Accord Dental felt they were spending too much time on the phone and not effectively reaching their patients. They decided to automate appointment reminders and recall messages and saw a huge increase in the number of appointments scheduled.
Accord Dental Rise in Recall
Summary
Accord Dental, located in Denver, Colorado, offers preventative, general, and cosmetic dental care. The team of doctors and staff are dedicated to providing patients with the highest quality of care, and use only state-of-the-art equipment and technology. The practice wanted to cut down the amount of time spent on the phone each day, so they decided to implement Solutionreach to automate much of their patient communication.
Case Study
The front office staff at Accord Dental used to spend hours on the phone reminding patients of upcoming appointments. Sonja McMuray, the practice’s office manager, saw their efforts weren’t effective and was looking for a solution to automate those reminders.
“We’d still get no-shows, even after we’d invested so much time reminding everyone of their appointments,” Sonja says. “It was amazing to have Solutionreach as an option. It makes our lives so much easier.”
Sonja set up the automated appointment reminders so they are sent when a patient makes an appointment, then again one month, one week, and one day before the scheduled appointment.
“I think we’ve hit the sweet spot,” explains Sonja. “Our patients love the text reminders and they always ask if we’re going to text them. We can tell them, ‘Absolutely!’ because we know Solutionreach will do it for us.”
The practice quickly saw the impact automated reminders made to their bottom line. Their no-show rate decreased and they no longer had to buy postcards and stamps to send appointment reminders.
“Not only were we able to save a ton of money for the practice, we really cut down on staff time too,” states Sonja. “Solutionreach easily saves us two hours a day, and we’re saving thousands of dollars by not sending out those reminder cards. It’s astronomical!”
Accord Dental doesn’t just automate reminders for scheduled appointments; they also use automated messages to let patients know it’s time to be seen again.
“We don’t have to go through a list and start calling patients,” Sonja says. “People don’t like to be bothered with phone calls. A quick text reminder is all they really want.”
The automated recall messages have saved time for the practice and they are more effective than phone calls. Sonja has seen a jump in the number of recall appointments scheduled since implementing Solutionreach.
“I can tell when the recall messages are sent because we get several phone calls that day,” Sonja states. “We easily get 50 percent more responses from patients than when we would call them.”
Sonja makes sure the time the staff saves each week has been put to good use. “We’re a busy practice,” Sonja explains. “Since we aren’t on the phone as much we can have that one-on-one time with the patients who are in the office.
PATIENT SURVEYS
Sonja and her team also take advantage of the post-appointment surveys sent through Solutionreach.
“We love the surveys,” says Sonja. “It lets us know where we’re doing well or coming up short. We always want to know where we can improve, and surveys give us that opportunity.”
Sonja wants the patients to know their voice is heard, so she and her team make sure they respond to every survey.
“We want to make sure our patients know we care about how they feel about the service we provided them,” explains Sonja. “We reply to every response that wasn’t left anonymously, even the positive ones. It’s a way for us to let our patients know it goes both ways; we appreciate them as much as they appreciate us.”
For Accord Dental, Solutionreach has been worth the investment. “Everything about Solutionreach just makes sense,” Sonja says. “You save time, you save money, and your patients appreciate it. All around it’s a win-win.
