What You Need To Know: The patient communication components of PLZ are the most comprehensive, most automated, most effective available in dentistry. No competitor's system is as well designed, as flexible, as powerful. And PLZ is the only system that can reach 100% of your patients, regardless of how tech-savvy they are (or aren't). 

If you want to know why... please read the rest of this page. It's long, but we believe it will convince you that PLZ will do a better job of communicating with your patients than any other system you could use. We welcome comparisons to any other system, because we are confident of the results!

"The Lighthouse team has done it again, taking vital office systems (appointment confirmation and recall) and making them totally automated and super efficient. As a bonus, PLZ has reduced our no-shows, improved our office's high-tech image, and freed up our staff for more face-to-face time with patients."      C. Randy Harvell, D.M.D., Huntsville, AL

In any dental practice, there are many opportunities to communicate with patients. Some are for very specific purposes (confirm appointments), others are only for reinforcing the relationship you have with your patients (newsletters, birthday greetings). The automated patient communications features of PLZ have been designed to do all of these things, and to do them very effectively, and very, very efficiently. (100% automatic is as efficient as you can get!)

The principals of Lighthouse have decades of experience in marketing (external and internal), dental software design and practice management consulting. Nowhere do these three capabilities come together better than in the patient communications features (a.k.a. "the messaging system") of PLZ.

Consulting
We have more than 75 years experience helping dental practices operate more profitably. We have designed systems for optimizing every administrative area of dentistry, and implemented them in hundreds of practices. So when we designed our "routine patient communications" systems for PLZ (appointment confirmations, recall notices, reactivation, surveys, etc.), we didn't just replace monthly postcards with monthly emails, and confirmation phone calls with text messages. Instead, we took our proven systems, enhanced them with the latest messaging capabilities, and truly automated them by having our server take over the work that previously had to be done by staff members.

One of the most significant aspects of the PLZ messaging system is that we use five different types of messages in most of our patient communications systems, so that we can reach 100% of your patients; email, text messages, postcards, letters, and automated phone calls. (No competitor uses more than three of these, which means they ignore at least 40% to 50% of your patients! Who would want to use a system that ignores so many patients?)

If you read about each of the systems referred to below (WHERE?), we think you'll appreciate the thought that went into designing them. It will be obvious to you why they simply work better: better than any system of any of our competitors; better than any system you've ever used.

Software Design
We're the people who envisioned, designed and programmed PracticeWorks, and who helped make CAESY the undisputed leader in dental patient education software. Before that - Trend Sierra (a dental and medical program sold all over California in the 1980's). We've been at this a very long time. When we started working on PLZ, the first feature we designed was the automated patient communication system, bringing all of our experience to bear on this one specific area of dental practice management. Here are just some of the things that make the software behind PLZ so much better than any competitor: 

We synchronize the data on your server with ours every 10 minutes, all day long, so that the information we use to send your messages is fresh! Other companies synchronize only once or twice a day, resulting in messages being sent for appointments that have been cancelled or rescheduled, causing patient confusion and embarrassing phone calls.

We automatically mark appointments 'CONFIRMED' in your schedule, within 10 minutes after your patient clicks on the "Yes, I'll be there" response in the email we sent them. Other systems require you to log onto their website, review a list of confirmed appointments, then manually mark each one 'confirmed' in your schedule.

Whenever appropriate, our emails have multiple patient responses, to accommodate all of the situations that commonly pertain to the patient at that time. Other systems have a single response ("Confirmed" for appointment reminders), or no responses at all - they're just reminders, or requests for the patient to take some action, but they don't give the patient the option to start that action from the email.

Each time a patient clicks on any response in any PLZ email, they're directed to an appropriate page on your website. It might be a simple "thank you" page, or it might have a web form that lets them communicate a question or request directly to you, thereby reducing time-wasting "phone tag".

PLZ can handle virtually any type of custom messaging situation with our integrated "rules engine". A simple example is that all the messages we send have different wording for children and adult patients. More complex examples include: totally different messages for new patients, hospital patients, patients who are having sedation dentistry, patients who are habitually late for appointments, patients who require pre-medication, patients who are seen in your satellite location, appointments during the winter months in "snow country"... you name it, we can handle it. And if you make "fake" appointments - i.e., if you ever use your appointment book for anything other than real appointments - we can handle that easily. We know of no other company offering patient communications services that can handle special situations like these.

Marketing
Every time your patients receive a message from you, it's an opportunity for you to market to them. Sometimes the marketing is obvious, because it's the main point of the message, like an email blast to announce a special on a cosmetic procedure. Sometimes it's not obvious at all, like a message to confirm an appointment. But every message received by your patient is really two messages: the content of the message (the words and pictures), and the image of your practice that the message conveys to the patient.

All PLZ messages have been designed to be all of these things, so that the image they convey to your patient is that your practice is progressive, professional, concerned about the patient's well-being and their time. During the setup phase, you'll have an opportunity to review all messages to make sure they say what you want them to say, before the first message is sent.

We believe that every message we deliver to your patients should reinforce your brand. If you have a logo, it will be included in your emails, postcards, letters and newsletters. If you have a website, we'll make sure your emails have the same "look and feel". When your patient receives a PLZ message, it will reinforce the idea that you are their dentist!

Finally, PLZ ties together consulting, software and marketing with RealCall, the optional tracking telephone number that can be used on any type of PLZ message. With a RealCall number, you know how effective your internal marketing is, you know how your team is handling incoming phone calls, and with the web-based reporting, you can make informed management decisions about changes you may need to be making in your practice.