Case Studies
Wave Dental Professionals
The gap: treatment left unscheduled
Wave Dental Professionals’ dentists diagnose treatment, and its case managers and sales reps do a strong job getting patients to say yes. Like every dental group, some patients still leave without booking the crown, the SRP, the implant case or the next cleaning.
The challenge: finding time across ten offices
Wave Dental Professionals had follow-up processes in place, but they depended on busy staff finding the time to work them consistently. Across ten offices, that was a lot of time to find: first to work out which patients to reach out to and for what, then to personally follow up with every one of them.
The solution: Codent AI
So Wave Dental Professionals added Codent AI. The AI audits every chart, and U.S.-based treatment coordinators personally take it from there, texting patients and booking them directly onto each office’s calendar.
about the practice
The Team
Dr. Steven Wingfield
President & CEO
Jennifer Emm
VP of Operations
Rebecca Dycus
Senior Case Manager
The Opportunity
Wave Dental Professionals is a ten-location dental group of general and specialty offices, and it’s still adding locations. Each office has its own staff, its own schedule and its own list of patients who need care and haven’t scheduled it.
That list includes:
Diagnosed treatment that was never scheduled: crowns, fillings, SRP, and at the specialty offices, implants and sedation cases
Patients with no next cleaning on the books
Patients who broke an appointment and haven’t rebooked
Patients who haven’t been in for a long time and are still marked active
Jennifer Emm, VP of Operations, explains that follow-up processes only work if individual staff members can find the time to work them, consistently, and there are only so many hours in the day.
When an office gets busy, the patient in front of staff comes first, then the phones, scheduling, insurance and treatment presentations. Calling or texting someone who left without booking gets pushed down the list. Dr. Steven Wingfield wanted more follow-up happening at the office level.
Adding a location adds more staff and another list, but not more hours in the day.
And the work starts before the first call. A name on an unscheduled treatment report doesn’t say whether the treatment is still owed, what was planned, what insurance says or what the patient has done since. Someone has to open the chart and read the treatment plan, the SOAP notes, the ledger and the appointments, then reach out to each patient, answer their questions and find a time.
What follow-up looked like at one Wave Dental Professionals office
Rebecca Dycus is a senior case manager at Dream Dental, one of the four pilot offices, and she’s often the only one up front.
To find patients to follow up with, she pulls a Dental Intelligence report and keeps her own list of patients the doctor wants seen. Then she makes the calls herself. When the schedule has open spots, she’s also the one calling hygiene patients to fill them.
How Codent AI did it
01
The AI did the audit.
Codent AI read each patient’s chart before anyone got a text: treatment plan, SOAP notes, ledger, insurance and appointments. It confirmed the treatment was still owed, worked out why the patient was unscheduled and decided who to reach out to and for what.
02
U.S.-based treatment coordinators did the outreach.
They texted 1,131 Wave Dental Professionals patients in wording that sounds like the office, answered their questions and worked out what was keeping them from booking. This mattered to Wave Dental Professionals. Emm says leadership didn’t want patient communication to feel automated or disconnected from the practice, and Dr. Wingfield named the mix of AI and live agents as his favorite part of the service.
03
Appointments went straight onto the calendar.
Patients picked a time over text, and the office got an email for every booking. That’s 56 appointments at Wave Dental Proefesionals so far.
Onboarding and support
Many DSOs have a rough time onboarding a new service, and it’s something groups watch closely during a pilot. Emm expected the usual: a significant internal lift to roll out a new service across several practices.
Instead, Codent handled the setup work, and she was pleasantly surprised by how hands-on the Codent team was throughout the pilot.
Support was just as easy. Rebecca says that in the past, being the pilot office meant a hard time reaching anyone. With Codent, a quick call was always available when she had a question.
Rebecca Dycus, Senior Case Manager
What Wave Dental Professionals is seeing now
Treatment scheduled
Return on investment
Wave Dental Professionals pilot • 60 days
More than 10x
Wave Dental Specialists (Detroit and Atlanta) • to date
More appointments on the schedule.
Bigger cases.
Production up.
Time back for staff.
Follow-up that happens every day.
From four offices to all ten
Emm wanted two things before expanding: results, and a good experience for her staff and patients.
The pilot returned 17.8x, her staff were positive about the communication, and Codent AI added no extra work for them. She says that made the decision easy.
Codent AI works the same way in every office: the AI audits each office’s charts, and treatment coordinators work each office’s schedule. That’s what let it scale from four offices to ten, including a newly opened specialty office that asked to start early. Pilot office staff walked the incoming locations through Codent AI themselves, and onboarding is now complete across the group.
Dr. Steven Wingfield, President & CEO
Jennifer Emm, VP of Operations, Wave Dental Professionals
