Many dental practices are in need of a solution to help meet increasing patient demands with fewer employees.
Angelina Hendricks is the chief technology officer at Planet DDS, a dental software company. She recently spoke with Becker's about how practices can best meet these demands.
Editor's note: This response was lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What is your biggest worry about the dental industry?
Angelina Hendricks: The dental industry faces the challenge of rapidly innovating to meet the increasing personalized experience demands of patients with less staff.
Patients are looking for more tailored experiences with short wait times, better understanding of costs and clear outcomes. With the difficulties of staffing, practices need to find ways to free up their people for personal interactions with patients. How does the industry move toward standard data exchange and automation for things like eligibility verification, claim adjudication and fee schedule updates?
Patients want flexibility even for last minute rescheduling or cancellation due to having to work an extra shift, dealing with childcare falling through or unexpected illness, while practices need to keep schedules full to afford the increasing staff salary expectations and the more sophisticated technology coming into the industry (3D vs 2D imaging, for example). Can more tailored patient communications and easy-to-use patient experience technology (two-way texting, online portals, for example) help?
Practices will need to be able to understand how their offices are running by analyzing their data so they can focus their time and staff on identifying and resolving problems early. This analysis needs to be easy to run and even easier to understand, because practices don't have data analysts on staff to spend all day crunching the numbers.
In the background, there are more regulations and penalties surrounding how personal information and especially healthcare-related information is handled, shared and protected. With the lack of a national standard for data privacy, there is an increasing variety of state laws that make it especially challenging for practices with locations in more than one state.
Facing all of these demands with limited staffing is going to call for creative solutions from all the participants in the industry, while practices will need to have a tech strategy in place to stay current and drive staff adoption for these new solutions.