The Dental Hygiene Studio offers treatment and prevention of gum disease, hygienist services and Guided Biofilm Therapy. The Studio is one small number of independent practices in the local area and strives to be patient-centred and offer a personal level of interaction that many dental corporates may struggle to achieve. When the pandemic struck, Jules Fisher’s new hygienist-led practice in Wallasey on the Wirral, had only been welcoming patients for six months. Following six months of lockdown, she reopened to a completely new set of protocols requiring stringent patient checks and questions to help keep Covid at bay.
“Before my recent hirings, I was handling everything on my own, which is why the technology saved my quality of life.”
We had to contact the patient before their appointment to check they had no symptoms. We had to check them on the morning of their appointment to check they still had no symptoms, and again on the day after their appointment and again two weeks later. For me, contacting each patient who walked through the door four to five times, and making sure I did it when I was supposed to do it, was really quite daunting. Particularly on top of everything else at the time, such as the extra PPE and trying to run a business and keep people in a job; it was really quite stressful,” says Jules. “FollowApp.Care was an absolute game changer for me. I would be staying until 11pm every night calling my patients for the following day if it weren’t for the system. Before my recent hirings, I was handling everything on my own, which is why the technology saved my quality of life.
“Patients loved it because they knew they were being looked after properly because someone was contacting them.”
When I spoke to the team at FollowApp.Care I was just blown away that it was able to carry out all of those patient contacts for me…I didn’t need to do anything. It facilitated the whole process for me, which meant I was able to just concentrate on my patients and it alerted me if any had symptoms. I thought it was a brilliant concept then and I still do, I just use it differently now. Patients loved it because they knew they were being looked after properly because someone was contacting them. I would not have the chance to contact each patient! Thanks to Follow.App I could, and still can, identify unhappy patients and reach out to them personally. It worked really well.
Covid’s timing might have been brutal from a new business perspective, but despite the challenges, Jules was soon able to give up the two other clinics where she worked on Mondays and Tuesdays to run her own practice full-time, supported by two other, part-time hygienists, dental nurses, a receptionist and a dentist for patients requiring tooth-whitening. While the Dental Hygiene Studio’s needs have changed, Jules explains that her practice is still very much using FollowApp.Care. “So, initially we only used it to ask patients if they had Covid symptoms, but now we’ve honed it to ask other questions. For example, we ask if patients had any sensitivity since their treatment, because sometimes they’re fine in the surgery but they get home and their teeth are really sensitive. I find it really important to make sure patients know that’s okay.
“…it’s a totally invaluable tool because sometimes it’s hard to ask people to give you a review.”
We ask patients if they would recommend us, which gives us an indication of how satisfied they are. We’ve now got more than 500 5-star Google reviews, and that’s partly due to FollowApp.Care because of its prompting and questions…it’s a totally invaluable tool because sometimes it’s hard to ask people to give you a review. If it’s automatic, you don’t have that embarrassment factor.” Recently, the practice incorporated a question around treatment finance. “The question was, if we were to introduce a payment plan, would they be interested – yes or no? That gave us a lot of information, not necessarily about each patient but about the type of numbers who might be interested,” says Jules. She concludes “The technology runs seamlessly…It’s a totally invaluable tool, and I couldn’t run the practice the way I do without it.