Use Membership to Convert Data into Actionable Results

Sponsored Content

By Jane Levy, Co-founder & CEO of Plan Forward

We’re laser focused on how to help our groups find ways to uncover real opportunities in their patient data to improve their business. Read on to discover:

where to find opportunities
how to convert more patients to members, and
why membership is such a powerful strategy.

Setting solid business goals, like increasing production, retention & revenue in your practices, is often a function of patient satisfaction. How to keep your patients happy? Deliver excellent care at a reasonable price. Patients stay on, book often and accept treatment – all of which translates into better business metrics.

There’s another way to make patients feel cared for – custom membership plans. You decide on the pricing, the discounts and the bundle of hygiene care included. The balance is to keep the plan profitable for the practice but also compelling for the patient.

Plans can be elevated with personalization. Design a perio package with 3-4 deep cleanings, or a senior package priced reasonably and tailored to age-specific needs like denture care. When patients see that their unique needs are understood, conversion rates and commitment to care increases.

When patients commit to membership, the metrics take care of themselves. Members tend to visit more frequently, accept more treatment, and often become your most valuable patients. Membership programs are built to encourage consistent visits and foster stronger, trust-based relationships between patients and providers.

In the interests of adding long term value, and keep members renewing, we closely track member behavior – how often they visit, how much treatment they accept, did they add family members to their plan. Renewals are managed exclusively by the software, relieving your front office teams from any additional burdens.

So given members are so valuable, how do we find more opportunities to convert? Plan Forward has built a sophisticated algorithm to identify the patients most likely to convert to membership. Frequent hygiene visits or outstanding treatment plans are obvious indicators for membership. But we’re also uncovering less obvious predictors – like the number of family members in a practice – which strongly correlate with interest in joining a plan.

To analyse & track all this data, Plan Forward is continuing to develop deep integrations with leading PMS platforms, including cloud-based leaders like Ascend and Denticon. Of course, most DSOs operate in mixed PMS environments, so we support both server-based and cloud-based systems.

Our new write-back capability to Dentrix Ascend enhances our capabilities even further, allowing us to update alerts and notes directly in the PMS so office teams can easily identify membership opportunities and calculate savings on treatment plans because of membership. For such practices, these upgrades are accelerating membership conversion and making it simpler for the office teams to account for membership. The change management challenges of initiating & growing a membership program are far less with stronger integrations.

According to Ali Hyatt, Chief Customer and Growth Officer at Henry Schein One:
“As the leader in practice management software with over 70,000 practices, we understand how critical it is for practices to use their data in everyday business decisions. Plan Forward is now a trusted integration partner in the largest dental ecosystem, enabling seamless read-and-write connections that eliminate the need to manage multiple systems.

According to Mehmet Dogan, VP of Marketing at Planet DDS: “Planet DDS’ DentalOS™ is built on the idea that data should fuel growth, not friction. With 60+ integration partners, we’ve created an ecosystem where innovators like Plan Forward can plug in seamlessly. Together, we’re helping DSOs transform raw patient data into membership strategies that drive higher production, stronger retention, and recurring revenue without adding front office burden.”

So why is membership a cornerstone offering for dental groups? Membership has so many business benefits because members behave differently from both uninsured & insured patients, and help groups achieve the goals of higher production, more recurring revenue and frequent patient visits.

Here are some of the benefits of membership and of using an integrated platform, like Plan Forward, to enroll & track members.

Better Hygiene Recall – Membership creates built-in recall incentives. Patients prepay for preventive services, so they’re more likely to schedule and show up. Reports track compliance and prompt outreach.
Loyalty from Uninsured Patients – Identify uninsured patients already visiting multiple times a year, then introduce membership as a better alternative.
Fewer Cancellations – Prepaid preventive visits improve reappointment rates and reduce no-shows. Reports reveal where improvements are needed.
Closing Care Gaps – Reports flag missed services, and PMS alerts help staff address them in real time.
More Treatment Opportunities – More visits = more chances to diagnose early. Data proves memberships drive downstream revenue.
Higher Conversion Rates – Use codes like D0140 to flag urgent patients and present membership as the solution for future care.
Perio Plan Adoption – Design targeted perio memberships, track uninsured perio patients, and measure conversions.
Strategic Patient Reactivation – Use data filters to target dormant patients with membership offers tailored to their history and needs.

The bottom line: patient data is powerful but activating it through membership can be transformational. Practices that embrace membership see higher patient satisfaction, stronger loyalty, and sustainable growth. Our membership platform doesn’t just present insights – it enables action, closes care gaps, and strengthens the patient-provider relationship while growing revenue.

Visit us at www.planforward.io, or reach me at [email protected]