Dentisoft And Interactive Intelligence Partner To Improve Service And Reduce Costs For Dental Offices

Bethesda, MD - Interactive Intelligence Inc. and Dentisoft Technologies have partnered to offer dental offices automated appointment reminders designed to improve patient service and reduce costs.

Dentisoft has integrated the Interactive Intelligence icNotify outbound hosted notification features into its Web-based dental practice system to provide the new automated appointment reminder service.

"This appointment reminder service expands the scope of our patient messaging capabilities with a unique and cost-effective, two-way communications vehicle," said Dentisoft Technologies CEO, Jeff Ulanet. "Dental office customers have already reported a significant reduction in staff-related costs and as much as a 50 percent reduction in missed appointments through better contact rates."

icNotify automatically triggers outbound calls that deliver pre-recorded appointment reminders to patients, thus eliminating the need for dental office staff to make manual calls.

The service enables patients to respond to automated calls through interactive voice response, which automatically confirms the appointment and updates the dental appointment book. Alternatively, an integrated voice over IP feature can connect the two parties for scheduling changes and cancellations.

Dentisoft is offering the new appointment reminder service to its 1,000 dental office customers serving more than 900,000 patients nationwide.

"Our new service eliminates the need for manual data entry, installation of local hardware, and labor-intensive report generation, all of which have typically characterized such applications in the past," Ulanet said.

Dentisoft selected Interactive Intelligence as its technology partner because of the company's mature and scalable communications platform, according to Ulanet.

"We selected icNotify because Interactive Intelligence offered more than a decade of experience developing feature-rich messaging applications used by global organizations with thousands of employees," Ulanet said. "The company also put a focus on the flexibility, security and reliability of its hosted services – attributes that are of paramount importance in the dynamic and highly regulated healthcare industry."

Interactive Intelligence sees the partnership as a major opportunity to fulfill a significant market need.

"Our research shows that the majority of the more than 60,000 dental offices located throughout the U.S. are still saddled by the high costs and limited capabilities of traditional communications," said Interactive Intelligence senior vice president of worldwide marketing, Joseph A. Staples. "Together, Dentisoft and Interactive Intelligence can help these practitioners improve patient service and reduce costs with a flexible and easy-to-use hosted communications option."

Dentisoft plans to expand its use of the Interactive Intelligence hosted services with new modes of interaction, such as text messaging, and additional telephony applications, such as the ability to send automated notifications that alert patients to new dental procedures based on their unique profiles, according to Ulanet.

SOURCE: Interactive Intelligence Inc. and Dentisoft Technologies