What Should a Dental Treatment Coordinator Automate?
If a task would be done the same way for every patient, it can be automated. If it depends on who the patient is, the treatment coordinator should keep it.
If a task would be done the same way for every patient, it can be automated. If it depends on who the patient is, the treatment coordinator should keep it.
The treatment coordinator's real job
Job adverts for treatment coordinators describe the same work again and again: convert enquiries into booked consultations, follow up patients who are undecided, and report on conversion. Almost all of the value is in conversations. Almost all of the time goes on everything around them.
The question is not whether to automate, but which parts of the work are conversations and which are list-keeping.
Automate the list, keep the conversation
A useful test: if the task would be done the same way for every patient, it can be automated. If it depends on who the patient is, keep it.
- Automate: remembering who is due a follow-up, and when.
- Automate: the first routine check-in after a consultation, on the patient's own channel.
- Automate: noticing a plan that went quiet, or an accepted plan with no appointment.
- Automate: collecting the list of plans that need the coordinator this week.
- Keep: the conversation about options, cost and finance.
- Keep: reassurance for an anxious patient.
- Keep: anything about suitability or clinical outcomes, which belongs with the dentist.
- Keep: the decision to call rather than message.
The morning list
The most valuable thing software can give a treatment coordinator is a short, ordered list each morning: which plans are due today, which have gone quiet, which were accepted but not booked, and which patients replied overnight.
If the coordinator has to build that list themselves from the PMS, a spreadsheet and four inboxes, half the morning is gone before the first call.
Questions to ask before you automate anything
- Does every automated message stop as soon as the patient replies?
- Does each automated message use the channel the patient chose?
- Can the coordinator see exactly what was sent, and when?
- Is anything clinical kept out of automated messages entirely?
- Does the system keep accepted and booked as separate states?
What changes in the coordinator's week
When the list-keeping moves to software, the coordinator's week changes shape. Monday morning starts with a short list rather than a spreadsheet. Follow-ups that would have slipped go out on time without anybody remembering them. The coordinator's calls are with patients who replied or who are due a personal conversation, not with patients who simply needed a reminder.
What should not change is the relationship. Patients considering significant private treatment usually decide because they trust the person they spoke to. Automation that pretends to be the coordinator, or that keeps messaging after a patient has said they need time, damages that trust.
Signs the automation has gone too far
- Patients reply to an automated message with a question and get another automated message.
- The coordinator cannot say what was sent to a patient last week.
- Follow-up continues after a patient asked for space or said no.
- Clinical questions are answered by a template rather than a clinician.
Where Clinqly fits
Work in Clinqly is the treatment coordinator's view: every plan still in play, with its stage, owner, next date and what happened last. Clinqly can send routine follow-up where the practice switches it on and stops when the patient replies, and it brings accepted plans without an appointment to the top. The conversations stay with the coordinator.