As noted by Dental Economics: “When patients have a positive experience in your practice, they will not only be more inclined to accept recommended treatment and return for ongoing care, but also refer friends and family.”
While there are many ways for dentists to improve patient experience — such as adding new services, enhancing the practice’s website, offering financing options and so on — among the most low-cost, high-impact strategies is to upgrade your dental office design.
Below, we highlight 3 dental office design tips that make patients happy, while helping your practice increase revenues and referrals:
Dental Office Design Tip #1: Distinguish Your Brand Identity
Do not settle for a generic dental office design that looks almost indistinguishable from any other practice. Instead, leverage design and layout to distinguish your brand identity.
For example, if your practice specializes in advanced esthetic and cosmetic solutions for discerning and financially secure patients, then your up-level dental office design should be customized to reflect this. Similarly, if you focus on serving families with young children, creating a cheerful and playful atmosphere can go a long way towards making patients happy – and keeping them on the roster for generations!
Dental Office Design Tip #2: Don’t Settle for a Waiting Room
For convenience or out of habit, your patients may call it a waiting room, and your staff might as well. But it is extremely important to keep in mind that the area in which patients wait for their appointment is not just a place to wait.
Rather, it is an ideal opportunity for your practice to engage patients with informative and relevant messages regarding available dental solutions (e.g. smile makeovers, “holiday party season teeth whitening specials,” etc.) aspects that make your practice special and unique (e.g. extended/weekend hours, sleep dentistry options, etc.), cleaning and dental hygiene advice (e.g. how to avoid red wine and coffee stains, etc.), and so on.
What’s more, patients in your (so-called) waiting room are in essence a captive audience, which in the marketing world, is the most valuable and coveted group that exists! Reaching out to these people in an agreeable and engaging manner — through HDTV programming, digital content available on tablets and smartphones, brochures and other print material, and so on — is an excellent way to boost patient happiness and, once again, increase the bottom-line.
Dental Office Design Tip #3: Don’t forget your staff!
So far, we have looked at ways to enhance the patient experience by improving overall design, and ensuring that waiting rooms are not wasted opportunities for positive engagement. However, there is another important dental office design tip that is not directly about patients, but nevertheless has a major impact on their happiness or lack thereof: making the environment more efficient and streamlined for staff.
For example, you can design the dental office to have more one-way traffic flows, so that staff are not constantly in each others’ way. Or, you may find it more efficient to centralize (or at least co-locate) sterilization stations vs. having them deployed throughout the practice.
Learn More
At Key Interiors, we specialize in helping dentists refresh and re-imagine their dental office design, so that it makes patients happier, improves staff efficiency, increases rosters, and ultimately makes the practice stronger and more profitable for years to come.
To learn more, contact us today. Your consultation is free. Discover why we are the interior solutions specialists that dentists recommend and trust!
