Modernising Dental Practice Management Software and Streamlining Operations in a Practice with 20 Years of Legacy Dental 4 Windows Usage

Location: Blue Mountains, NSW
Size: 3 practitioners, 13 total staff
Serving general dentistry in the Blue Mountains area since 1998

The practice owner inherited the business from his father and realised that their workflows were completely outdated. He attempted to tweak and work with their existing software to automate tasks such as sending text messages to patients, but inevitably felt like he was fitting a square peg in a round hole.

Principle’s best-practice features make life easier, save time and provide consistency & accountability

The practice owner has a background in IT and had a lot of innovative ideas for how to run his practice, but felt like those ideas were not possible in D4W. Mainly, he wanted to automate as much as possible, so that his staff could focus on the patient experience rather than repeatable, menial tasks which they had been doing for the last 20+ years. 

With Principle, he found that he could automate patient communication such as appointment reminders and courtesy messages, as well as automate task creation for things like following up treatment plans after a new patient appointment is completed. These tasks and messages fire off based on a treatment being booked or completed. He was even able to set recurring tasks, ensuring important things weren’t forgotten about. He was delighted to find Principle’s “task manager” feature gave him full visibility of the practice’s tasks, ensuring complete accountability across his team. 

Furthermore, he created templates for various treatments that were specific to his practice. These had item codes, templated notes, patient education and pricing all built in, and became the foundation of the appointments that his dentists could build upon. 

His favourite feature of all was the templated notes where he could write scripts for his front of house staff, ensuring the correct information was received on the phone and inputted into Principle every single time.  His clinical staff could also utilise Principle’s templated notes functionality. This ensured that their clinical notes were thorough and they were asking the right questions to their patients without fail. Furthermore, Principle includes notes that are categorised by type such as social, scheduling or clinical; these different contexts to the notes make them more meaningful and useful.  He also loves the ability to filter them according to their tags, their note type and could readily find them via the search function.

Transitioning from 20+ years of D4W to Principle. 

The transition from D4W to Principle went as smoothly as could be described, especially considering the 20+ years of data that was brought over from their old server. Note that Principle is cloud based. The data that Principle brings across from D4W, is incredibly comprehensive and in addition to patient details (name, date of birth, etc), Principle migrates treatment plans, staff, including provider details, fee schedules and account information, appointments including notes & treatments, treatment plans, clinical notes, clinical charts including dentition records & periodontal records plus much more. After the data was migrated, the Practice Owner and his nominated staff were able to check their data to ensure they were happy with it in advance of their go-live date.  

Whilst Principle was migrating the data, the Practice Owner and his team had online training workshops where his Customer Success Manager facilitated training through Google Meets and was able to personalise it to the staff’s requirements. On launch day, Principle’s Customer Success Team made themselves available to assist with queries, but also helped with their first few patients that attended the practice, ensuring a smooth transition. Post launch, the Practice Owner’s staff had access to online training videos and other training material as well as a dedicated Customer Success Representative who helped with any questions on-the-go. Principle’s staff endeavour to respond to their clients within five minutes of the query being received during business hours.  

Now that Principle is used throughout the practice, the practice is enjoying using the new software. Practice Owner is happier with his front office workflows and finding that Principle’s templates and integrations reduces keying errors and predictable workflows to follow. More importantly, clinicians are loving using Principle, with 69% of their patients having accepted their treatment plan and their next appointment booked.