Spilling the Teath: The New Era of Patient Scheduling
What if you could transform the way you handle patient bookings? In this month's Spilling the Teeth, Dr. Ryan Hungate, DDS, MS, Chief Clinical Officer at Henry Schein One spoke with Jordan Miles, Senior Product Manager at Henry Schein One to debunk the myths surrounding online scheduling. Below, we’re sharing the top highlights from their conversation.
Dr. Ryan Hungate:
I think I saw a stat out there that 70+ percent of patients want online booking -- they demand it even. What's the adoption rate within a practice?
Jordan Miles:
I would say it's in the low teens. It depends on the segment that we're looking at. Private practice historically is much, much lower. When you have group practices, they’re typically higher on the adoption curve. We see anywhere from 10%, 11% in private practices, so super low.
Dr. Ryan Hungate:
I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second. I'm the front desk person, and if it's not broken, I don't need to fix it. We’ve got a full schedule; I'm booked out for three months right now. I think it's a control thing, right? If I'm the front desk team member how do I get over this? How do I give up maybe a little bit of control, or do I still have control?
Jordan Miles:
We've done a lot of research around this, and the consistent number one answer that we hear from people who aren't using online scheduling is that they're afraid to lose control. By far it is the number one reason that people are not using something today. And I think a lot of it comes down to misconceptions about what online scheduling really is. People really think that by having online scheduling I, as a patient, could schedule myself for any day with anybody for six hours for whatever procedure I wanted. That's really not the case. You restrict the appointment types patients can book. You set the durations of the appointments. There's a difference between an adult appointment and a child appointment, right? You have control over that and that complexity. There's a lot of rules that you have at your fingertips to make sure that this is performing and scheduling in the way that you expect it to.
Dr. Hungate:
How do you recommend offices ease into this process?
Jordan Miles:
Start with one appointment type. You don't have to create all these different appointment types and create all this additional logic for each of them. Start with that Wednesday 2:00pm appointment that never gets filled. If you're making that available, you will see patients who are scheduling for that through the online scheduler. You don't need to open all of your operatories up for this. Really start small and then add different services. As you get comfortable with the tool and the scheduling process you can add those additional scheduling types. Start with one, and I think that will reduce some of the hesitation around online scheduling.
Dr. Ryan Hungate:
Let's do some myth-busting here. I think that a lot of people believe that patients are calling during the day, right? I can go online, I look when the hours of business are, I'm going to call you during the day. Does that still hold true today?
Jordan Miles:
It absolutely does not. From the research that we have, the majority of people want to schedule after hours, right? Everyone has their day jobs, they're not typically making phone calls during the day or scheduling appointments. We see about 43% of patients are doing their searching after hours. They're doing it after dinner, at night when they have time to be able to do that. That really highlights the importance of having the online schedule, right? 24/7 booking. If you're only allowing patients to schedule through calling your office, you're literally just restricting it from 8:00 to 5:00. Most people are doing it after hours and so you're missing all those people. And so they're having to create a reminder for themselves to call you in the morning or maybe leave a voicemail. We want to make sure that the practice is accessible so that you can boost bookings effectively.
Dr. Ryan Hungate:
Talk to me about Reserve with Google.
Jordan Miles:
We've had the really awesome pleasure of working with Google to bring a pretty game-changing feature to online scheduling. We really want to emulate the same experience that you have with making a reservation at a restaurant, right? All that is done through Google and the My Business pages. Working with them we've created a direct integration with Google that allows you to tie your online scheduling location to your business profile and displays this beautiful big blue button that will say book online.
A lot of patients are doing research nowadays through Google My Business. That's become a really powerful tool to not underestimate -- the power of Google and the power of the Google business profile and how people are using it today. People are making decisions based on the information that's there, right? Whether they choose you or the doctor that's down the street, a lot of the time it's done within the Google My Business page just because it's just widespread and there's just a lot of reviews and things that are associated with that.
Dr. Hungate:
What are the immediate benefits a practice can expect after integrating Reserve with Google?
Jordan Miles:
It really went beyond our expectations when we initially launched the feature. During our beta test initially, we tested with a national DSO, they have 145 locations throughout the United States so very diversified as far as regions go. For about six weeks we ran with them. They had over 700 new patient visits that came directly through the Reserve with Google booking.