I have been writing often about the internet and how it benefits the dental practice for some time now. I decided this go around that I wanted to get a dental professionals point of view rather than my own. I must tell you that I came across a goldmine of information on the ada.org website. It is a podcast interview with Dr. Keith Rossein who has been a dentist for over 25 years himself and now dedicates his time helping other dentists use the internet for their practice. The podcast can be found by clicking here. I recommend you download it and listen to it yourself to hear the great things he has to say.

I took some notes on some things he was talking about. I was fascinated on how similar his point of view is to ours. He specifically mentioned the importance of having forms online for the patient to fill out before he/she comes into the office. He also mentioned the importance of email ’s to keep in communication with patients because it’s much cheaper than any other form of communication. He mentioned enewsletters and how important they are in keeping good communication with the patient. And lastly, he mentioned patient education articles as an important internet tool for all dentists. I find it interesting how similar his recommendations are to the services we provide at patientdocs.com. Almost exactly the same. For more information about PatientDocs.com services click here to go to the services page.

WebDentalMarketing.com is a company that helps dental offices with online marketing through websites and eNewsletters. I came across their website by browsing around the ADA website. If you go to their website and read the homepage you will read an interesting statistic that they reference. It’s a statistic from the Dental Products Report, January 3, 2001. It states that “80% of patients with Internet access would like to communicate by e-mail  with their health professionals.” Wow! What a powerful statistic. And what makes this statistic even stronger is the fact that it was generated over 6 years ago. You could only imagine what the current percentage is of patients who prefer e-mail communication with their health professionals.

What does this mean for the dental industry? It basically means that e-mail communication systems  are vital for the dental industry and must be a part of every practice in order for a dental practice to continue to succeed. This is how patients want to be communicated with. This is how they want to be treated. And if you don’t treat them how they want to be treated, they simply leave you for another dentist.

Make sure you have automatic email systems in place for your practice. These systems should be easy for your office manager to manage. They should also be setup for automatic appointment reminders, as well as teeth cleaning reminders and so forth. If you don’t have these systems in place, go to www.patientdocs.com and they will set you up.

One of the leading vendors in Dental Practice Management Software is EasyDental owned by Henry Schein, inc. They have the EasyDental software for the practice as well as many other tools for practice management. One of their “eServices” is called WebReady where it appears that they offer services for building websites and web tools for dentist offices. On their WebReady services page they list some of the features and benefits to their WebReady service.

On this same page they cited some very interesting statistics from a man named Dr. Larry Emmott, who claims to be a leading expert in how technology benefits the dental industry. On this services page Dr. Emmott shows how a dental practice website is a lucrative venture. He says that “if your practice averages 4,000 patients, and a website increases your practice growth by just 5 percent, you would add 200 new patients each year.” That makes for some pretty interesting statistics. He then says, “If these additional patients average $300 per chair-time visit, you can potentially increase revenue growth by an average of $60,000 per year“. On top of this Dr. Emmott claims that a practice will save/increase $30,500 per year from Web Communication tools.

If you add up all these numbers you will find that Dr. Emmott’s claims are that through websites and web services, a dental practice can increase it’s yearly revenue growth by $90,500! A further breakdown of these numbers can be found here and also here. If these claims are even remotely true, then the importance of getting a website and web tools for your dental practice are obvious.

I came across an interesting blog article today on lauralake.com about online marketing and dentists. She highlighted some interesting points about online marketing vs. yellow page advertisements. Her input and point of view is very interesting. Here is what she said…

“Dentist use to spend most of their marketing budget in yellow pages advertisements. A large percentage of them are now allocating a certain percentage to online advertising.

Recently I was in need of a dentist in the Overland Park area, so I began my search. Of course I used the search engines, I refuse to crack open the yellow pages. Truthfully yellow page phone books seem archaic to me. I realize that some people still use them, but I believe that percentage shrinks everyday. After all the yellow-pages are published once a year - how up to date can they be?

After a quick search I found a dentist in the area - that catered to those that have a fear of the dentist and want the “perfect smile.” While I wouldn’t say their website was the most aesthetic pleasing it was informative and gave me enough information to book my appointment.

Long story short, if you are a dentist and you are not advertising online, I wonder how many of your potential patients are going elsewhere. Perhaps it’s time to consider placing some of your budget in online advertising. Consider this over 4000 search queries are preformed for dentist every 90 days - that’s a lot of potential patients..”

The reason why this information is so valuable is because it comes from a Patient Perspective rather than someone who’s actually in the dental industry. This woman searched for a dentist in a search engine and found a dentist in her area, and actually booked an appointment with that dentist. She gave an interesting stat that 4000 search queries are done on search engines for dentists every 90 days. I wonder where she is pulling that information from? Even if it’s a close estimate, that is a lot of queries. Something that every dentist office should capitalize on.  To read more of this article and comments about the article click here.

There is a way to add profitability without even having to add any new patients. That’s called taking advantage of your existing customer base. In an article written by Melinda Spitek of Hycomb Marketing in the blog site blog.wealthydentist.com, Melinda talks about marketing to your existing customer base and how important it is. She references to the part of California where she lives as “whine country” where less than 10% of the population purchases more than 80% of all the wine! She applies that to the Dental Industry and teaches us that it’s no different. Your existing customer base is critical. She gives five basic components of a successful internal marketing strategy to your existing customer base;

• Information value (keeping your patients up-to-date on what you offer),
• Educational value (teaching your patients about important health issues),
• Repetition value (reminding your patients that you are their dentist and that they might be past due for recare),
• Consistency, and
• Consistency.

I must say that is great advice worth paying for! Every dentist office should know and understand what Melinda Spitek is teaching us here. She then goes on to explain why a regular newsletter to your entire patient base is a good strategy and how it provides the following;

• Information and educational value,
• Repeated name recognition,
• A tangible link to your practice,
• Flexibility of involvement (your office can be closely tied to development of the materials, or not involved at all), and
• Cost-effective promotion to high-value current patients.

All this can be done through the PatientDocs.com Med eMail service. You can create a newsletter in our back office and mass mail it to all your existing customer base. You can send education pieces to them. You could send coupon’s or notify them of specials. If a tool like Med eMail can help you get more business from your existing customer base then this is a tool that you must have. It makes perfect sense.

Exceptional Dental Practice Management is a blog that we recommend to you if you are involved in the dental industry written by Linda Zdanowicz. She wrote an article in May of this year titled Keep The Customer Service Ball Rolling where she highlighted the importance of great customer service in the dentist office and how important it is to maintain it. Here is a small excerpt of what she said;

“Keeping customer service first and foremost in the minds of your staff reinforces the importance of top quality service to our patients. If they see that you mean it, day in and day out, it will become something they see as a normal part of what they do. Constantly recognize outstanding service and new ideas. What gets recognized gets repeated. If you hear a staff member say something especially kind or insightful to a patient, write it on the white board, in quotes with credit to the staff member. Have a part of your regular staff meetings dedicated to recognizing outstanding service that took place since the last staff meeting. Let the team members talk about what they saw each other doing that impressed them. Recognition by peers is particularly gratifying. Keep the customer service ball rolling and your entire practice will pick up speed. Just becoming great at customer service doesn’t guarantee that you’ll stay great. You have to continue to focus and work on it.”

In a perfect world this would be easy for a dental office to achieve. However, maintaining high levels of customer service also involves maintaining high levels of communication. And that part of it can become quite expensive over time. You will find that if you can use an automatic email service that can send appointment reminders and appointment confirmation emails, as well as birthday cards via email, that your communication levels will increase with your patients and therefore your level of customer service will increase as well.  And you will be able to maintain this level day in and day out.

It all starts with the fact that I have a simple but fairly weird name, but still, you wouldn’t think that the name Parl could create such a stir in the land of insurance claims.  I vaguely remember filling out all the paperwork and I don’t recall my handwriting being to terribly horrible, but I do tend to be a fairly biased individual.  After all the medical procedures were taken care of, I went home thinking all would be well.

 After a couple of weeks, I received a letter from our insurance provider.  It was very amusing.  It opened with “Dear Pearl.”  Right off I knew I was in for a treat on this deal.  The letter proceeded to explain in a partially diplomatic way and in semi politically correct terms the fact that they would unfortunately not be able to cover any of my claims.  I was a bit taken back at first, until I began to read the reasons why.

 ”We are unfortunatly unable to cover any of your claims due to your homosexual relationship which is illegal in the state of Utah.”

It was classic.  People have butchered my name before, but never sacrificed it before the great gender gods.  Needless to say, we were able to work it all out, but not until we spent quite a few hours on the phone with the Insurance Provider and the office manager at the doctor’s practice.  I know she had to resubmit forms and spent a great deal of time on the whole issue as well.

Turns out that whoever processed my form figured that no one could possibly have a name like Parl so they changed it to Pearl and of course there is no way that a Pearl could be a male either so they changed my gender as well.  Its all humurous now, but it was pretty amazing how such a few minor things on my patient forms and they’re improper interpretation cost so much time and energy.  Alas, I still haven’t taken the time to go get my name changed to something a bit simpler…. Al perhaps.  My fear would be that the state would mistake it for Allison.

We have yet another interesting statistic that is important for the dental industry. The same study that we have been pulling stats from recently come from the February-March 2007 survey held by Pew Internet Stats. You can learn more about these surveys by going to www.pewinternet.org. This site is a terrific internet resource and we highly recommend it for any of your internet studies. This survey states that 71% of all American adults actively use the internet. The interesting fact that they released that we are highlighting today is how many of those users look for health and medical info online.

According to the survey, 80% of all American internet users claim to use the internet to help find health and medical information. Most people who we have shared this stat with have been very surprised by how high the percentage is. Websites such as “WebMD” have become valuable resources for almost every home in America.

What in the world does this have to do with Dentistry you might ask? Let’s analyze it for just a bit. These internet users are apparently looking for health information with respected and legitimate sources. Websites like “WebMD” are filled with articles written by proffessionals to help give the correct info to the readers. This is a perfect opportunity for a Dental Office! Think about it!

What if every dental office in the United States had a website, and on that website there was a patient education portal. This “portal” could provide article upon article, link upon link, and resource upon resource to help educate patients of a particular Dentist. It’s genius! Now, you educate your patients and give them what they are looking for. It’s a great combination. So in case you are wondering, a patient education portal is one of the tools that PatientDocs.com provides to it’s customers. We will build a website for a Dental Practice, and on that website is a Patient Education section for all their articles and resources.

It’s important for Dentist Offices to have a map and directions to their office on their website. By doing so, you make it easy for your potential new patients to find you. This of course leads to new business for your practice, and increasing profits and revenue. It is very common of internet users to search for a map or driving directions while using the internet. According to the February 2007 survey held by Pew Internet Stats, 86% of all American adult internet users search for a map or driving directions on the internet.

Remember that this is the same survey that stated 71% of all American adults use the internet in general. The fact that 86% of that 71% searches for directions or for a map shows us that it is a critical practice to have a map on your website to your dentist office. Not doing so could result in huge potential annual losses. So if you work in a Dentist office, are a Dentist, or communicate often with a Dentist or Dentist office, this effects you. Make sure every your Dentist office has a map on your website. And of course, if you don’t yet have a website we suggest you get one.