How to Implement Teledentistry in Your Dental Practice

You’re committed now what!? That’s a relevant and good question regarding how to implement teledentistry in your dental practice or DSO.

A couple of things are in the mix.

• One, you recognize the value of teledentistry and the virtual dental care environment for your patient experience.
• Two, you want to make sure you’re following an appropriate implementation process and timeline for successful virtual visits.

Know your “why”

The COVID-19 pandemic season of dentistry was about adapting and surviving. Now that you’re (hopefully) accomplishing both it’s those adaptive processes that linger.

Teledentistry is perhaps among them. What was useful and/or considered an alternative during the pandemic is becoming a new treatment norm for many.

Different questions are being raised.

• How can you expand your patient care into the virtual space?
• What does virtual dental care look like?
• Why invest in dedicated teledentistry technology to deliver virtual care?

All are valid questions among many others. But the “why” question(s) help anchor your resolve to dive into the “how.”

Let’s assume you’re “sold” on the virtual dental care model. And that you’re ready to invest in teledentistry technology.

Or…

You’ve made the investment and you’re ready to get rolling!

How to implement teledentistry in your dental practice and treatment processes

(Preliminary) Step 1-Make your software decision

The “toolbox” has grown since teledentistry emerged in the mid-2000’s. Even so, your decision should be made based on more than mere video capabilities.

Of course, video communication is core. But a virtual dental care environment has many vital parts.

As far as platforms go - here are the fundamental essentials:

• Secure
• Compliant (HIPAA, etc)
• Comprehensive and scalable

And perhaps most important - “dedicated” to the virtual care environment.

Step 2-Promote your Teledentistry services

Creating a virtual care platform and merely hoping patients notice will delay the service’s impact potential. You want to get the “word” out so the “word” spreads.

• Include teledentistry in your routine dental marketing and SEO strategies (e.g. emails, text messages, social media channels, direct mail, website content, etc)
• Ask patients who utilize your teledentistry services to provide an online review about their experience(s).
• Utilize your dental practice blog to inform, educate, and answer specific procedural questions that your patients and website visitors have about teledentistry.

And speaking of “procedural” questions…

Step 3-Design and follow a proven teledentistry implementation path

This begins with getting your practice and team ready to implement teledentistry as a core patient care protocol. Once you’ve selected your software platform and begun to promote it - it’s essential to get your practice and team “wired” for implementation.

From our experience as dedicated (there’s that vital word again) teledentistry providers there’s a proven process for getting you up and running.

Initial Setup

Most teledentistry developers (like us) have a trained team of implementation specialists. They’re equipped and prepared to help you “map out” your teledentistry strategies, best-practices, and incremental goals for virtual patient care.

User Training

• Tools and Applications: what they are and how to apply them in the best, most effective way for each virtual visit.
• Questions, Answers, and Account Creation: you and your team will learn by inquiry and implementation around their individual user account(s).
• Implementation and Experimentation: this phase of training provides you and your team an opportunity try, fail, and fine tune your use of the teledentistry platform. Prior to going fully “live” you might want to test your processes on a few willing patients.

Go Live

Curious or otherwise inquiring patients will begin to respond to your available online information and strategic marketing around your teledentistry services. A dedicated platform (such as Teledentix) comes equipped with a support team on stand-by as you venture into the virtual care environment.

Post-Live Evaluation

You’ll learn a lot from your first few experiences with your software and patient interactions with teledentistry. Stay in evaluation mode to spot issues and make improvements to how you and your team handle virtual visits.

The goal is to imbed teledentistry as a core service within your workflows. Preparation, implementation, and evaluation are your triad of success for virtual dental care using teledentistry.

Check out these resources for more insight into teledentistry implementation and its impact on your patient relationships:

Optimism About Patient Perception and the Patient-Facing Benefits of Teledentistry

Refine the Patient Experience with Teledentistry

Trust a dedicated, secure, full-capacity teledentistry platform

Teledentix is an innovative, turn-key teledentistry solution created by Virtual Dental Care. The all-in-one platform will enable you to adapt teledentistry to your patient care and extend your services beyond the walls of your dental practice…and improve your patient care in the process.

• Teledentix provides an easy-to-use video conferencing tool that’s secure, HIPAA compliant, and specific to dentistry.
• Teledentix Basic is a perfect starting point. Begin with a free trial and then transition to a very low monthly fee. You and your patients can join unlimited video conferences including screen-share, file-share, video-share, and real-time chat communications.

LEARN MORE about the Teledentix platform.