The Top 5 Flex Features To Boost Efficiency in Your Dental Practice

Who doesn't love a good list? They're great for getting information quickly and efficiently, just like Flex. 

We spend a lot of time talking with practices about patient communication and creating efficiencies in Open Dental, so our team has a good bit of insight into the topic. After all, patient communication is our specialty - we even tend to get a bit geeky when it comes to the subject. 

Flex was designed in an Open Dental practice, so it’s little surprise that there are some really cool patient communication features in Flex that add to your Open Dental experience. In the spirit of brevity, this will not be an exhaustive list of every Flex feature. Instead, we’ll focus on the top functionalities of Flex that make your dental life easier and your processes move faster.

5. Online Payments with Automatic Allocations by Procedure Code & Provider

FlexPay, our integrated online payments solution, allows you to accept payments both in-office and remotely via statements that can be emailed and/or texted to your patients. We like to help you get those payments rolling in fast but the real financial efficiency of Flex in Open Dental happens behind the scenes. 

Do you have a junk-drawer at home or in your practice? You know, that one area that seems to catch everything that doesn’t have a place to belong otherwise? You just open the drawer, drop in whatever item needs to be stored at that time, and don’t think about it again until spring cleaning comes around. Flex prevents this messy situation from happening with your accounts receivable via automatic allocation of payments via procedure code and provider.

When you accept a payment via FlexPay, every payment will be automatically entered into your patient's account and assigned to the correct procedure code and provider in Open Dental. Flex makes sure your payments are organized automatically from the very beginning, keeping your patient financial records uncluttered. 

So, Flex doesn’t treat your accounts receivable like the aforementioned junk drawer, just dropping in unattributed payments in bulk that you’ll have to decipher and allocate manually later. Flex saves you (and your calculator) time so you can stay focused on other tasks. 

4. Real-Time Online Appointment Scheduling

In a previous article, we mentioned the trend of patients moving to online scheduling as their preferred method of booking appointments, so it’s a foregone conclusion that more and more dental practices will begin integrating online scheduling into their websites. FlexSchedule utilizes real-time integration into your Open Dental appointment book, so that your patients can see exactly what appointments are available and confirm their time immediately. That booked appointment is then synced automatically into Open Dental in real-time, so your schedule is always up-to-date.

Ultimately, this patient found your website, clicked your FlexSchedule link, and scheduled an appointment with your practice without any interaction from your staff. And, the appointment is immediately viewable in Open Dental. Talk about a time saver!

3. Integrated Paperless Forms 

Is there anything slower than patients completing paper forms? Whether it’s an insurance update, health history, onboarding, or a consent for treatment, paper forms are time consuming and require manual filing on the part of the practice staff. They also have to be filled out in the practice rather than prior to an appointment. The bottom line . . . there is room for efficiency boosting here!

Flex’s paperless forms can be emailed or texted to patients for completion prior to their scheduled appointment, include dynamic fields so that irrelevant questions to a certain patient’s demographic (like questions about recent pregnancy for a male patient) are not included, and pre-fill with patient data that you already have in Open Dental so there’s less redundancy. Your patients spend less time filling out paperwork and your staff spends less time organizing it. And, all form data is automatically imported into Open Dental so your patient records are kept up-to-date. 

2. Treatment Planning with Integrated Payment Options

If I had to choose a truly unique feature in Flex that makes our platform stand out from other patient communication providers, it would be our treatment planning module. It does a great job of outlining treatment proposals in a clean format that patients can easily understand, allowing you to improve your communication with patients while selling more dentistry.

Beyond the treatment presentation itself, our treatment planning module includes a couple of additional features that improve the efficiency of the treatment and collections processes. First, our treatment plans allow for the inclusion of integrated payment options, so your patient can choose to pay upfront or select from payment plans that you can customize. These plans create a simple segue from a conversation on treatment needs to payment options, encouraging your patient to go ahead and move forward with your recommendation while committing to a financial agreement.

Second, our treatment planning module integrates into Open Dental so that once the patient has selected a payment plan and agreed to the proposed treatment, a signed copy of the proposal is immediately saved to the patient’s chart and the payment plan is established in Open Dental. There is no manual entry of the financial plan on your staff's part - all while your treatment acceptance rate skyrockets. 

1. Automated Recalls, Reminders and Confirmations

Automation is the king of efficiency - there’s a reason why businesses of all sizes invest considerable budget dollars every year in automated operations and communications. Software just does things more efficiently at scale than any person could. If you’re a new practice with a few dozen patients, you may be able to handle these tasks manually but, as your practice grows, you’ll likely find that the volume of work to keep your patients engaged and up-to-date necessitates some technological assistance. 

Automated recalls, reminders, and confirmations sent via email and/or text can be scheduled in Flex and customized for your practice. Every communication is documented in the patient record in Open Dental, so you’ll always have an up-to-date history of what emails and texts your patient has received. 

Implementing automated patient communication will pay big dividends in time-savings, with those benefits being realized almost immediately.  

The Top 5 Flex Features To Boost Efficiency in Your Dental Practice

Again, Flex has literally dozens of features that can positively contribute to patient communication in your practice; however, these 5 aspects of Flex stand out as differentiators when compared to other systems on the market and how they integrate with Open Dental to boost the efficiency of your practice.

If you have any questions about Flex and how it can work to supercharge your Open Dental software, please feel free to reach out to a member of our team via the button below or you can schedule a demo at your convenience. We would love to get to know you and your practice. 

Ready to Learn More About Flex?

If you’re an Open Dental user looking for a patient communication solution, please ask for opinions of our solution from other Open Dental practices. We pride ourselves on creating Flex fans for life. The words of our customers are our best reference and we think you’ll like what you find.

Our team members are all what we affectionately call “Flex-perts” and make it a priority to address all requests quickly and knowledgeably. If you have any questions or would like to learn more, please click the button below and submit your questions online. A member of our team will connect with you shortly and help you understand the value that Flex can bring to your practice and your patients.