Smiling from Ear to Ear: How a Multi-Location Dental Practice Shines Bright in San Antonio with the LeadingReach Referral Network
“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”Mike Burns, Chief Operations Officer
- 40 Providers
- 9 Locations
- 250 Employees
About 7 to 7 Dental
In its 15 years of operations, 7 to 7 Dental has quickly become a leading dental group for patients in the greater San Antonio area. Spanning 9 locations and 40+ providers, 7 to 7 Dental takes pride in delivering quality patient experiences and serving its population with excellent dental and orthodontic care.
According to the American Dental Association, the top priority impacting the dental industry in 2024 and beyond is centered around personalized and improved patient experiences. While this trend isn’t a new, never-heard-of-before best practice in healthcare, it does shed light on the importance of providers establishing meaningful relationships with their patients to ensure they get the best care they can.
This couldn’t be more true for the team at 7 to 7 Dental, a leading 9-location, 40-provider dental group in the greater San Antonio area.
“Our primary goal is delivering great customer service” says Carrie Carpenter, Scheduling Manager. “With LeadingReach’s communication functionality, we’re able to center our operations on providing quality patient experiences because we aren’t worrying about mundane administrative tasks that [previously] impacted our ability to do so”.
With a business model unique by design, 7 to 7 Dental enlisted LeadingReach to improve communication and care coordination and has since turned into a non-negotiable for their current and future-planned referral workflow processes.
The Challenge
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.
“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”
The Solution
LeadingReach’s Patient Pipeline Management was the solution of choice for overcoming their existing challenges. When introduced to the core functionalities that would ultimately revolutionize their referral management processes, the team quickly realized they had found a long-term partner in success.
Mike quotes, “once we started managing referrals in LeadingReach, that’s when our journey really started—that’s when we really began to see the efficiency gains across all of our locations”.
By leveraging many of the features of PPM, Carrie and her team were in awe of how much better their referral workflows had evolved into. “We didn’t have the right processes in place before LeadingReach. The custom statuses and tags allow us to see exactly where a patient is in their care journey and what additional steps, if any, need to be taken”.
With this level of insight and tracking their new standard, made possible by LeadingReach PPM, the team similarly found refuge knowing that everything is HIPAA-compliant.
“For every patient’s clinical documentation, the fact that our referral coordinators can upload secure file attachments gives us peace of mind knowing that we’re in compliance”, Carrie explained.
Managing a multi-location footprint is no small feat, and as Mike says, “knowing we can follow a patient from beginning to end has been pretty powerful to see”. Not only is this a testament to the power of LeadingReach, but it highlights how utilizing the tool can be the catalyst to driving improved patient outcomes—the cornerstone element to 7 to 7’s organizational framework.
“The custom statuses and tags allow us to see exactly where a patient is in their care journey and what additional steps, if any, need to be taken”
The Results
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”.
“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”
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