Dentrix Ideas

We have been 6+ months of using the DentrixHub/Demand force platform. In this time we have noticed a number of “glitches” but for the purpose of this input I’m referring to appointment reminders and auto texts sent out relating to patient appointments. We would get patients telling us here and there that they didn’t receive their reminders or only some of them. We were unable to see anything on our end causing it and they were set up properly to receive them. Some of these were individuals and some of them were families. In the case of families, they were receiving reminders for some but not all the family members. We had been chalking it up to one of the many tech glitches we have seen with the new patient engage system thinking that they would get resolved over time / version updates. Over the past few weeks there were a significant number that were experiencing this. They were getting reminders for 2 of their kids and confirming them but didn’t realize that they also had other kids with appointments at the same time. When we looked at the appointment book, all family members had been confirmed. The patient shows up on time with kids for the appointment that they received appointments for but didn’t have the other children who also had appointments. Families are not the only ones that these “glitches” effect. I had an appointment scheduled for myself and purposely did not reply to the texts to confirm my appointment because I wanted to see if I would get all of them. I did not receive all of them. The sequence was apparently screwed up because the software scheduled the initial text to go out at 11:56am and the 2nd text to go the next day at 11:55am. Meaning that it did not meet the FCC requirements of the 24hr period because it was 1MINUTE short. Why in the world was a limitation not programed into the software that would keep that from happening?

It is quite clear that actual dental offices must not have had any input in the development or adaptation of the demand force system in meeting the needs of those offices. Why would you ever implement a system that is limited by federal regulation in the number of texts that can be sent in a given time period that doesn’t/can’t group family members with appointments on the same day into a single text, limiting the total number of messages that need to be sent? With as many texts that are defaulted to go out for each appointment, did anyone ever stop to think that multiple family members (kids) would ever be attached to the same phone number and that it might cause a problem? That they wouldn’t get all the notifications that they need? Why would you not inform the offices that are buying/paying for this product that a given phone # is limited by federal regulation in the number and frequency of texts that they are able to receive from this type of system. Your customers (dental offices like mine) are paying a price in actual dollars for this short sightedness. It is costing us actual missed appointments and manpower hours to figure out why this bells and whistles new system isn’t working. It isn’t the patient’s fault per-se that they are only bringing in the family members that they receive confirmation texts for. It isn’t our fault that we are not calling to confirm appointments when they are E-Confirmed in the appointment books because a parent confirmed 1-2 of the kids that the received the text for but didn’t know that the software would also confirm for kids that they had forgotten or were unaware also had appointments.

The platform is severely lacking in its ability to keep our patients and families informed of all scheduled appointments. We pay a considerable amount of money for a convenience that is not there with the way this system is set up. In the long term, I’m not sure that the programing logic of this system makes sense for us to continue use of this system without considerable changes in a very short time frame!