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New patient questions a dental practice should answer

For your trade 6 min read

Your front desk already knows every question a new patient asks. Here is how to collect them, answer them in the patient's own words, and put them online.

The questions a new patient asks are not a mystery. They arrive at your front desk every morning, in the same order, in roughly the same words, and somebody answers them out loud and then answers them again an hour later.

A question asked forty times a year belongs in writing, on your own site, where it can be read at nine at night by somebody deciding whether to call you at all.

Collect the questions before you try to answer them

Do not sit down and imagine what patients want to know. You will write the practice's questions rather than theirs.

Put a notepad by the phone for two weeks. Every time somebody asks something before they book, write the question down in the words they used. Add the ones that come in by email, the ones that arrive as messages, and the reviews that were really a question with a star rating attached.

At the end of two weeks you will have thirty lines, and about eight of them will have happened over and over. Those eight are your list, and they will not be the eight you would have guessed.

Answer in the words the patient used

The question is written on your notepad as, do you do cleanings. It is tempting to answer it with the word prophylaxis, because that is the word on the chart.

Use theirs first and yours after, if yours is needed at all. Cleaning, check-up, gum disease, root canal, cap, wisdom teeth out. A page written in clinical language reads as a page written for another dentist, and the person reading it at nine at night concludes they are in the wrong place.

Short answers are also better than complete ones. Three sentences that settle the question beat a page that covers every case and settles nothing.

Moving from another practice, and the records question

This is the question that stops more people than any other, and it is almost never on a practice website.

Somebody has been going to the same practice for eleven years. They are unhappy or they have moved, and they think switching involves a confrontation, a form, and a conversation with a receptionist who knows their mother.

So say what actually happens. Whether they need to tell the old practice anything, who requests the records and X-rays, how you handle it if the old practice is slow or has closed, and whether they can be seen before any of that arrives. Whatever your answer is, it is calmer than the one they have invented.

What to bring, and how long the first visit takes

Write the list out. Insurance details, identification, a list of medications, the name of the previous practice, and anything you actually need that a person would not think of.

Then give the time. Not the time on the schedule, the time from the door to the door, including the forms. If a first visit runs an hour, say an hour, so that somebody can decide whether it fits in a lunch break.

The other half is what happens in that visit. Whether a cleaning happens the same day or is booked afterwards is a question people ask constantly, and the answer is usually that it depends on what the examination finds. Say that, and say what it depends on.

The money question you can answer, and the one you cannot

Which plans and insurers you accept is a fact. It belongs in a list, updated when it changes, not in a sentence saying you work with most major providers.

What a treatment costs is not a fact until somebody has looked in the mouth, and pretending otherwise ends in an argument at the desk. What you can commit to is the process: that nothing gets done without a written estimate first, that the estimate comes before the appointment for the work, and that a patient can take it away and think about it.

Whether you offer a payment plan, or a practice plan, or nothing of the kind, is also a fact. Say which. A plain no is easier to read than silence, and somebody who cannot afford you today will remember that you did not waste their afternoon.

Children, and what parents are really asking

Parents ask two things. Do you see children at all, and at what age do you want to see mine first.

Give your practice's answer rather than a general guideline, because your answer is the one that governs whether they get an appointment. Then add the things they are too polite to ask: whether a parent stays in the room, what happens if the child will not open their mouth, and whether you will still see the parent on the same visit or on a different day.

Access, timing and the awkward practical ones

These look too small to write down and they decide more appointments than the clinical pages do.

Where to park and how long it takes to walk from it. Stairs, a lift, whether a wheelchair gets through the door and into the surgery. Which languages are spoken by somebody who will be there. How much notice you need to change an appointment, and what happens if a patient is fifteen minutes late. What happens if you are running late, which is the one patients have been on the wrong end of before.

Say what you do not do

Every practice has a list. Implants, orthodontics, sedation, certain extractions, anything you send elsewhere.

Putting that list in writing costs you the occasional inquiry and saves the appointment where somebody arrives expecting work you were never going to do. Name what you refer out and, where you can, name who you refer to. A patient sent competently somewhere else remembers it.

A short checklist

Questions people ask

Should all of this go on one page or across the site

One page holding every answer, with the two or three that decide bookings repeated where they matter, such as accepted plans next to the appointment button.

What if an answer is going to change soon

Write today's answer and put a date on the page. A page that is right now and edited in six weeks is better than a blank space that is never wrong because it never says anything.

Somebody sent a clinical question through the website

Answer the general part in writing and say plainly that the specific part needs an examination. Patients read that as care rather than evasion.

Do we have to say whether we are taking new patients

Yes, and it should be the first thing on the site. It is the question underneath every other question on this list.

Our inquiries have gone quiet, is that the form

It might be. Forms fail silently and nothing tells you, so send yourself a test inquiry from a phone that is not on the practice network and see whether it arrives.

Can we use reviews to find the questions

Yes, and they are the honest source. A review complaining about something nobody explained is a question you never answered in writing.

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