The Cost of Switching

Nicole is the office manager at North Coast Dental’s McKinleyville location. McKinleyville sits on California’s far north coast, just below the Oregon border, hours from the nearest major city.

“We don’t have a lot of dentists,” Nicole said. “People usually reschedule their appointments very quickly to get back in. They don’t wanna lose their spots.”

Nicole runs one of two offices; the other is 14 miles away in Eureka, CA. Together the offices serve more than 5,000 patients across a vast rural area known for its towering Redwoods.

Only one office ran on NexHealth: the scheduling, the intake forms, the campaigns that refill its openings. Then the practice changed hands and decided to switch.

“I was much, much happier with NexHealth,” Nicole said. “So were our patients.”

The trade

Nicole didn’t choose the platform. Eureka's office manager had already signed with it, and the new doctor wanted both offices working the same way.

"The only thing that appealed to me is that I could see my other office's schedule, make changes, and add to it if needed," she said.

She notified NexHealth at the beginning of May and her office signed its own contract with the new platform on May 6.

The cost

It broke from the outside in. Patients, then the front desk, then the schedule.

Forms failed first. "The timeout after 10 minutes deletes everything," Nicole said. "You have to start over. It doesn't save your place." A patient who paused came back to nothing.

The forms ran on long drop-down menus. Nicole wanted yes or no.

They also asked patients to upload a photo of themselves. "Not many people want to upload their own photo," she said. "That should not be a requirement."

The front desk called support and instead got webinars. The first ran an hour with no walkthrough. Asked how onboarding had gone, Nicole answered in one word: "Non-existent."

Then the schedule.

“My doctor in this office noticed that we have more holes in our schedule in the last two weeks than we’ve had in the last six months,” Nicole said. “When he’s telling me that, you need to change back.”

“All of these things,” she said, “took only 16 days to make me go back.”

The return

It was underway within one morning. NexHealth assigned an onboarding manager, McKelle, who had already worked with the practice's outside IT contractor.

Nicole met with her that morning. The system was up and running again and she only needed to log in. "McKelle is wonderful," she said.

The forms are the ones she already knew: "clear and concise, not overwhelming." This time she is taking more of them, including consent forms the office had never fully utilized.

Support has names. "It is a night and day experience on customer service," she said. "I get one of three people always. Johnny tends to be the person I get the most and it's always the same Johnny."

Coming back costs her the cross-office view and the direct messaging, and Nicole still wants both. "I don't actually have a messaging system now," she said, "so if that happens, we are very interested."

"I'm just tickled pink that we're gonna come back," Nicole said.

McKinleyville has returned to NexHealth. Eureka, for now, is staying on the other platform.

The gap

Asked what the other platform had that NexHealth was missing, Nicole gave a one-word answer: analytics. She called it the only gap between the two programs.

What she described was specific. It could "break down and tell me in a few seconds, who had crowns on their treatment plan but never booked." She said, "I didn't realize how much treatment was sitting out there."

Her doctor wanted the same view. "My doctor is a numbers man, and so that is his game," she said. "If I can show him how we're being successful or how we need to improve, that would be awesome."

NexHealth announced its answer on July 23rd, releasing NexHealth Insights.