To learn how dental leaders transformed their practices in 2020 and to understand their outlook for the future, Becker’s Dental + DSO Review in conjunction with Rectangle Health hosted a webinar with a panel of dental leaders including:
- Brian Doyle, Vice President, Enterprise Sales, Rectangle Health
- Ken Kaufman, CFO, Community Dental Partners in Denton, Texas
- Barbara Krug, Practice Administrator, Webb Orthodontics in Charlotte, N.C.
- Norton Travis, CEO, ProHealth Dental Management, LLC, in New Hyde Park, N.Y.
- Lisa Morrison, Senior Director, Revenue Cycle Management, Sage Dental in Boca Raton, Fla.
Five key takeaways:
1. Leading dental practices saw the pandemic as transformational. Practices moved quickly to stay open for emergency procedures and ensure patients their office and clinical environment was safe. Practices transformed themselves by offering teledentistry and virtual consults. Practices also adopted technology to go fully contactless, which meant emailing digital registration information and enabling patients to pay via text. “We realized COVID was going to be the great accelerator,” Mr. Kaufman said. He said initiatives previously thought to take years were implemented in weeks. “Everybody’s been innovating like crazy.”
2. Dental practices acted to improve safety, the patient experience and efficiency. Community Dental Partners created a new position of health and safety advocate. This person would meet patients at the door, screen them and clean everything. Webb Orthodontics began conducting virtual exams and initiated a Zoom link so parents could be with their children virtually during orthodontics appointments. ProHealth Dental Management continued to partner with healthcare providers and expanded its services to include measuring blood pressure, taking electrocardiograms and providing other health services. From Mr. Doyle’s perspective, the most significant action he saw dental practices take was “digitizing everything.”
3. These actions have produced multiple benefits. Practices have created an even safer environment, increased appreciation among patients and strengthened their cultures. “This gave us the opportunity to reinforce our mission in terms of looking at oral health as an important healthcare discipline and helped build the culture within the organization,” Mr. Travis said. Actions to improve patient satisfaction have benefitted the bottom line. “There is a direct correlation between patients’ satisfaction with their registration, with their payment experience and the revenue to the provider,” Mr. Doyle said.
4. Patients like contactless technology. Panelists said the pandemic underscored that patients like virtual consults, Ms. Krug said, and, “Our patients were hungry for a touchless system of online bill payment and text to pay,” Ms. Morrison said. Patients’ preference for these technologies led Mr. Doyle to say, “The biggest lesson we saw is that the adoption rate of technology absolutely surged.”
5. As things return to “normal,” many changes will remain in place. The panelists see a continued emphasis on safety, on partnering and integrating with other healthcare providers and on adopting and using various digital technologies for clinical applications — like teledentistry and virtual consults — and for operational and financial purposes, like contactless payments.
To view this webinar, click here.