Launching 2Dental to Optimize the Operation of Dental Offices

When we started Soothing Dental in 2016, our goal was to provide the best dental care possible to our patients. What we found out quickly thereafter was that a great patient experience is only possible by having an efficient set of operational tools and a great team needless to say. We have built many software tools internally to help optimize the operation of dental offices in Soothing Dental. Our patients, staff and doctors love the outcome of using these tools. We are now opening them up to the public under 2Dental.

It’s important to realize that the challenges of running a boutique dental office is different from that of multiple practices. The problems change as the business grows and unless you have people who are familiar with the evolving environment, the business will stop growing and in many cases it will even suffer and shrink.

For example, for a smaller offices, the challenges are related to making sure the office has the type of staff with various skills. A smaller office cannot afford to have multiple people each with a certain type of skill to handle various things; they need unicorns who can do them all. This makes it challenging for such offices to find people who qualify for these unicorn positions. This may impact the operation of the dental office and patient experience negatively. Also, offering some services may be out of reach for them due to their overhead. As the dental practice grows, the problems shift to being able to manage the growing number of staff while maintaining the standard of care. The office can afford hiring people with certain skills but now you need a management layer to make sure the team works well together. The problem at this stage is to ensure there are great managers on the team and they have access to the data that would help them discover and address the issues fast. Specially when multiple practices are added to the group, the management problem and maintaining the standard between all offices becomes super challenging to address. This is in addition to making sure that the patient experience improves with today’s expectations of patients.

Very early on, it became apparent to us that the current tools that are available for the operation of dental offices are not built for this era. These tools are mostly a collection of “features” that are cramped together by antiquated software companies so that they have longer list of features than the competitors. None of these tools are built to solve real problems related to the operation of dental offices. When using those, the office would require a large number of very skilled staff to be able to find a way to somehow piece together different tools and services from various vendors to barely keep up with operational challenges today.

That’s why we took it upon ourselves to build our own tools with real goals in mind. We didn’t want to compete on how many features we can cramp into our product. We wanted it to solve our own problems and run our offices smoothly.

Over the last two years, we have built a complete set of solutions, many of which are using artificial intelligence, to help our patients, doctors and staff. Our patient app gives patients control over their oral health. The AI-backed system shows the value of each treatments to patients so that they understand why a certain procedure is necessary (or not). That reduces the time that our team has to spend with patients to show them why they need those treatment. 2Dental also helps our staff with almost every single aspect of running the business from answering patient inquiries, checking insurance eligibility, billing, payments and even HR-related tasks like employment contracts, time tracking (i.e. clock in/out), location mobility (for multi-practices), payroll, bonus tracking and more.

This has helped us run our offices with 30 lower overhead while doubling the size of our business size every year.

Talking to other dentists, we have realized that our problems are not unique to us. That’s why we have decided to open up the set of tools that we built for our own offices to other dentists with one or multiple offices, and Dental Service Organizations (DSOs) to help them run their own practices without being a part of Soothing Dental. We are releasing these tools under 2Dental.

Our public launch will be at the California Dental Association (CDA) meeting in San Francisco. If you are planning to attend the CDA, reserve your 15-minute timeslot with us at the CDA (booth 2134) for a one-on-one demo. As a part of this, you will also meet some of the Bay Area’s most prominent dentists who are working with Soothing Dental and have been using the software on daily basis for a while now. We can show you how 2Dental solutions can help you, your staff and your patients.

Over the next few articles, we will explore more of the benefits of what 2Dental offers and the areas.