Imagine you just bought a new car. One of the first things you will do is set up the seat to fit you in the most comfortable way. Next, you may set up the radio stations to all your favorite music and talk radio. You will save your insurance card in the glove box and stash an ice scraper in the trunk. You might add a bumper sticker.

In each of these ways, you are customizing your car to work the best for you. Do you do the same with the software in your dental office?

Dental practice management software

Let's start with your Dentrix or Eaglesoft program. Of course, you will add your providers, but how much customizing do you set up after that? Many offices just leave the standard defaults in place and never change a thing. Instead, once you recognize all the options you can customize, you can make the most of the dental practice management software.

Here are just a few of the items you can customize:

  • Your schedule: Get creative and set up as many pages as you like, and use the block scheduling to make it more visual.
  • Billing types: Consider the types of patient accounts you will have in your practice and set them up, such as fee-for-service and out-of-network patients, collections, a billing type for each PPO you join, etc.
  • Letters: Think about the types of communication you need for your patients. You can even use the default letters to identify the types, but then customize the ones you will actually use — and train your team to select the correct ones. You can also rename the default letters so they have an "X" in front of their names and therefore, are pushed to the end of the list.
  • Statement notes: Again, customize these to your language style .
  • Clinical notes: You can create your own clinical notes to prompt certain questions and then autofill the info you need based on the products and techniques you use
  • Continuing care: Do you just use the prophy default? You can set up as many continuing care types as you can think up and then create the custom communication to match.
  • Referral sources: When you invest in a radio ad or another special marketing program, set it up as a referral source so the software can automatically track the success based on the patients who discovered your practice in this manner.

Online communication software

Whether you use Demandforce or Lighthouse or another online communication software, you can customize it to fit your style of practice and your beliefs about when patients should be contacted. In fact, the more you consider that this is simply a communication tool, the more you can make the most of this product.

You can start by thinking about what you want your patients to know rather than how the software comes out of the box. Here are some of the items you can customize in an online communication software:

  • Timelines: You decide when you want your patients to receive active and inactive messages from your office.
  • Content: Just like the letters from your dental practice management software, you can write exactly what you want your patients to hear. And this time, you can link to YouTube videos or insert audio files or other multimedia resources.
  • Campaigns: You can send any message you want to patients using an email newsletter, so you can continue working to reactivate patients with last visits over 18 months, two years or any other time frame you have in mind. This part of the software also allows you to create your own reasons to contact patients, whether it's a "use the remainder of your insurance" message or a whitening promotion.

As the dental office manager, you can help your dentist by understanding what options are available to customize your software to your style of practice. This will benefit the office by saving you time communicating with your patients.

If you find yourself saying the same thing over and over to patients, think about how this can be communicated more effectively. Custom letters will support your efforts to educate your patients, and help you to clarify the guidelines of how your office runs. Time invested in the customization returns in saved time later and more options for how patients want to access the info.

So, get started today. How about starting with a new patient welcome letter? What would you like your new patients to know about your practice? You can google all types of letters to adapt the best phrasing and ideas into your letters. Then, once you settle on a letter you are happy with, copy this content into your online communication software and paste it into the automated welcome letter there.

Now you're beginning to develop consistency across all your communication methods. The more you understand your software and customize it to your practice, you are making the most of these programs for which you pay hundreds a month.