Dentists can expand their patient base significantly and streamline care by offering teledentistry visits, as shown in dentistry research, such as treatment planning and follow-up care.
Current SEO articles by some dentistry offices lean into the desire for at-home care searched by patients with lackluster articles on how patients can practice hygiene at home. From the patient experience angle, we can understand that this is not what patients are looking for, but rather how to get a dentist to provide care in an in-home setting.
However, articles on how to brush your teeth at home optimized for “dental care at home” are a typical symptom of clinicians not using insights gleaned from keyword and trend research in marketing to enhance service offerings.
Telehealth services have proven to be much more than a pandemic-era fad. According to Grand View Research, the teledentistry market is estimated to be worth over $2 billion and is expected to grow exponentially to $6 billion by 2032.
This makes teledentistry a game-changer for dentists who are ready to innovate. Over 60% of patients today prefer hybrid care models that blend the convenience of virtual appointments with mobile or in-clinic dental services.
While many dental practices today claim to offer telehealth services, only a small minority use them strategically to reach underserved populations and grow revenue. This can have a positive social impact on the local community and a positive financial impact on your practice, as you thrive in a financially viable model that allows you to hire more employees and reach more individuals who need accessible, quality care.
While many clinicians associate underserved populations with financial loss, the reality is that homebound people of all financial backgrounds exist and that these types of services typically match the needs of those who work from home and have little wiggle room in their schedules.
Healthcare professionals should not underprice themselves but set competitive rates to cover expenses and ensure a profit margin, focusing on growth. Many price-conscious healthcare professionals do set a sliding scale based on income. They can provide care to a range of people, from homebound individuals without an income to higher socioeconomic status self-employed or employed homebound individuals.
Even mobile adults with busy schedules or caregiving responsibilities appreciate the convenience of getting dental services like teeth cleanings at home.
Telehealth in dentistry is transforming how care is delivered. You now have the opportunity to reach patients beyond your geographic area through HIPAA-compliant video consultations, digital imaging, and AI-powered diagnostic tools.
This modern approach opens access to dental services for patients in current market gaps while opening new revenue streams for your in-person practice.
This guide isn’t aimed at teaching you how to add a Zoom plugin to your website; it’ll discuss in detail how to build a teledentistry service with a mobile dentistry arm into your in-person practice that attracts high-value patients, fills scheduling apps, and ensures your practice’s long-term success.
We’ll break down the technical, legal, and marketing steps you need to make telehealth work for you, regardless of whether you’re targeting rural families, busy executives and caregivers, or seniors who can’t travel. We’ll show you how to turn questions like “Can dentists do telehealth?” into “How fast can my practice scale this?”
Your ideal telehealth patients aren’t just millennials and Gen Zers who can’t wait to try out any new tech tools. Some of the populations who need telehealth the most include:
Expanding with teledentistry and mobile dentistry allows dentists to create a continuum of care that bridges the gap between virtual consultations and in-person treatments. Think of patients who initially reach out for virtual consultation and end up scheduling in-house visits.
This integration of virtual and in-person dental services creates new revenue streams for your practice while reinforcing your reputation as a forward-thinking, patient-centered dentist.
Some of the highly demanded dental services you can monetize through teledentistry include:
Many dental telehealth platforms struggle because they don’t offer in-person mobile services, use cookie-cutter pricing systems that exclude cash-based patients, and ignore niche markets in high-demand areas like low-toxin dentistry for patients with chemical allergies.
Additionally, these dental telehealth platforms often cannot streamline care as they focus only on single remote visits rather than ongoing care with the integration of resources that can be deployed to patients’ homes and a lack of partnerships with companies offering resources to local patients. This is where a small dental clinic can excel in markets with heavy in-person competition and large dental telehealth platforms by offering in-person care, virtual visits from their clinic, and mobile visits with equipment brought out to patients’ homes to streamline care.
A recent audit of an in-person dentistry practice with a mobile dentistry side added to the business revealed that a lack of telehealth integration led to missed conversion opportunities as the practice failed to have people sign up directly for mobile dentistry services from SEO searches.
A review of the patient journey showed that more patients were searching for telehealth to figure out how to get care within their homes than mobile dentistry, and then being left hanging after telehealth visits. A robust telehealth strategy streamlines patient flow from online consultations to mobile dental care, ensuring that many digital interactions lead to real-world appointments.
Far too many providers assume that patients will know the best approach to receiving care, missing opportunities to educate patients about local resources. Dentists with an in-person practice and mobile dentistry services can use low-friction telehealth new patient appointments to educate patients about their mobile in-person services.
Some of the legal considerations you should keep in mind when launching teledentistry services include:
Partner with a healthcare attorney for a one-time compliance audit to ensure everything is in order before offering teledentistry services. Consider a retainer service as well so you can ensure ongoing compliance and ask questions as needed. Far too many clinicians fail to respond positively to individual patient requests, creating a poor image of their brand by taking out their fear on patients in a harmful way, where the patient is offering cash for a tailored service because of fear of the unknown.
Expanding your services to include teledentistry doesn’t have to be an overwhelming experience. It’s a matter of choosing the right tech tools, making the proper workflow adjustments, and developing an effective patient acquisition strategy.
Here’s how to get started:
The best teledentistry software is HIPAA compliant, user-friendly, and equipped with helpful features like online appointment scheduling and patient record integration.
When selecting a telehealth platform, consider the type of services you plan to offer, such as remote orthodontic consultations, post-operative teledentistry care, or pediatric teledentistry services, to ensure the platform addresses all your needs.
Popular software options to choose from include:
Your staff play a crucial role in how efficiently your teledentistry practice runs. Provide training on:
Patients can’t take advantage of the virtual care you provide if they don’t know it even exists.
That’s where hiring an experienced search engine optimization (SEO) team comes in to increase traffic to your practice’s website. Your marketing team can optimize your practice’s website with key search terms potential patients would look up, like “affordable online dental consultations,” “dental telehealth visits,” and “low-cost virtual dentist visits.”
Ranking high for such terms on search engine result pages would drive people interested in what you offer to your practice’s website. An SEO team can also help to include teledentistry in your Google My Business listing and other localized client acquisition tools, while promoting your services on digital platforms like social media, emails, and newsletters.
Targeted paid ads can also effectively attract patients who are conducting high-intent searches on search engines, such as “Can I get a cavity checked online?”
The main goal of your SEO campaign should be to educate patients about their dental problems and available treatment options, especially those you offer.
But patient onboarding is just the start. Patients' lifetime value (LTV) matters as well. This is how much revenue a patient generates over their time in your care. If you are retaining patients in long-term relationships with regular use of your services, this can be a marker of how well you are responding to the needs of your community.
Onboarding the patients via SEO to your telehealth offerings is the first step. Next, we must look at conversions from telehealth to other services, such as sign-ups to your mobile dentistry subscription program or patients visiting your in-person practice regularly. This is not just a marker of success for your marketing and re-marketing efforts but also a marker of success for your ability to educate patients in your community on what resources are available and to be the lead clinician providing those resources to meet previously unmet needs.
Let’s review a case study involving a mobile dentistry practice we audited as an example to discover where the problem lie in lack of sign-ups to their mobile dentistry subscription program despite our knowledge of a high level of need in the area, low competition, and the fact that the practice ranked high in Google for some keywords related to mobile dentistry services in the area.
The practice suffered from missed opportunities to add virtual consultations to its services despite providing quality care to many patients. This study illustrates how strategically integrating teledentistry can transform clinics.
The practice showcased in the case study focused on only in-office and mobile dentistry instead of combining it with virtual consultations. Although the site showed up when “mobile dentistry in [city]” was searched, these related keywords made up 0% of the traffic to the site.
At the same time, queries for online dentists and telehealth were much more frequently searched than mobile dentistry and led patients to online teledentistry services which revealed that the only dentist providing teledentistry service across multiple platforms in the state in question was located in another state as he had secured a license in the state in question due to it being a care desert despite being heavily populated. These teledentistry services provided subpar, rushed care with no way to follow up and no insight into what local resources existed. One other noted practice in the state claimed to offer telehealth consultations with an intake form but did not respond to form submissions. Yet another mobile dentistry practice in the state offered telehealth but refused to take on cases other than the most cookie-cutter cases with a focus only on serving healthy seniors.
Some of the challenges the practice struggled with include:
Limited online presence
The case study showed the practice's website did not mention teledentistry, nor did the provider offer this. Its SEO efforts were only focused on traditional mobile dentistry keywords like “house call dentist,” ignoring relevant keywords like “online dentist consultation” that people who might later be interested in mobile dental services would naturally look up first.
Ask yourself the question: do you think every person out there knows that it is possible to have a dentist perform services in your home? If the answer is no, then recognize that tailoring your SEO only to people looking up mobile dentistry is not necessarily productive. Keyword research shows a much higher awareness among patients for teledentistry than mobile dentistry.
Missed opportunities
The dentist was unsure why patients failed to sign up for the mobile dentistry subscription program despite an SEO presence for these keywords and demand for their services in the area. However, the dentist perceived the problem from knowing what resources were available and that dental office equipment could be brought to patients’ homes.
On the other hand, patients were looking for teledentistry first to seek a solution to their problem and then the ball was often dropped after this point by large teledentistry platforms. The dentist could have added teledentistry to his clinic as a much lower-overhead service than his mobile dentistry program and in-person clinic to use this approach to generate additional revenue from teledentistry consultations and use this opportunity to educate patients on mobile dentistry options if they were homebound and convert them to mobile dentistry program subscribers.
The dentist attempted to use word-of-mouth marketing through patients rather than focusing more on improving service workflows and SEO for what actually converts.
Some findings we discovered in this sample audit can help other dental practices in similar situations, as we make the below recommendations, which can be tailored to each business case:
Revamping the Website and SEO Strategy
An effective way to turn a struggling practice around is to redesign the website to highlight your services, plan out touchpoints, and add/adapt clinical services to improve workflows and retention.
For example, rather than simply offering in-clinic and mobile dentistry care, streamline conversions by adding teledentistry to educate patients on whether their needs constitute an emergency or the existence of your mobile dentistry services and what you can do for them via a low-friction, highly-searched channel of telehealth services.
To help with visibility, add high-intent keywords like “online dental consultations” into your copy. This ensures your practice ranks high when patients search for dentists offering virtual care. The practice in question wasn’t doing this.
Investing in a Comprehensive Telehealth Platform
A HIPAA-compliant platform that supports on-demand dental advice apps and AI-powered virtual diagnostic tools makes adding teledentistry to your services more manageable. This allows you to assess patients online and schedule follow-up visits.
Training Staff and Optimizing Workflow
Staff at the struggling practice were trained to operate the platforms used for telehealth services and upsell in-person follow-ups. Staff neglecting new systems leads to lost opportunities. For example, several dental practices in the state offer teledentistry, but most don’t respond to new patient queries.
Enhance Patient Communication and Marketing
Update your digital marketing strategy to include clear call-to-actions for virtual consultations. Use patient testimonials and case studies to build trust and demonstrate the benefits of a telehealth-integrated approach to dental care. Highlight success stories of patients who started with virtual consultations and transitioned to in-person and/or mobile dentistry treatment.
Some dentists have been slow to incorporate teledentistry into their services. Widespread concerns these dentists have often include:
Yes, in some cases. Teledentistry regulations vary by state, but licensed dentists can often prescribe non-narcotic medications, like antibiotics, through virtual consultations in most states. Always verify the laws governing teledentistry in each state where you plan to offer services to ensure compliance.
Advances in AI-powered teledentistry tools and remote dental monitoring technology have improved the accuracy of virtual diagnoses.
Many dental issues, such as gum disease, oral infections, and orthodontic issues, can now be diagnosed with high-resolution images during video consultations.
However, some services, like X-rays, might require partnering with mobile dental clinics or local service providers in areas that are difficult to reach physically.
Teledentistry is a great tool for virtual consultations and online emergency dental advice, but some positions will always require in-person care. Teledentistry serves as a triage tool for such problems, helping to assess which patients need immediate intervention versus those whose dental problems can be managed remotely.
Teledentistry is also increasingly being used as a tool for post-surgery follow-ups, reducing the need for unnecessary office visits.
Teledentistry is ideal for your practice if you’re looking to:
You’ll miss the big picture if you track the wrong metrics after launching your teledentistry service. Some significant numbers to focus on include:
Teledentistry is a gateway to secure patients who eventually make you their primary dentist. For example, a remote consultation with a patient dealing with the symptoms of a temporomandibular joint disorder can lead to an in-house visit for orthodontic treatment. Track cross-service conversion rates to identify your most profitable pathways.
Some of the ways you can scale up your teledentistry services include:
The future of teledentistry looks bright as tech advances give dentists more tools to provide services remotely. Here’s what to expect:
Teledentistry is now being merged with specialty care. For instance, diabetic patients can get gum disease screenings after virtual consults with an endocrinologist since both conditions are related. Position yourself as the go-to dental partner for medical telehealth platforms.
Invest in teledentistry platforms that are HIPAA compliant, target underserved markets, and highlight the convenience you provide while marketing your services. You want potential patients to know you’re willing to adapt your services to fit into their lives, not the other way around.
Your next steps should include:
Book a 15-minute complimentary consultation with our marketing strategists to discuss your practice’s needs. The future of dentistry is in your Wi-Fi, not your waiting room.