How You Can Improve the Patient Experience in Your Dental Practice
It’s no secret that lots of people would rather not go to the dentist if they didn’t have to. Some of this reluctance can be attributed to nervousness or the fact that most people have limited time plus plenty of other things they’d rather be doing.
However, in some instances, a previous bad dental patient experience can lead to a future fear of dentistry work.
Whether you’re helping patients with dentistry phobias or whether you’re looking for ways to provide an overall better dental experience that really puts a smile on your patient’s faces, we have some suggestions that can help. Read below to find out more.
Defining the Dental Patient Experience
It’s easy to think of the dental patient experience as what patients experience during their dentistry appointments. However, the true dental experience actually encompasses quite a lot.
The dental experience actually begins when potential new patients first discover your practice, and it includes everything from browsing your website to reading reviews from prior patients. Appointment scheduling is also part of the experience, as is the appointment itself. Lastly, the dental patient experience also includes any aftercare that may be necessary, like pain management and recovery in the wake of a procedure.
To improve the patient experience, you need to not only make patients as comfortable as possible, both physically and emotionally, but also leave them satisfied with the standard of care offered and the types of dentistry services that you can provide. Accessibility is crucial, too. It should be easy for patients to find your practice online, learn more about what you offer, and schedule appointments.
Strategies to Improve the Dental Experience
As you can see, there are many different components to the dental experience—and that means that there are many different strategies you can deploy to improve the dental experience. Let’s look at some of the best ways that you can improve experiences within your own dentistry practice.
1. Make it Easier to Schedule Appointments
Sometimes, the only way for patients to schedule appointments is to call the dentistry practice, leave a voicemail, and wait for the receptionist to return the call. For most would-be patients, this process can prove frustrating since work obligations and other responsibilities can make it difficult to find time to make calls or to make themselves available for return calls.
If your practice hasn’t already implemented online appointment scheduling, this should be at the top of your list of ways to improve the patient experience. It gives even the busiest patients plenty of time to make appointments whenever it is most convenient for them.
2. Offer Flexible Hours
According to the Oral Health Foundation, more than half of workers are not allowed to take paid time off for dentistry. It’s an unfortunate reality that keeps a great many from visiting the dentist simply because many dentists only offer appointments during regular business hours, which is when most people happen to be working.
This is also why offering more flexible hours can do a lot to improve the patient experience. If your practice can offer dentistry over the weekend and during evening hours, you can make life much easier for patients who are unable to break away from their 9-to-5 schedules.
3. Make the Environment as Comfortable and Welcoming as Possible
As a professional operating a private practice, you’ve probably already invested in creating a comfortable, welcoming waiting area—and this is a great first step since it can help nervous patients relax ahead of their appointments. However, there are a few more things that you can do to improve the patient experience even more.
- In waiting and recovery areas, favor soft lighting, which is more relaxing than harsh, bright lighting.
- Use calming color palettes and aromatherapy to help put anxious patients more at ease.
- Noise-canceling headphones paired with music or media of the patient’s choice can help drown out the nerve-wracking sounds of dental tools. For introverted patients, it also means they won’t feel pressured into small talk with their provider.
- Virtual reality tools have come a long way in recent years—and you can offer them to patients so that they can enjoy relaxing virtual experiences that distract them during their procedure.
4. Request Patient Feedback
Sometimes, the best way to improve the patient experience is to go straight to the source and ask them what you could be doing better. Pay attention to online reviews—and take any complaints or negative reviews seriously. You can also request feedback via surveys and suggestion boxes within emails.
As to acting on that feedback, it’s not necessary to make a change for every suggestion made. The best strategy is to watch for patterns. If you analyze comments and discover multiple people saying the same thing, it’s time to take action.
Similarly, surveys can give you numerical feedback in the form of scores. After collecting enough surveys, you can see which areas have the lowest scores and then work on ways to bring those scores up.
Listening to feedback to feedback does more than help you identify areas for improvement. When patients see that you’re making adjustments based on their suggestions, it also helps them understand that you’re actively listening to their concerns—and that is huge when it comes to building trust.
5. Create Personalized Patient Experiences
Personalized dental experiences are another way to build trust. Certain types of personalization also help to enhance comfort or make your services more convenient and accessible. Here are some examples:
- Use patient histories to track special needs and patient anxiety levels so that you can offer personalized care to make individuals more comfortable.
- Remember preferred communication methods—email, phone calls, or text messages—to make the patient interactions that happen outside the office easier.
- Send out personalized reminders for services. For example, if it’s been a while since a patient last came in for a hygenist appointment, send out a personalized reminder.
- You can also create a lot of goodwill through simple techniques like emailing well wishes on a patient’s birthday. Combine this technique with an exclusive discount on a particular service for the patient’s birthday month to not only build goodwill, but also to potentially generate extra revenue, too.
6. Expand Your Range of Services
Once people find providers that they like and trust, they prefer to do as much business as possible with that provider rather than looking to others for related services. You can improve dental patient experiences by expanding the services that your practice offers.
Here’s an example: Most dental practices offer a complete range of dental care services like cleanings, cavity filling, root canals, and more. However, not all dentists offer aesthetic services. If this sounds like your practice, you can expand into aesthetic techniques so that patients don’t have to visit a separate provider for these services.
7. Offer Educational Resources
Today’s patients are more informed than ever before—and that’s in large part because it’s easy to find information about various dental procedures online. However, it isn’t always easy to find accurate information from trusted sources.
That’s why you can improve the patient experience by providing your own educational resources. Create videos or online content that explains various procedures so that patients looking for information can easily find what they need to know from a provider that they trust.
This has the added advantage of positioning you as an authority when it comes to information on dental procedures. Potential new patients who are searching for dentists in their area are more likely to choose a dentist who offers comprehensive information on their website versus one who doesn’t.
8. Improve Follow-Up Care
Remember that the dental patient experience doesn’t end once they leave the dentist’s office. You’re already providing instructions and sometimes medications or tools to help patients recover as safely and comfortably as possible after significant dental procedures—and this is part of the dental experience, too.
However, there’s a little something extra that you can do to ensure the best follow-up care possible—and it’s something that not all dentists do. After a significant procedure, be sure to call, text, or email patients just to check in. Ask how they’re doing and if they have any questions or concerns.
Hopefully they’re recovering well. If not, then this gives the patient a chance to get whatever additional care may be needed. And if all is going well, this small step can still make a big difference by demonstrating to the patient that you truly care about their wellbeing, which will help you build a better patient-provider relationship.
AAOPM Can Help You Improve Dental Patient Experiences
Here at the American Academy of Procedural Medicine, we can help you improve dental patient experiences. Browse through our course catalog to discover certification programs that can help you enhance your skills, develop new skills, or expand the range of services that your dental practice offers. If you’d like to learn more about any of our courses, feel free to contact us with any questions.
