Automation holds great potential for dental practices, which some perceive as lagging behind the broader medical field in terms of technology adoption.
During a February webinar hosted by Becker's Dental Review and sponsored by Rectangle Health, leaders and executives from five dental service organizations (DSOs) discussed how automation is ushering dentistry into the league of modern, customer-centric industries. Panelists were:
- Brian Doyle, VP of Enterprise, Rectangle Health
- Bradley Dykstra, DDS, Chief Executive Officer, MI Smiles Dental Group
- Bob Eisen, Senior VP and Chief Human Resources Officer, Western Dental and Orthodontics
- Teresa Williams, Chief Operating Officer, Dental Express
- Kai Zhao, Chief Operating Officer, ProHEALTH Dental Management
Four key takeaways were:
- Pandemic-related factors along with pre-COVID challenges have highlighted workplace inefficiencies. As people got accustomed to remote work and reassessed their professional lives, the need for automation that can offload mundane tasks became obvious. Two automation examples that address both staffing and patient engagement hurdles are filling out new patient paperwork and setting appointments online, which frees staff to spend more time engaging with patients instead of administering forms.
"If someone comes into your office and they need a process to be analog, be prepared with a few sheets of paper — but you don't need to build your whole practice around that one patient that struggles," Ms. Williams said. Mr. Doyle added: "In return, the provider can reallocate FTE hours to do what they should be doing anyway, which is patient care — not billing, not sending statements, none of these antiquated things." - Automating administrative workflows is a path to digitalizing the patient experience. To put the dental patient experience on par with user experiences in other industries, dental leaders are aiming to automate their practices' workflows. They are looking at all steps in the patient journey — from initial information intake to insurance verification to post-visit instructions — as opportunities. "The promise is that it's going to help increase our productivity, but more importantly, make us a preferred provider for patients," Mr. Zhao said.
- Automation technology must solve a problem that users recognize exists. For DSO leaders, that means ensuring the technology is mutually beneficial to dental practitioners, RCM data analysts and other team members. It is also important to screen technology vendors through informal networking and by learning what solutions the best organizations have adopted and that have worked for them. "It's listening to people who have gone before me and listening to my team," Dr. Dykstra said. Mr. Zhao noted that it is also worth paying attention to what technologies are working in medicine that could transfer to the dental space.
As an example, Mr. Eisen shared that Western Dental is implementing an innovative staff engagement technology platform that will enable a more efficient flow of information, training and feedback to and from staff, as well as stratification of that feedback by job function, geography and team leader. He said his organization aims to improve employee engagement by "stratifying free text comments and numerical Likert scale responses and putting that into action plans and follow-up." - Ongoing consolidation in the dental space requires technology vendor consolidation. As merging organizations typically operate multiple EHR, RCM and other information and communication systems, back-end vendor consolidation becomes a must if the goal is a uniform patient and staff experience across sites and platforms. To choose an optimal vendor, Mr. Doyle suggested DSO leaders lean on those who understand the healthcare and dental markets and have capabilities to scale.
"There are a lot of good vendors out there, so make sure [the one you choose] can become more of a partner than just a payment or an engagement vendor; you should have a good rapport with them and they should be able to customize solutions," Mr. Doyle said.
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