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Patient Pre-Registration registers new patients quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively without queues forming outside premises.
- History of NHS dentistry: Although the NHS
offers a basic dental service to the public, very
few dentists in recent times were prepared to
accept the terms of NHS contracts and provided
only private treatment, resulting in a shortage of
provision for those unable to afford private
treatment.
- The gap is being increasingly filled by private
companies who are attracted to opening new
practices in regions where NHS contracts are
available. When these new practices open
offering NHS care, the demand is massive and
the consequence is that very long queues form
outside the practice on opening day. The
immense inconvenience and discomfort to
prospective consumers does nothing to enhance
the reputation of PCTs.
- Pre-registration of patients before opening day
to avoid spending the first few weeks of
operation on registration without any actual
dentistry being performed and consequently no
income earned.
- Inexpensive telephone pre-registration to avoid
people having to visit the practice and wait in
very long queues. The system is designed to
handle an unlimited number of concurrent calls
to avoid stress to callers from a constant
‘engaged’ signal.
- Speed: which is vital due to almost
overwhelming number of prospective patients.
- Cost: lowest possible telephone costs for both
patient and practice.
- Database: Transfer of information left by patient
onto database which creates unique bar-code identifier.
- Generation of Welcome Pack sent to patient,
which confirms successful registration and
details opening hours and services provided.
- Generation of patient file.
- An advertisement is placed in the local press,
and perhaps on local radio, approximately 6
weeks before the new practice opens.
- An 0800 telephone number, free to prospective
patients, is published to invite new registrants.
(Or if preferred an 0845 / 0871 number free to
the practice).
- VoIP telephony should be adopted for ease of
use and very low call costs.
- The registrants would call the number and be
guided through a simple process leaving their
names and addresses. The telephone number
they called from would be captured by the
system, except in the rare event that 141 was
dialled to bar the number being identified.
- The registrant’s contact details are entered on a
web-based system and at the end of the day, 2
labels are generated for each new patient
address and carrying a unique bar-code.
- The first label is attached to a ‘Welcome Pack’
which includes information about the institution
and the opening hours of the practice etc.
- The second bar-coded label is attached to a
medical questionnaire which is included in the
Welcome Pack and which the patient is invited to
return.
- Completed questionnaires, when received back,
are scanned into the patient’s record at the pre-
registration office, and eventually exported to
medical management software.
- Here is summarized the real life experience when a new dental practice opened earlier this year.
- Within 24 hours of the publication of a
newspaper advertisement 1020 calls were
received from registrants, equivalent to 17 hours
of consecutive messages. At peak time, mid-
morning, an average of 15 concurrent calls were
being handled. About 30% of calls were to
register couples. Obviously the number of
received calls diminished daily after the initial
surge, with a total of around 2000 registered for
the new practice in the first week.
- All patients were able to register with their first
telephone call, and there were no queues outside
the practice.
- All new patient records were uploaded
comfortably prior to opening day so that the
practice could take appointments and
concentrate on performing actual dentistry from
day one without being bogged down in
administration.
If the system is run by Le-Tech on behalf of the client then no investment in hardware is required to be made by the client.
If run by the client, then the following equipment will be needed:
- Label Printer
- Barcode Scanner Page Scanner
- Internet connected, voice-enabled terminal with
browser.
Download Brochure (PDF)
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