Online patient registration can improve the patient experience, increase practice efficiency, and reduce the management burden on your staff.
Here’s how:
Improving the patient experience
Most patients are provided a clipboard stacked with paperwork when they walk into the average dental office. Filling out all of that paperwork right before the appointment progress the amount of time spent at the office, and the amount of time devoted to their dental appointment in an already busy day.
With online patient registration, your patients receive a link in an appointment confirmation email stating them to a secure online form they can complete at home, at their convenience. The information they provide demographics, health history, and insurance which is then transmitted to the new patient record in your practice management software automatically when they submit the form.
It would be natural, with everything going on, to return to what you were doing for marketing before the pandemic; running the same internal initiatives and resuming whatever external efforts you had in place. Will this work? While we don’t know for sure, considering patients may be hesitant to return to care quickly, the possibility of a resurgence of the virus, and the fact that dental practices will be competing for patients – signals a change to your approach may be in order.
When the patient reaches the office for their appointment, they can go straight to the operatory once they’ve checked in because you already have all of their information in the patient record saved. This means they can be on their way much more quickly than when they had to spend 20 minutes at the beginning of each appointment filling out paper forms in your waiting area.
Increasing practice efficiency and reducing the administrative burden
If your patients submit an online registration form ahead of time, you’ve taken a task off of the front desk’s plate, comforting your team to do other important things like help a patient schedule a follow-up appointment before they exit.
What’s more important is, electronic forms can reduce data entry errors related to transcription. Anyone who has worked the front desk knows that patient handwriting can be difficult to read at times, and even the best employees reading perfectly legible handwriting can make the occasional typo when entering information from paper forms into your dental practice management software.
Electronic forms don’t eliminate data entry errors completely; they're still recording inputs from humans, and no one is perfect, but they can certainly help reduce the potential for error.
The benefits are clear, but not all dental practice management software is created equal. Most dental practices in the U.S. are still running on outdated software, which doesn’t allow for online patient-facing features like patient registration. Some creative practices have managed to build a workaround using custom-built online cloud forms, but those typically require manual upload into the practice management software, which doesn’t go all the way in reducing the administrative burden on staff as well.
To conclude the most important need of the moment for any business is to maximum convert the process online.
CareStack Enterprise™ is an all-in-one cloud-based dental practice management software for growing multi-location practices, DSOs, and solo practices. At CareStack, we work with dentists around the country to help them increase their new patient appointments and overall patient satisfaction as they invest in dental scheduling software for their practices. With a number of features, CareStack helps dentists to manage their daily appointments, anytime, anywhere
Book a demo with CareStack to integrate the amazing features within your practice website and experience for yourself the rapid increase in your appointment volume and practice profitability.
