I need some feedback from those that are using Lighthouse360 with OD.
Our practice has used LH for about 2 months. It has not been the system improvement that we had hoped for based upon these observations:
1) While OD gathers information clearly on the patient's preferred contact method, confirmation method and recall method - and even if text messages are okay - LH does not follow this information. LH will confirm based upon the email address first, text messages second, phone call third and then finally to mail a post card. Further customization is required to change this default pattern. For example, if a person does not want an email - even though OD has wireless phone as preferred - you have to place the "#" symbol before their email in the OD screen.
2) If you go to the LH web portal, preferences can be set individually that address situations noted in #1 above, but this requires the placement of information in LH. We want to also have information on where to contact patients for any number of reasons so really we are needing to place the same information in both LH and OD. This is an extra step that takes additional time for a team member to manage.
3) If LH calls and leaves a message, we have no way of knowing that this event happened. Leaving a message would not create a confirmed status. We have run into situations where we have left messages in addition to what LH has done. It's a bit embarrassing to leave multiple messages.
4) LH requires that people reply to a text message with only a "c" when confirming. If the patient replies with anything other than a "c" the message goes to a team members email where they then have to read the email and change the patient's status manually.
5) The automated phone calls when answered ask a person to press 1 to confirm. This event sometimes automatically connects the person back to our office where we answer the phone - not knowing who now is calling us. Embarrasing.
6) LH has no way of presenting information on what the appointment is for when they are confirming. Patients end up calling us back to ask what the appointment is for.
These are the top 6 concerns based upon our understanding of the system. Maybe other LH users have workarounds for some of these.
Your feedback would be helpful.
Lighthouse360 users please respond
Re: Lighthouse360 users please respond
sounds about right. automated systems still need to be checked on. we dumped the phone confirmation service because of what you described and the bilingual capabilities didn't work very well. LH is still a great product and I still would recommend it but there is always room for improvement.
Re: Lighthouse360 users please respond
@mkleive: Everything you say is true but wait till I list the cons of front desk staff. Lighthouse may not do everything, but what it does is guaranteed to happen and additionally what it does, LH logs. Before the LH era, we had to choose in every instance whether to believe the patient or the staff member whenever there was a dispute about communications. And even if we believed the staff member (which was 50% of the time) we always had to take the patient's word for it. This was bad for morale on those occasions when the staff member had it right. Since LH is inanimate, people do not take it personally when we say something like, "our system indicates that itcalled you on 3 separate occasions."
Specifically:
1. Call order: this is done to lower their costs and yours. Should it follow OD's preferred contact method. Sure but absent that, it is the cheapest way to do things.
2. You list this as a con but really it is the only solution to the problem at present.
3. This is easily explained. Some patients will deny receiving messages when it is convenient and unless you have feedback there is really no way to prove anything. Of course you can prove you called but they can say the message was garbled. So "Left Message" is essentially non-verifiable and of low value.
4. Again, you want an unequivocal response which is not open to misinterpretation. If you give patients many choices which indicate YES they'll have an easier time saying it was pressed by mistake.
That said I can list ten things I would immediately change in LH if I could.
Ultimately we use LH to structure the task at hand for the front desk. This alone is worth the expense. Can everything LH does, be done using OD and a motivated team that can write custom SQL queries at will? Yes, but good luck finding such a team for a dental office. If you have staff members who fit this description, hang on to them for dear life because the members of this forum are going to try and recruit them away from you.
Specifically:
1. Call order: this is done to lower their costs and yours. Should it follow OD's preferred contact method. Sure but absent that, it is the cheapest way to do things.
2. You list this as a con but really it is the only solution to the problem at present.
3. This is easily explained. Some patients will deny receiving messages when it is convenient and unless you have feedback there is really no way to prove anything. Of course you can prove you called but they can say the message was garbled. So "Left Message" is essentially non-verifiable and of low value.
4. Again, you want an unequivocal response which is not open to misinterpretation. If you give patients many choices which indicate YES they'll have an easier time saying it was pressed by mistake.
That said I can list ten things I would immediately change in LH if I could.
Ultimately we use LH to structure the task at hand for the front desk. This alone is worth the expense. Can everything LH does, be done using OD and a motivated team that can write custom SQL queries at will? Yes, but good luck finding such a team for a dental office. If you have staff members who fit this description, hang on to them for dear life because the members of this forum are going to try and recruit them away from you.
Re: Lighthouse360 users please respond
Hello all!
mklelve - We actually have some of tightest integrations with Open Dental in the market. We DO read (and thus our software is aware of) the "Do not contact" flag, as well as the "preferred confirm method" preferences. That being said, since I honestly am not 100% up to speed on Open Dental and how you guys use it (we work with 30 different PMSs), there is always room for tweaks to our "sync client" that reads Open Dental data and sends it to the Lighthouse 360 server. One of our primary goals is for you to be able to administer your patients from only a single place - Open Dental - where it should be. We only have the "go to the web site and update it" when there is no good place in the PMS to record the data, or the way the PMS stores the data is very different than the way LH360 does.
I'm looking at the code right now, and apparently we currently only use the "preferred confirm method" to set our "automated contact phone number" field, which is a field that we can optionally use to dictate WHICH phone number we should call when making an automated phone call. Even making that work requires a configuration change on our server, so for all practical purposes, it doesn't really do much right now. I can see now that we should change this AT LEAST so if the confirm preference is set to "Do not call", we should turn off txt messages, as well as probably set our "do not contact" flag (which would prevent emails and phone calls also). I'll make that change now.
If you think that setting this status to "Wireless" should turn off emails (by putting the "#" in front of the email automatically), I can certainly make that change. We can make it a "configuration preference", so it works for you only, and anyone else who wants it to work that way. I wouldn't recommend it, because it would turn off ALL communications via email - not just confirmations. But, if you guys think it should optionally work that way, its pretty easy to change.
Re: your #3 - there IS a way to configure LH360 so if the automated call system leaves a message than it ALSO should be considered a confirmation (vs. only if the patient explicitly dials #1 to acknowledge the confirmation). All you need to do is send an email to our support department (or call them) and request that "MessageLeft" be added to your "confirmationReplies" account configuration preference. That will tell our system that you believe ANY phone call, including a "left message" is to be considered a confirmation, and the AutoConfirm feature of LH360 will mark it appropriately in Open Dental.
Re: #4 - the txt message sent to patients tells them to reply "C" to confirm. Any OTHER reply gets emailed to you because we really can't be sure what the patient means. If the patient responds the way they are asked to, we do automatically mark the appointment confirmed in Open Dental without any additional work on your staff's part.
Re: #5 - The automated phone call has an option for the patient to dial to be connected to your office immediately. I wonder if the patients are dialing that instead. If you don't like that option, I'm pretty sure that it can be removed. You actually have some control over what the automated phone message says. If you need to change the wording or what responses are valid, contact our support department and they can help you out.
Re #6 - We don't put appointment information in the reminders due to HIPAA. Emails and even text messages are like post cards - actually sent over "non secure" public communication lines, and thus can be intercepted and read by anyone. We can't put it in the automated phone calls because that would require a custom recording for every type of appointment you have and that would be virtually impossible to maintain.
The bottom line is that we do have ways to re-configure both the way data from Open Dental is interpreted when its sent to our servers for processing, as well as ways of configuring our servers so it can handle your office's preferences as best we can. It won't always be 100% what you are looking for, but we strive to get as close as possible. We've been doing dental software for over 25 years, so we've got most of the major issues handled.
That being said, we are also willing to listen to feedback if we've got something wrong. We've had Open Dental users in the past make suggestions, and we've added them fairly quickly. For example, here is a post about an option we added to put information about confirmations in the Open Dental Audit trail: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4034 Its another example of a configuration option we need to turn on for you, but it can be done.
Jay - I have a list of things I'd like to change in LH360 also! And I can tell you, its longer than 10 items! Software development is always a challenge to direct the finite resources in the best places. We have been able to expand our resources recently, and I've now got a guy dedicated to improving the integration between the PMSs and LH360. As I mentioned earlier, its hard for us to keep up with all the improvements in the PMSs. Open Dental has had a lot of improvements made to it since we first wrote our integration. Some of those improvements may affect the way we SHOULD handle patient communications, but we just haven't caught up.
To everyone - please feel free to private message me here on the forums if you have a question or suggestion about the way LH360 works or should work with Open Dental. I THINK that will forward to my email address. That is the best way to get in contact with me.
mklelve - We actually have some of tightest integrations with Open Dental in the market. We DO read (and thus our software is aware of) the "Do not contact" flag, as well as the "preferred confirm method" preferences. That being said, since I honestly am not 100% up to speed on Open Dental and how you guys use it (we work with 30 different PMSs), there is always room for tweaks to our "sync client" that reads Open Dental data and sends it to the Lighthouse 360 server. One of our primary goals is for you to be able to administer your patients from only a single place - Open Dental - where it should be. We only have the "go to the web site and update it" when there is no good place in the PMS to record the data, or the way the PMS stores the data is very different than the way LH360 does.
I'm looking at the code right now, and apparently we currently only use the "preferred confirm method" to set our "automated contact phone number" field, which is a field that we can optionally use to dictate WHICH phone number we should call when making an automated phone call. Even making that work requires a configuration change on our server, so for all practical purposes, it doesn't really do much right now. I can see now that we should change this AT LEAST so if the confirm preference is set to "Do not call", we should turn off txt messages, as well as probably set our "do not contact" flag (which would prevent emails and phone calls also). I'll make that change now.
If you think that setting this status to "Wireless" should turn off emails (by putting the "#" in front of the email automatically), I can certainly make that change. We can make it a "configuration preference", so it works for you only, and anyone else who wants it to work that way. I wouldn't recommend it, because it would turn off ALL communications via email - not just confirmations. But, if you guys think it should optionally work that way, its pretty easy to change.
Re: your #3 - there IS a way to configure LH360 so if the automated call system leaves a message than it ALSO should be considered a confirmation (vs. only if the patient explicitly dials #1 to acknowledge the confirmation). All you need to do is send an email to our support department (or call them) and request that "MessageLeft" be added to your "confirmationReplies" account configuration preference. That will tell our system that you believe ANY phone call, including a "left message" is to be considered a confirmation, and the AutoConfirm feature of LH360 will mark it appropriately in Open Dental.
Re: #4 - the txt message sent to patients tells them to reply "C" to confirm. Any OTHER reply gets emailed to you because we really can't be sure what the patient means. If the patient responds the way they are asked to, we do automatically mark the appointment confirmed in Open Dental without any additional work on your staff's part.
Re: #5 - The automated phone call has an option for the patient to dial to be connected to your office immediately. I wonder if the patients are dialing that instead. If you don't like that option, I'm pretty sure that it can be removed. You actually have some control over what the automated phone message says. If you need to change the wording or what responses are valid, contact our support department and they can help you out.
Re #6 - We don't put appointment information in the reminders due to HIPAA. Emails and even text messages are like post cards - actually sent over "non secure" public communication lines, and thus can be intercepted and read by anyone. We can't put it in the automated phone calls because that would require a custom recording for every type of appointment you have and that would be virtually impossible to maintain.
The bottom line is that we do have ways to re-configure both the way data from Open Dental is interpreted when its sent to our servers for processing, as well as ways of configuring our servers so it can handle your office's preferences as best we can. It won't always be 100% what you are looking for, but we strive to get as close as possible. We've been doing dental software for over 25 years, so we've got most of the major issues handled.
That being said, we are also willing to listen to feedback if we've got something wrong. We've had Open Dental users in the past make suggestions, and we've added them fairly quickly. For example, here is a post about an option we added to put information about confirmations in the Open Dental Audit trail: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4034 Its another example of a configuration option we need to turn on for you, but it can be done.
Jay - I have a list of things I'd like to change in LH360 also! And I can tell you, its longer than 10 items! Software development is always a challenge to direct the finite resources in the best places. We have been able to expand our resources recently, and I've now got a guy dedicated to improving the integration between the PMSs and LH360. As I mentioned earlier, its hard for us to keep up with all the improvements in the PMSs. Open Dental has had a lot of improvements made to it since we first wrote our integration. Some of those improvements may affect the way we SHOULD handle patient communications, but we just haven't caught up.
To everyone - please feel free to private message me here on the forums if you have a question or suggestion about the way LH360 works or should work with Open Dental. I THINK that will forward to my email address. That is the best way to get in contact with me.
Re: Lighthouse360 users please respond
A correction to my post above re: the "patient contact preferences"
Open Dental does not have a "do not contact" flag on its own. I dug in to our code a little further, and what I thought was a "do not contact" flag in Open Dental is actually a synthetic field our code reads from Open Dental based on the preferred contact methods. Basically, if ANY of the three preferred methods (preferred confirm, preferred contact, or preferred recall) is set to "DO NOT CALL", then we set our "Do not contact" flag. This prevents the patient from being contacted for any reason.
So, we DO honor that setting "somewhat" already. No need for me to make that change.
The offer still stands, however, to suppress email communications to the patient if the preferred confirmation method is "wireless." What I'd probably do is write some code that says "if the patient has a cell phone number, and the preferred confirmation method is wireless, then put the "#" character in front of the email." That would, in effect, say "if the patient wants to be contacted via txt message only, then use text, as email is no longer an option."
Open Dental does not have a "do not contact" flag on its own. I dug in to our code a little further, and what I thought was a "do not contact" flag in Open Dental is actually a synthetic field our code reads from Open Dental based on the preferred contact methods. Basically, if ANY of the three preferred methods (preferred confirm, preferred contact, or preferred recall) is set to "DO NOT CALL", then we set our "Do not contact" flag. This prevents the patient from being contacted for any reason.
So, we DO honor that setting "somewhat" already. No need for me to make that change.
The offer still stands, however, to suppress email communications to the patient if the preferred confirmation method is "wireless." What I'd probably do is write some code that says "if the patient has a cell phone number, and the preferred confirmation method is wireless, then put the "#" character in front of the email." That would, in effect, say "if the patient wants to be contacted via txt message only, then use text, as email is no longer an option."