One of the questions we are most often asked by new clients is "If three family members all have an appointment on the same day, are they all going to get the reminder messages?". The answer has always been "Yes" - and even though it's rarely an issue, we have been asked about it often enough that we finally did something about it.

Effective immediately, we will "cluster" all messages of the same type to members of the same family, if individually, they would be sent within a short amount of time of each other. You might have to take some action in order to have these new family messages work for you, so please read the rest of this article!

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We'll be the first to admit, our current email templates are nice looking, but not what you'd call "sexy". Very functional, but not exactly "eye candy". But with the release of two brand new templates, that has changed - we think you'll love the way they look, and we're sure your patients will notice, too.

A picture is worth 1,000 words, so here's about 5,000 words worth. Below are five samples of the two new email templates that are available to you now. Click on the images below to see a full sized image of any template.

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We created RateADentist.com for one simple reason: to help dental practices "get found on the Web". One of the things that Internet search engines take into account is patient reviews - and RateADentist is all about patient reviews. By having a lot of your patients post reviews on RateADentist, you improve your chances of getting a good ranking by the search engines.

Another thing the search engines like is "relevant" websites, and one of the ways they determine if a site is relevant is by looking at all the other websites that are linked to it, and the relevance of those sites. We have designed RateADentist so that every RateADentist user's website will point to it, and vice versa. Eventually, there will be thousands of dental websites all pointing to each other through RateADentist, which should make it appear to be very relevant to the search engines.

So when someone searches for "dentist indianapolis", for example, the RateADentist site itself may come up high in the "organic" search results. Hopefully, the prospective patient will look at it, and search for dentists near them, and of course, the RateADentist clients with the highest number of reviews will appear at the top of the search results. 

Below are some Frequently Asked Questions about RateADentist (and the answers, of course).

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As the Ruby Sponsor of the AADOM (American Association of Dental Office managers - www.dentalmanagers.com), Lighthouse will pay $100 of your registration fee for the Sixth Annual Dental Managers Conference, October 22-23, 2010 in Las Vegas!

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If you don't know about the AADOM - the American Association of Dental Office Managers - you should! It's the only organization we know of that's dedicated to furthering the profession of dental office management and administration. If your practice has someone in the role of office manager, or practice administrator, or office coordinator, or any of a dozen other titles that means "the person who is mainly responsible for the administrative aspect of your practice" - you should seriously consider AADOM membership for that person.

Lighthouse is so convinced of the value of AADOM membership, and committed to the organization's goals, that we have become the first ever "Ruby Sponsor" of the AADOM for 2010. (We think we're in good company - Patterson Dental is the "Diamond Sponsor"!) That means that we'll be very actively involved with AADOM throughout the year, culminating in October at the Annual Conference (this year, it's Las Vegas in October!).

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