Scheduling each of your pediatric patients often has the challenges of scheduling 2 people at once—parent/guardian and child. Adults are busy and trying to remember to bring their kids to the appointment, while kids are very busy themselves, with school, sports, and other afterschool activities. A software platform that can help automate many of the repetitive tasks of patient outreach, while syncing seamlessly with your practice management software, can save your staff valuable hours per week during a busy time of the year for everyone.
Amy Trappler is the office manager at Colmar Dentistry for Kids in Colmar, PA. Some of the biggest challenges her office faces are last-minute cancellations, no-shows, and patients forgetting to schedule follow-up appointments. Trappler wanted to solve these problems, increasing her staff’s production and reducing phone time. In Lighthouse 360 patient communication software, she found a solution that was designed specifically to save time, prevent holes in the schedule, and increase revenue.
Here are 3 easy-to-use aspects of Lighthouse 360 that are especially important to Trappler and her staff:
1. Automation of Manual Tasks – So many of Lighthouse 360’s features increase the practice’s efficiency that it’s hard for Trappler to pick just one. But the fact that the system automates her most repetitive daily tasks saves her hours per week and helps her focus on issues that require a more personal touch. She particularly appreciates the automated appointment confirmation, recall reminders, reactivation outreach to dormant patients and Treatment Plan Reminders, which allow you to turn on reminder messaging for individual patients who need to return for specific procedures.
2. Email blasts and text message – When Trappler first started at Colmar Dentistry, she would call patients a day or two in advance to confirm their appointments. Now, through Lighthouse 360, she leverages emails and text messages to not only confirm appointments but also contact patients who are overdue. Trappler especially likes the two-way text messaging that gives her the ability to personally communicate with patients on an individual basis via text through the Lighthouse portal. She can even send birthday greetings (automatically), further improving the practice-patient relationship. Her patients love these reminders and greetings as well.
3. Fill-In – This recent addition to the Lighthouse 360 platform detects last-minute cancellations in the schedule and helps find a patient to take the opening. Fill-In allows dentists to keep their chairs full, even when patients cancel last-minute, and saves staff from the last-minute scramble and disruption that cancellations can cause. Having the ability to quickly fill appointments can improve your bottom line by ensuring valuable chair time never goes to waste.
See Trappler’s full customer testimonial in the video below.
Lighthouse 360’s easy-to-use automation features free up the staff’s time, so they can dedicate their full attention to the patients they care for. Building better relationships can lead to better patient reviews, and Lighthouse 360 offers several tools to facilitate your practice’s collection of these reviews. Learn more at www.lh360.com