OPERATIONS

How better patient experience tracking can drive bottom line revenue

You probably already watch your production per visit, case acceptance, and hygiene reappointment numbers like a hawk. But do you know whether your patients actually felt heard? Whether they understood what they were paying for? Whether the front desk picked up the phone?

What’s happening: Patient experience is quietly becoming the next DSO operating metric, and the gap between tracking it well and tracking it badly could determine whether your patients stick around for the next appointment or quietly schedule somewhere else.

• Case studies abound of DSOs and practices that are seeing positive results after focusing on tracking and improving different patient experience: Smile Workshop drove a 193% increase in reviews and surfaced problems for local teams, Dr. Dental saw its online rating jump from 4 stars to 4.7, and Pearl Street Dental Partners said its follow-up workflow helped schedule more than $1.1 million year-to-date across 43 locations.

Why it’s happening: Scale is forcing the issue. Ensuring a quality patient experience is one thing with one or two locations, and quite a different challenge across dozens of locations. As DSOs scale up, tracking patient experience metrics becomes critical to maintaining consistency across practices and surfacing issues before they show up as a serious, organization-wide patient retention problem.

• CareQuest's North Carolina oral health initiative offers an instructive example. In this case, practices began tracking 14 patient-reported experience metrics and uncovered previously unaddressed issues ranging from price transparency to scheduling bottlenecks that left patients frustrated. 

Why it matters: Patient experience isn't just a "soft" metric. Dental-specific studies have found that a positive patient experience is crucial to driving loyalty and return visits, and DSOs that have deployed structured experience programs report meaningful gains in review volume, booking conversion, and revenue recovery from recall and reactivation workflows. 

• Studies of the broader healthcare sector have even found associations between patient experience and self-rated and objectively measured health outcomes. In other words, patients that feel well-treated are more likely to have positive health outcomes.

What you can do: A blended scorecard built off a variety of touchpoints with patients and data about patient behavior is the best way to get a realistic picture of your clients experience. Here are some tips to get started:

• Begin with a short post-visit survey covering access, wait time, communication, treatment understanding, cost clarity, and likelihood to return or recommend.

• Consider including the opportunity for patients to submit free-text comments and feedback. With AI tools, practices can easily compile these to draw out insights and common concerns (or praise!).

• Pair direct patient feedback with hard operating data: broken appointments, recall performance, follow-up completion, response times, review-response rates, and booking conversion.

• Review results by location, not just at enterprise level, and read comments weekly rather than quarterly to identify problems before they spiral. 

What about net promoter scores? Sending a post-visit survey asking for a 1 to 10 net promoter score (NPS) is a fine starting point, and something many practices already do, but research has found this metric often adds limited standalone value and can mislead in markets where patients don't have real provider choice. 

Bottom line: Like any part of the business, understanding your patient experience at scale requires a rigorous, data-driven approach. The evidence shows that the DSOs that get it right will enjoy a real advantage when it comes to keeping patients coming back.