Smiling from Ear to Ear: How a Multi-Location Dental Practice Shines Bright in San Antonio with the LeadingReach Referral Network

Even with a team of in-office treatment coordinators to support each location, there was an inefficient element to the ways with which their referrals were being managed. 

7 to 7 Dental’s referral workflow and daily processes consisted of manual spreadsheet tracking to know when/where to send referrals, sending time-sensitive, encrypted emails with referral information, and managing an inbound queue of 600+ phone calls daily. 

Although these systems “worked”, they knew this process wasn’t sustainable long term, especially considering their plans of opening a separate specialty entity before year-end.

As Carrie mentioned, “there has to be a better way to manage our referrals and these processes; there’s got to be a way to minimize the back-and-forth phone calls we’re making to our internal specialty offices to help free up our phone lines for patients”.

By recognizing that their current workflow patterns were a catalyst to inefficiencies, Mike Burns, Chief Operating Officer, added “whenever a patient calls into one of our offices, every phone call routes through our centralized location; and because the phones don’t ring at our specialty practices, we realized the calls we were making internally [to manage our referrals] were likely clogging up our patient’s ability to get through to us”.

In addition to these communication challenges, 7 to 7 Dental struggled with tracking. As Mike mentioned, “one of the major issues we had in the past was the ability to track anything—notes weren’t being taken accurately, and overall, wasn’t anywhere close to where we needed it to be”. 

Together, these issues were ultimately impacting the delivery of great patient care, the one thing that’s most important to their vision and mission. With a plan in place to redefine its referral management efforts and “eliminate all of the back-and-forth phone calls wasting my scheduling team’s time”, as Carrie said, 7 to 7 Dental would soon understand the power that LeadingReach would provide to fully support all of its locations.

Not long after joining forces with LeadingReach, the team at 7 to 7 Dental understood just how impactful a tool like Patient Pipeline Management would be for their referral management efforts. Mike, being the data-driven executive he is, comments “the fact that I’m able to pull our data and find out exactly what our doctors’ referral patterns look like, it’s unlike anything I’ve seen before in my 15 years here”.

In just a few short months, efficiency gains became the norm across all of their locations—with the metrics to support this claim. 

What previously took 42 days to schedule an appointment was minimized to just 20 days, a 63% improvement. Not only that, but the average number of days to appointment went from 53 days to 19, a remarkable 94% decrease. When pairing these data points with the fact 7 to 7 Dental additionally reduced their average hours to respond to a referral by 44%, it’s no surprise that LeadingReach was the long-awaited answer to improving their operations.

As Carrie said, “LeadingReach has helped us reduce so many phone calls because we’re able to communicate directly inside the platform. The fact that we don’t have to worry about picking up the phone and can leave our lines open for patients, it’s really an amazing feeling”.

By adopting and implementing LeadingReach best practices, the team has relished in their ability to improve patient experiences while simultaneously streamlining their core operational workflows. As Carrie explains, “we love that we can look in a single place to find out everything we need for our patients—everything really is right there and so much more efficient than what we were doing before”.

From an operational perspective, Patient Pipeline Management is the end-to-end solution for 7 to 7 Dental. With plans actively in place to build a new specialty group by the end of 2024, Mike quotes “once we open up our new standalone office, I truthfully don’t think we’d be able to operate without LeadingReach—we’ve found it to be nothing short of incredibly effective”.