Give it a try and see what kinds of amazing things you could be opening yourself up to.

Trainers spend their days navigating systems for different practices and advising them on how to best use their practice management software. Not an easy job. Every practice has its way of doing things for its own specific reasons, and it’s the trainer’s job to implement, teach, and sometimes create best practices that will fit with each specific set of needs. Because of this, when you ask a trainer for a great power tip, they often can’t give you a simple answer. Frustrating. However, our amazing senior trainers pinpointed a tip that they like to give to every single office: “Change your treatment plan status”

By that, she means that it’s not good enough to simply label your treatment plans as planned or pending. You can do your practice a world of good by adopting AFRX method. 

A – Accepted: Schedule the patient immediately.

F – Future: The patient wants the treatment, but something is preventing them from being able to move forward immediately, so put a task in your to-do list to follow up with them on a specific date.

X – Rejected by patient: The patient doesn’t want the proposed treatment. If the treatment is important, gently follow up with them to encourage them to approve it before the issue gets worse.

R – Rejected by insurance: Follow up with the patient only if their insurance status changes.

Label your treatment plan status with these and you can save your treatment coordinator a huge amount of time since they will now automatically know which patients to follow up with first (accepted), and how to approach patients that fall into one of the other categories.

This small change can make a big difference, and those are the best changes to make! Try implementing this at your practice and let us know what you think!

Imagine a world where each patient’s insurance coverage appears before you like magic. Imagine having the correct invoice amount for every patient through automated EOB, every time. Imagine having everything ready for you in an instant!

You don’t have to imagine it… it can be yours! But first, a couple of definitions:

Explanation of Benefits (EOB) is the statement that is received from the insurance carrier with the correct amount of coverage for the patient

Coordination of Benefits (COB) is the ability to prioritize multiple insurance carriers for a patient calculate the amount of coverage from each carrier in sequence and find the total covered amount.

ClearDent has fully integrated EOB and COB into our software so that everything is completed for you in the background. ClearDent’s electronic claim feature will automatically implement the Explanation of Benefits so the correct percentage of coverage is reflected on each patient’s invoice without any need for manual recording, hence automated EOB. If the patient has coverage from multiple insurance carriers, ClearDent’s electronic Coordination of Benefits (COB) will automatically forward the EOB from the primary insurance to the secondary insurance for completely accurate coverage information, and then implement that information into the patient’s invoice. Everything happens automatically, instantly*, and correctly.

Why is this so important? By automating this process, your front desk and patients will enjoy big benefits. First, the time needed to prepare an invoice will be drastically reduced. Accordingly, this will allow you to process more patients and greatly reduce wait times. Second, the accuracy of the statement will be vastly improved. With no human interaction or estimation, the invoice will be filled in with correct information without any risk of typos, or missteps. You will never have to attempt to collect more money from an incorrectly billed patient again!

Click here to learn more about ClearDent’s practice management software including our Explanation of Benefits (EOB) Coordination of Benefits (COB) and more.

* Performance based on support of real-time adjudication by insurance carriers 

These days, the amount of dental paperwork needed to successfully run a practice is astounding. For decades, dental offices have been collecting information on every patient, printing it, filing it, and storing it in massive filing cabinets. It’s time to put your practice on a diet. Stop feeding it all these papers, and put it on a strict diet of technology. You’ll be amazed how much faster you can perform. 

You can slim down your practice. You have options!

How to eliminate dental paperwork by feeding your filing cabinets

Kiosk, by ClearDent, is a mobile web app for iPad, Android, and Windows that allows you to complete your check-in procedures, update medical information, sign documents, and inform you of insurance coverage changes via notifications in ClearDent, all using tablets. From there, new and updated data provided by the patient, including his/her family, is automatically updated in your ClearDent system, and available to you immediately, skipping any dental paperwork. Neat, huh?

Hey everyone. Come see how good I look.

Once you’ve shed the weight of filing cabinets, your practice will have new options – so much extra room. Clean and modern looking. On top of a little interior design, outfitting your practice with some technology will go a long way! After all, patients want to know that they are receiving the best possible treatments. And often, the clean look made possible by modern tech throughout the practice will give them that perception and confidence. At the end of the day, everyone knows the right technology streamlines the workflow and will help deliver better services and experience.

Be more efficient. Look more stylish. Give you and your patients a new and amazing experience.

For decades, the norm in dentistry has been calling patients with appointments and recall reminders. But is that the most efficient way of doing things?

No, it isn’t.

Communication has become faster and more personal with the advent of smartphones. As such, the way businesses need to communicate must adapt as well.

Where newspapers, mail and phone calls used to be the norm for communication, Twitter, email and text messaging have now all but taken their place. For many, the phone app is becoming the least important app on their device. Instead, a click-to-confirm message from your dental practice via email or text message allows your patients to communicate with you using the medium that they are most comfortable with, as compared to calling patients.

Is phoning still effective? Not really…

The caveat here is that if you manage to get someone on the phone, at a time that is convenient for them, when they have the ability to take note of what you’re saying, yes… phoning can be effective. However, the vast majority of calls don’t manage to meet those criteria. In fact, most will go unanswered.

Using an email or text messaging system of communication allows your patients to check and record the reminder at the best time for them, whether that’s immediately, or later that day. On top of that, phone confirmations can not be scaled unless you commit more time and more people. Email and text communications, on the other hand, are instant and completely scalable.

This is how ClearConnect can greatly benefit your practice immediately. With a few clicks of a button, you can quickly see a list of patients with unscheduled recalls or treatments, and send a message to them to get an affirmative response to fill vacancies much more effectively.

Combine this powerful ability with a revolutionary system like ClearMessaging, which has the ability to chat with single patients or groups of patients via text messages from within ClearDent, and your communication efficiency and effectiveness will skyrocket.