Implement an AI-Powered Patient Engagement and Recall System
The ROI of AI for dental patient recall is a 15-20% increase in hygiene appointments booked from your existing patient list. It reduces front-desk staff time spent on manual phone calls and texts by over 80%.
A custom AI recall system connects directly to your Practice Management Software (PMS), understands patient history, and conducts two-way SMS conversations to get appointments scheduled. The build scope depends on your PMS (e.g., Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental) and the complexity of your scheduling rules across multiple hygienists and locations.
We built a recall system for a 2-doctor practice with 3 hygienists and a 7,000-patient database. Their front desk previously spent 3-4 hours daily on recall calls. After a 3-week build, the AI agent handles 95% of recall conversations, and the practice saw a 17% lift in hygiene bookings within 60 days.
What Problem Does This Solve?
Most dental offices use the recall module built into their PMS or a bolt-on service like Weave or Demandforce. These systems send generic, one-way SMS blasts: "Hi Jane, you are due for your cleaning. Please call us to book." Patients ignore these messages because they are impersonal and require them to stop what they are doing to make a phone call.
When patients do reply via text, the interaction breaks. A patient might respond, "I have new insurance, is it in-network?" or "Any chance for a Tuesday morning next month?" Standard recall software cannot answer these questions. It creates an alert for your front desk staff, forcing them to manually look up the patient, check the schedule, and text back. This defeats the purpose of automation, turning a time-saving tool into a disorganized ticketing system.
The core failure is that these tools are not conversational; they are notification systems. They cannot access the live schedule to offer specific times, cannot answer simple questions, and cannot understand intent. This leaves your staff to manage hundreds of disjointed text threads, while thousands of dollars in potential hygiene revenue sits unscheduled in your patient database.
How Does It Work?
We start by establishing a secure, read-only connection to your on-premise or cloud PMS database. A Python script runs daily to sync overdue patient records, extracting key details like last visit date, scheduled family members, and previous appointment notes. This data populates a dedicated Supabase database, creating a clean data source for the AI.
We use the Claude 3 Sonnet API to power a conversational AI agent. For each patient, it drafts a personalized message that references their history, like "Hi John, it's been just over 6 months since your last cleaning with Dr. Smith. We have a few spots open with your hygienist, Sarah, next week." This initial message sees a 40% higher response rate than generic templates.
The core of the system is a FastAPI application deployed on AWS Lambda that manages the two-way SMS conversation. When a patient replies, the AI agent understands their request, queries the live schedule via the PMS connection, and offers 2-3 specific, available appointment slots. The entire response cycle, from receiving a text to offering times, takes under 800 milliseconds. The patient can book, ask for different times, or ask a question, and the AI handles the entire flow for over 95% of interactions.
Once a patient confirms a time, the system writes the appointment directly back into your PMS schedule. The infrastructure costs on AWS Lambda for an office with 10,000 patients typically run under $40 per month. Your front desk staff only gets involved when the AI flags a complex query (e.g., a specific clinical question), which happens in less than 1 in 20 conversations.
What Are the Key Benefits?
Fill Your Hygiene Schedule in 3 Weeks
From PMS data sync to the first AI-booked appointment in 15 business days. Stop letting unscheduled recall appointments sit idle for another quarter.
A Fixed Build Cost, Not a Monthly Fee
One scoped project replaces recurring SaaS fees from tools like Weave. Your only ongoing cost is for cloud hosting, not per-patient or per-user licenses.
You Own The System and Patient Data
We deliver the full source code to your private GitHub repository. You are not locked into a vendor; the entire system runs on your own infrastructure.
Flags Conversations That Need a Human
The AI is trained to escalate. If a patient asks a clinical question or expresses frustration, the conversation is immediately flagged and sent to your front desk.
Writes Appointments Into Your PMS
The system integrates directly with Dentrix, Eaglesoft, or Open Dental. Confirmed appointments appear on your schedule automatically, no manual entry required.
What Does the Process Look Like?
PMS Discovery and Data Sync (Week 1)
You provide secure, read-only access to your PMS. We analyze your recall data and scheduling rules, delivering a data map and proposed messaging strategy.
AI Agent Development (Week 2)
We build and train the conversational AI using your specific scheduling logic. You receive a private link to a test environment to interact with the agent yourself.
Deployment and Integration (Week 3)
We deploy the system on AWS, connect it to a dedicated phone number, and run a live test with a small batch of 50-100 patients to monitor performance.
Monitoring and Handoff (Weeks 4-8)
We monitor booking rates and conversation accuracy, tuning the AI as needed. You receive full source code, documentation, and a runbook for long-term operation.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What factors affect the build cost and timeline?
- The main factors are your PMS type and how it is hosted (on-premise vs. cloud). On-premise systems like Dentrix often require a small data-syncing utility to be installed on your server. Other factors include the number of office locations and the complexity of your hygienist scheduling rules. A typical single-location office can expect a 3-week build.
- What happens if the AI misunderstands a patient's text?
- The AI has a confidence threshold. If it cannot parse a patient's request with high confidence, or if the patient uses words indicating frustration, it will not guess. Instead, it sends an alert to your front desk's email or Slack with the full conversation transcript. This ensures a human can take over complex or sensitive cases immediately.
- How is this better than our existing Weave or Demandforce service?
- Those are multi-tenant SaaS tools that primarily send one-way reminders. Syntora builds a dedicated, conversational AI you own. It can have genuine back-and-forth conversations, answer questions about insurance, and book appointments directly into your live schedule. It replaces a notification tool with a system that actually closes the loop and gets patients booked.
- How do you ensure HIPAA compliance with patient data?
- The entire system is deployed within a HIPAA-eligible AWS environment that you own. All Patient Health Information (PHI) is encrypted at rest and in transit. We do not store any PHI on Syntora systems. As part of the engagement, we sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with your practice, outlining our shared responsibilities for protecting patient data.
- Does my front desk staff need extensive training?
- No. The system is designed to be invisible for 95% of interactions. The only training required is on how to handle the handful of conversations the AI escalates for human review each day. Instead of learning a new software dashboard, their job becomes simpler: managing exceptions instead of making hundreds of manual calls and texts.
- What if we switch our PMS software in the future?
- Because you own the source code, the system is adaptable. The core conversational logic remains the same. Migrating to a new PMS would require a small, scoped project to build a new data connector for that specific software. This is far simpler and cheaper than replacing an entire third-party SaaS subscription and losing all your existing logic.
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