5 Reasons To Adopt Teledentistry In Your Dental Practice

February 10, 2022

  

For the past few years, various communications and digital technologies have proved that it’s genuinely possible for many industries and specializations to operate remotely—particularly dental care. If you’re a dentist or operate a dental clinic, it’s high time for you to adopt teledentistry. Read on if you want to know why and what benefits you can gain from it.

1. Eliminate overhead costs

Going to the heart of the matter, teledentistry’s main appeal to dental professionals is the fact that it can eliminate overhead costs. You may fear the cost of hiring a custom healthcare software development company, but know that having them develop your teledentistry application ensures you that you can reap the ultimate benefit of reducing your business’ or practice’s operations costs.

Some of the business expenses teledentistry can cut are the following:

• Clinic utility bills: Only open your clinic on certain days.
• Employee salary: Reduce the number of receptionists or assistants you have. A dental software can accomplish various receptionist/assistant work, like scheduling.
• Travel cost: You can perform your patients’ dental triage at home. Only go to your clinic when it’s open and when there’s surgery scheduled.
Marketing: When you adopt and market teledentistry services, you can use effective, efficient, and inexpensive marketing online.

2. Remote monitoring of your patients’ oral health

Most media content spread that people only need to visit their dentists once or twice a year. While it’s a good rule of thumb, it’s misleading. You also understand that people should visit dentists as often as possible, especially if they have certain medical conditions (e.g., pregnancy, diabetes, immune system issues) and other circumstances (e.g., being a smoker). (1)

The two biggest reasons people firmly believe in that rule of thumb are the cost and convenience of going to a dentist. With teledentistry, you can eliminate those concerns. Aside from encouraging them to have frequent dental checks, you can also do your job at monitoring your patients’ oral health.

3. Save everybody’s time

Indeed, you’ve already experienced having a long line of people in your clinic. One way or the other, someone will mess up their appointment, and you couldn’t help but adjust to ensure all your patients will be attended to. Before, people were okay with an hour or two waiting in line. Nowadays, making patients wait can risk you getting scathing negative feedback on a review website. Remember, the patience threshold of people is now drastically lower than before. Just waiting 30 seconds in line can already make them feel stressed. (2)

With teledentistry, you can eliminate the need for anyone to wait in line physically. If someone couldn’t appear on time, you could quickly bump the next person in the schedule. Unlike waiting in your office, having to stay at home is much more tolerable and convenient.

In addition, you’ll also have complete control of your time. You don’t need to compromise your time for the sake of your patients’ satisfaction. After all, if they miss their schedule, it’s on them, and they won’t feel too bad about it since anybody’s time wasn’t wasted.

4. Gain a wider reach

With teledentistry, you can widen your reach. As the teledentistry industry grows, many dental patients are more open to getting remotely checked by their dentists. You can get more patients even if they’re towns or cities away from your clinic. If you have a great reputation and an excellent marketing team, you can even serve people from other states.

5. Quick response to emergencies and suffering patients

In your practice, you may have met people with oral emergencies. And most patients with that kind of emergency often panic—confused about where to go. You can quickly tell them what to do and where to go with teledentistry, saving them time and pain.

Some dental patients don’t have the time to wait in line and go to your clinic, especially those in pain who require some prescription drugs as soon as possible. Know that in the US alone, up to 22% of the population experience orofacial pain—12% of them might have been caused by toothache—in six months. Remotely giving them consultation and prescription would make them thank you for it. (3)

Conclusion

Those are just the top five reasons you should adopt teledentistry in your dental practice. This guide isn’t an exhaustive list since there are other reasons like improving customer relationships, streamlining payments, preventing disease spread, reaching people with disabilities, et cetera. While this article didn’t discuss those things in detail, indeed, you already have an idea of how beneficial teledentistry is for you.

References

1. “How Often Should You Go To The Dentist?”, Source: https://www.colgate.com/en-us/oral-health/dental-visits/how-often-should-you-go-to-the-dentist
2. “Hurry Up! Modern Patience Thresholds Lower Than Ever Before, Technology To Blame”, Source: https://www.studyfinds.org/hurry-up-modern-patience-thresholds-lower-than-ever-before-survey-finds/
3. “Common Dental Emergencies”, Source: https://www.aafp.org/afp/2003/0201/p511.html

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