Patterson Dental's RevenueWell provides easy, automated marketing for the general dentist

Launched in early 2012, Patterson Dental’s RevenueWell is a service that helps dental practices grow through automated marketing and patient communications.

Here founder Alex Nozdrin answers questions about the product’s development and its features.

Q:  Where did the idea for RevenueWell come from? 

A: We have a team of four very brilliant people who founded the company, and everybody brought something unique to the table to create a product that’s simultaneously very focused yet comprehensive in the value that it delivers.

The idea actually came from one of the other founders, who spent decades of his life managing and consulting dental offices on how to grow and cultivate a productive patient base. As it often happens, he tried every existing offering in the market and found that they either didn’t offer a complete solution or weren’t even built for dental offices. So the idea for RevenueWell was born.

Q:  What was the development process like?

A: Obviously, rather long, laborious and expensive. But also very interesting from the standpoint of analyzing the existing market, the target user base and what they’ve been missing with some of the more generic solutions out there. 

Dentists are actually very lucky to have amazing practice management software, like Eaglesoft, to run their businesses on. Very few other service providers have a foundation like that and the resulting opportunity to automate their workflows and marketing efforts.

A big part of the development exercise was to map the different parts of our service to how a dental office runs, what data is available in the practice software, and what can be meaningfully used to help the office grow AND deliver an amazing patient experience.

Q: What makes RevenueWell different?

A: The practice marketing and patient communications software space is a very crowded one – which is both good and bad for dental practices. Good, because they have choice. Bad, because it’s often hard to separate hype from fiction in terms of what actually works. 

RevenueWell’s success stems from being completely focused on one industry and one goal. We exist to help dental practices operate and grow in the Internet age. Companies we compete with typically have much broader mission statements, and that inescapably trickles down into everything they do or choose not to do. 

I’ll give you an example. A company with a broad focus may let a dental office put together a quick email campaign to patients to promote dental implants. All you have to do is write the email message, segment the patient base based on gender, age and their visit history, perhaps – and send it out.

We thought it was a great start, but wouldn’t it be great if all the content was prebuilt, the campaign was available in email and postcard versions, and you had a way to send it only to patients for whom you’ve treatment planned an implant in the last six months? This kind of a 100% solution is only possible when you focus narrowly and get a chance to bake every part of your system all the way.

Then there’s the day-to-day training and support. We’ve been lucky to align ourselves from the start with a premier player in the industry, Patterson Dental, who helps us train and support our customers through the amazing Patterson Technology Center. So when a customer calls with a question, they’re speaking with someone who knows their challenges, knows their technology environment and is uniquely qualified to make them successful. 

Q: What are the key features you are most proud of?

A: The service does a ton of things for everyone at the practice – from confirming appointments to letting patients make payments online – but my favorite features have to do with tailoring communications based on the patients’ clinical history, conditions and recommended treatment.

Things like post-operative instructions: having our service send automatic emails to ensure the patient knows what to expect, do and avoid following an extraction or another common procedure. Or, our automated treatment plan follow-up feature, which audits patients’ charts for proposed treatment plans, sees when a patient hasn’t scheduled treatment and brings them back into the chair with timely, multi-media messages. Finally, how great is it to know exactly which kids in your practice haven’t had a fluoride treatment in the last 12 months and send their parents a prebuilt newsletter with a coupon for the procedure?

These are the types of capabilities that deliver real growth and get patients excited about coming to their doctor.

Q: So what does it take for a practice to succeed in the Internet age?

A: I think the fundamentals never changed. Again, there’s a lot of noise in the marketplace about things like social media, SEO, online reviews and such – and they’re important things for a practice to figure out. We do many of them, but we’ll always stress the importance of basic blocking and tackling: get the patient to schedule the appointment, get them to show up, get them to say “yes” to treatment, and make sure they follow-through with it.

Today’s technology makes many of these things easier, more streamlined, and more intelligent – but they still remain your best bet for success.