When you think of what the typical waiting room in a dental office looks like, what do you think of? Is it a reflection of what your practice looks like?
Dental practices are looking for ways to make their offices comfortable places that their patients aren’t anxious about visiting. Brushing up on your patient engagement strategies is an easy way you can keep your patients at your practice and get new ones through the door.
One of the easiest ways of doing this is to put in place dental patient engagement systems. You can then use various features that are usually built into patient engagement systems to better connect with your patients. You can even use such patient engagement systems to execute any new engagement strategies, ideas, or tactics that you may have.
What are patient engagement systems?
A lot of work goes into creating a lasting relationship with your patients. After all, the decisions we make about our healthcare providers are about more than just the services we receive.
Patients look for providers they can trust and feel comfortable with. That trust isn’t just built in your chair; it usually starts when your patient first steps into your waiting room. This is where the benefits of patient engagement in healthcare truly become apparent.
A patient engagement system is a collection of tools that your practice can use to communicate and interact with patients. It’s not just marketing, either. These tools can help you cultivate the right atmosphere for your practice so that patients feel a little more at ease in your office.
The right patient engagement system should offer many opportunities for your patients to interact with your office, including things like streamed entertainment, informative digital displays and anxiety-reducing music playlists. These great features can transform your practice from one that feels stark and cold to one that's friendly and inviting.
Top 3 dental patient engagement benefits
Patient engagement in healthcare improves overall satisfaction
If you can believe it, patient satisfaction can be improved in the waiting room, provided you have the right patient engagement programs in place.
Research has shown that long wait times can lead to lower satisfaction rates among patients, which ultimately impacts a patient's decision to return for another visit. Wait times are inevitable, though, so you can find ways to make them more pleasant and keep patients focused on something other than the clock.
Digital displays make it easy to redirect patients’ attention and create an experience for them, especially those anxiously waiting to get their visit over with.
According to statistics about patient satisfaction and anxiety, roughly 36% of adults experience anxiety when visiting the dentist’s office. Another 12% experience extreme fear, sometimes referred to as “dentophobia.” These numbers shouldn’t be ignored, as together it accounts for nearly half of all your patients.
Reducing patient anxiety is an easy way to make your waiting room experience more pleasant, ultimately increasing patient satisfaction. More and more, practices are using engagement software to help patients feel calm in otherwise stressful situations.
An engaged patient doesn't miss appointments
Experiencing the pain of no-shows? Your practice can help reduce missed appointments by upgrading its patient engagement strategy.
The general recommendation for most patients is that they see their dentist on a biannual basis, though this number can vary. Reminding your patients about their next visit with a postcard or flier may have worked before, but in the digital age, engagement in healthcare needs to be paperless to have the proper impact.
You can help patients make their next appointment or remember to schedule a follow-up with digital reminders. By attaching a QR code to your next mailer or displaying it on screens in your office, you can prompt patients with digital links to sign up for reminder tests, sign up for email notifications or add appointments right to their phones’ calendars.
This is an easy way to ensure patients show up on time for their next appointment while staying top-of-mind with them.
Patient engagement systems can be used to educate patients
Preventative care is the best way to stay healthy; when it comes to dental hygiene, Americans are struggling with ways to keep up.
More than 50% of American patients are concerned with their oral health, making it a leading concern in most households. While a lack of access to healthcare plays a role in this, dentists can help patients take their health back into their hands by increasing patient education efforts.
Use your digital displays to share hygiene tips with patients. You can inform them how often they should brush and floss, how to schedule appointments with hygienists and foods or beverages to avoid to prevent cavities.
With digital displays, rather than a lecture post-examination, you can turn patient education into a fun game of trivia or use cheerful displays to make the advice a little more friendly. This is sure to build better healthcare experiences.
How UPshow can be the perfect dental patient engagement system
Engage patients with the right digital signage
Your patient engagement system should be intuitive for anyone at the office to use. Luckily, UPshow is simple! Soon, you’ll be engaging your patients with new, fresh displays.
UPshow comes equipped with in-app Canva integration, the content creation tool that so many have come to know and love. You’ll be able to display content rich with royalty-free images, videos and animations to keep your displays engaging and elegant. Best of all, you get to work with hundreds of premade templates. This takes the hard work out of creating the right atmosphere in your practice.
UPshow makes it easy to create content schedules, too, so patients aren’t bombarded with one form of content or another. You can rotate between anxiety-reducing displays and educational ones without having to manually switch them. Plus, multi-panel features allow you to share multiple screens all at once, so no need to pick and choose!
Encourage patient interaction with UPshow Connect
Marketing in healthcare can sometimes seem a lot less exciting than marketing in other industries, but it doesn’t have to!
UPshow Connect makes it easy for dental practices to elevate patient engagement strategies in healthcare and create a robust campaign that’s fully integrated into one solution. You can display QR codes on screens for appointment reminders or helpful links, and we’ll track how patients are engaging with them!
We make it easy to create print campaigns equipped with the power of QR code technology, too. Smart Paper, a feature of UPshow Connect, can help you turn your in-house displays into the mailers that your patients have come to love. The QR codes they feature are fully trackable, too!
Track engagement metrics easily
Sometimes engagement strategies can feel like talking into the void. With limited or complicated data staring back at you, it’s hard to tell if the efforts you made were worth it.
Luckily, UPshow’s insights and analytics make it easy for your team to see exactly how effective campaigns are and what resources are being used for. You’ll know in an instant which QR codes are being scanned and what elements of your campaign are most effective at getting your patients to engage with content.
We want you to make smart decisions about your on-premise content so you can keep your patients—and profit margins—happy and healthy.
Explore the benefits of having UPshow as your dental patient engagement system
If you’re looking for an easy way to elevate your patient engagement strategies, look no further than UPshow!
UPshow makes it easy for your practice to manage all aspects of its patient engagement strategies from one intuitive platform. With in-app content creation and robust analytics, you’ll know which of your marketing efforts are landing and which need to be changed. Ready to make your waiting room more exciting? Try a risk-free demo today!
