Patient Engagement Software Built to “Gro” Your Practice

An important part of patient engagement is communicating with patients how and when it’s best for them. In today’s digital world, patients expect to have access to self-scheduling, online forms, and to communicate with the practice without needing to pick up the phone. Furthermore, online reviews are critical to practice growth, as often a patient’s first impression of a practice is in an online forum. As the years go by and technology progresses, more and more ways to build relationships have appeared. It may not be a practice’s first thought, but customer service is increasingly important in a digital world where reviews are often a patient’s first impression of a practice.

Curve GRO™ is a full-featured patient engagement platform that is part of Curve SuperHero - an all-in-one, cloud-based practice management solution from Curve Dental. Jana Macon, chief operating officer at Curve Dental, says the company’s focus has always been delivering great products and services to customers. “We believe outstanding patient engagement is the best way for practices to set themselves apart and elevate the patient experience.” Macon said. “We intentionally focus everything we do on driving our customers’ growth by improving their workflows, increasing staff productivity, and supporting true work-life balance.”

Curve GRO has a myriad of features in a single platform, including the following:

• Appointment and recare reminders: Patients receive reminders via text or email. This customizable feature allows the practice to choose when to send reminders.
• Smart action lists: This feature changes the traditional front office workflow by automatically creating a list of critical tasks that staff can triage to completion in order to improve coordination and productivity.
• Campaign builder and email/text campaigns: Build custom campaigns in an easy-to-under- stand, concise way.
• Patient portal and self-scheduling: Patients choose from available appointments online based on the practice’s configured preferences.
• Smart forms: Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant forms that patients complete on a PC or mobile device are automatically uploaded into Curve to eliminate dual data entry and reduce mistakes.
• Online Reviews: The practice can choose to send review requests to patients to build and improve their online reputation
• Text-to-pay: Allow patients to pay balances easily through a text link.

• 2-way texting: New and existing patients can text conversationally with an office to improve patient communications.

GRO is built to serve not only the patient but also the practice, says Mark Blount, vice president of marketing at Curve Dental.

“The GRO patient engagement system was built with a few goals in mind. First, by providing the best patient experience possible. Second, to make things easy, convenient, accurate, and customizable to meet patients’ needs and preferences. Third, to empower the front office team to serve the customers better and more efficiently,” Blount said.

The Process

Features that are available through Curve GRO took over 12 months to fine-tune through various beta tests and customer feedback. The feedback told the Curve Dental team that practices wanted effective communication above all else.

“Curve SuperHero has had text and email capability for many years,” Macon said. “But what we noticed over the last few years was that more and more of our customers were asking to integrate third-party products because they had features that we did not. We asked our customers about what they were using and what they needed for patient communication. Practices emphatically told us that they wanted a modern solution to run their practice and the ability communicate with patients within a single, affordable system. Thus, GRO was born.”

A big part of the process was market research.

“We started by visiting practices to understand exactly how they worked, sometimes with multiple systems, sticky notes, and paper reports. Then, we created a wireframe design and workflows, which are mock-ups to help end users understand how the product will work to address the problems.” Macon said. “Our customers gave us feedback about the design, which helped us to create a product that was on target with their needs.”

“At Curve, we utilize what is called an “agile” development process. We leverage customer advisory groups to garner feedback incrementally as we design and develop an important feature like Curve GRO.” Macon said. “Following the invaluable feedback we gathered upfront, we thought hard about how to design GRO. We did not rush to get the first phase out to our users because we knew the foundation had to be rock solid so that we can add all of the features that would follow”

Being integrated with SuperHero was one of the most common requests that Curve received from the advisory group because it eliminated the cost and complexity of bolting on a third-party patient platform.

“GRO utilizes the same database as the SuperHero practice management software. If you are using a third-party patient management product, you’re spending more money than necessary and having to manage a complex integration. There could be problems with syncing data or issues with data integrity, lag time, and data and records not matching up.” Blount said. “The beauty of having it fully part of Curve SuperHero means that you’re working off one database.”

Along with the all-in-one aspect, another feature that sets Curve GRO apart from other software is Curve GRO’s Smart Action List. This feature creates lists for the practice in order to help prioritize important tasks and facilitate better patient care. “The Smart Action List is the single place for everyone in the front office to go to see exactly what’s going on. For example, if the patient doesn’t respond to the automated recare or appointment reminders, then they drop onto the Smart Action List so that someone from the front office team can call them,” Macon said. “Users can also add tasks to the list for other users. Every task has its own audit trail so you know exactly if things got done or didn’t, which is a huge help to gauge productivity and improve workflows.”

Now, one year later, the market response to GRO has been phenomenal. Dentists using GRO have told Curve that their no-shows decreased by more than 15 percent in the first 30 days when compared to their old 3rd-party patient engagement system.

Challenges

As with any creative process, Curve GRO encountered challenges in its inception. As a new platform, the architecture and workflow designs had to be created from scratch; and in any software shop, there is a natural tension between quality and time-to-market.

“Because we put so much forethought into the GRO design, we now have a tremendous foundation to continue building onto as the needs of the dental industry evolve around patient engagement,” Macon said. “We have some very exciting enhancements already in the works that will directly impact a practice’s ability to improve acceptance rates and successfully appoint incomplete treatment for patients.”

At its heart, Curve GRO was designed to make things simpler and easier to use for both the clinicians and the front office. When practice management technology is evolving every day, using advanced tools like Curve GRO to cut time and support integration can help a practice work as smoothly as possible.

“We took our time to build it right. As a result, today we have a product that is not only powerful but also easy to use,” Blount said. “And we are just getting started.” ●