Are You Looking for a Dentist Near You?

If you’ve ever moved or changed job you are likely to have dealt with the issue of finding a new dentist. The normal channels are to ask friends and colleagues, check Yelp or even check your insurance company’s website. None of these channels ensure that the dentist that you find meets your standards clinically, professionally or even personally. So, how can you find a new dentist near you that you can trust with your health?

Here is a list of most common factors that patients consider when they are looking for a dentist in their area:

• Quality of the clinical dental work: Patients use online (Yelp) and offline (friends and family) references to ensure that the clinical quality of an office meets their expectations.
• Modernity: Does the office use state of the art technology or is it still using a tools that were used ages ago? That does make a difference in how comfortable a dental experience is.
• Specialized dental procedures: Many patients educate themselves before coming to the office. They research the new procedures in dentistry (like CEREC, Invisalign, etc) and would like their new office to offer these services instead of outdated treatment methods.
• Accessibility: Whether it’s for booking an appointment or asking a question about their insurance coverage, patients care about how easy it is to get the personalized information they need.
• Appointment availability: This is an interesting one. Patients usually book their first appointment within the next 3-4 days. If the office doesn’t have availability, then it’s possible that patients would try another office with availability.
• Insurance coverage: Does the office accept their insurance?
• Is the dentist close by? Patient would like to go to an office that is close to their work or their home.

Simply put it’s usually not easy to find a dentist near you that satisfies everything that you like to see in a dental office. A modern dental office that you like may not be accessible or not accept your insurance. It’s challenging, and often painful, to finally find a dentist nearby that you are comfortable with.

Many people are also not looking for a dentist until they have pain! This is common and it puts a clock on the process. In many cases, you may not have the time, or the patience, of researching every aspect of a dental office. That can lead to bad experiences that you will have to pay for (figuratively and literally) for a long time.

The is no silver bullet for finding a new dentist near you. It’s hard. The trick is to stick with the one that you like for as long as you can. This may prove difficult due to changing addresses, work, insurance and other life events. We suggest the following approach:

1. Look online or ask around to find a few candidates
2. Check and see if you can find reviews from their patients on a reputable third party website like Yelp and Google. Some dental-specific websites do accept requests from dentists to remove or hide reviews so we don’t recommend visiting those. Stick to well know generic ones.
3. Look for reviews that are detailed which provide reasons as to why the experience was good/bad instead of saying “the service was great” without any reason why.
4. Check the number of reviews. The more reviews an office has, the more reliable the average of the reviews are. An office with 10 reviews is not that reliable.
5. Contact the office and ask them to check your insurance coverage and see how fast and effective they respond. You don’t want to go to an office that is not responsive and takes days for it to respond to a simple query.
6. See if it’s easy to do things online. It’s usually a good indicator as to how modern an office is (even clinically). An office that uses a template website with some copy/pasted material usually doesn’t provide a great service clinically either (or hasn’t been updated for a long time).
7. Give it a try but be open to change it early on if you are not comfortable with it.

We make it easy to find the information that you need to trust us enough to give us a try. Once you do, we are confident that you will not want to go anywhere else. We are making it easy to find a dentist near you because:

• The information that you need is easily accessible on our website.
• You can chat with us from our website or our mobile app 24/7 (or call/email us) and ask questions and we will be happy to respond even if you are not yet our patient.
• We have multiple locations and even will Uber you to/from our office to make the proximity a non-issue. It cannot be easier to come to your dental appointment.
• Even if you move (within our coverage area), chances are we have (or will have) an office in that area. You won’t need to look for a new dentist near by. We have your files, X-rays, and history and will offer you a similar experience in all of our offices.

Check what our patients say about us or ask us your questions before you come in. We are confident that the experience that you will have in Soothing Dental will be unmatched and you will not want to ever change your dentist.