ADEA Innovation Article Series: Centralized Call Centers at Dental School Clinics Reduce Inefficiency While Improving Patient and Student Experience

Centralized Call Centers at Dental School Clinics Reduce Inefficiency While Improving Patient and Student Experience

May 15, 2025—By LaShell Stratton-Childers, ADEA Senior Editor

The average customer or patient has experienced it at least once: Calling an office where no one answers the phone, or being left on hold by the front desk as elevator music plays in the background. Minutes go by with an automated voice intermittently assuring the caller that someone will be with them shortly. But that “someone” does not answer, and the disgruntled caller hangs up. In both situations, the caller either decides to try again later—or seek services elsewhere.

For some patients scheduling appointments and follow ups with busy dental school clinics like the University of Michigan School of Dentistry (U-M SOD) and University of California, San Franscisco, School of Dentistry (UCSF SOD), this experience was all too familiar. To improve customer service, these dental school clinics innovated a practice management system by creating centralized call centers that have not only decreased call-waiting times and abandonment rates but also increased the overall number of patients seeking treatment and improved both the patient and student experience.

“The call centers have led to improved customer satisfaction, particularly in high-volume specialty clinics,” said Andrea Morefield, Patient Services Operations Manager at U-M SOD, which implemented its centralized call center in December 2023.

“We have seen dramatic success in our call center with calls answered achieving the highest industry benchmark levels of success,” said Rick Seefeldt, M.S., FACHE, Director of Health Faculty Practices and Director of Dental Center Clinical Operations and Finance at the University of California, San Franscisco.

UCSF SOD implemented its dental clinics’ centralized call center between September 2023 and February 2024 for all advanced dental sub-specialties, such as endodontics, orthodontics and pediatric dentistry.

“We have also seen an increase in patient visits from more patients being scheduled by our call center than pre-launch,” Seefeldt said. 

U-M SOD has seen an increase in patient appointments as well.

We observed “a 6% increase in patient appointments handled by the call center when comparing a snapshot of data from December to February in 2023 and 2024,” Morefield said.

Ending a Cycle of Frustration

Prior to creating its centralized call center, Seefeldt said all patient calls at UCSF SOD went directly to the clinic and were answered by roughly a dozen front desk personnel.

“These are the people ... at the dentist’s office that are checking you in for your appointment,” he said. "They’re giving you the clipboard and asking you to sign in. They’re taking your insurance card. While they’re doing that work, the phone is ringing. They’re not answering the phone.”

Seefeldt noted that this type of situation may be easy to navigate in a small dentist’s office but not for large dental school clinics like UCSF SOD. (There are 200 chairs and 120 to 150 clinical faculty at UCSF SOD, according to Eunice Stephens, Associate Dean and Administrative Chief of the Staff at UCSF SOD.)

With one or two dentists in a practice, “there’s probably some downtime for the staff,” Seefeldt said. “But when you have a large, integrated dental center like we have that’s also associated with a massive health system where we’re seeing 140,000 patients this year alone ... we’re getting about 150,000 to 200,000 phone calls a year.”

Seefeldt said the UCSF SOD dental clinic call response rate prior to the centralized call center was “pretty bad.”

“We answered 25% of our calls before we went live with the call center,” he said. “And the funny thing is that actually had a [cumulative] effect, because what did the patients do? They called more. You have to keep calling to get through. So, it was just a mess.”

The school desperately needed the infrastructure to accommodate this heavy demand and alleviate the backlog, so UCSF SOD started the process of implementing the new call center in September 2023.

"Development of standard work was the first step in this project,” Stephens said. “Defining clearly what was in scope versus what was out, was essential to hiring and managing expectations for staff and faculty. Building that and getting input took a good six months before hiring and going live."

U-M SOD had a similar call answering set up to UCSF SOD before it implemented changes for some of its sub-specialty dental school clinics. (Not all specialty clinics at U-M SOD chose to participate in the project.) Now the new centralized call center supports an average of 20 chairs available per clinic, with approximately 17 providers scheduled per day, Morefield said.

“The primary goals were to alleviate the workload of clinic staff and improve the overall patient experience by streamlining scheduling,” Morefield said. “This initiative aimed to address challenges such as inefficiencies and improve customer service.”

Morefield could not provide details regarding the implementation timeline for U-M SOD because “the vision for the call center was created prior to my position by a committee called Advancing the Patient Experience,” she said.

New Systems, Better Experience

Seefeldt said UCSF SOD not only hired 11 more staff for its centralized call center but also employed a new call management system by Cisco, a technology company that develops and sells networking hardware, software and services—to enhance its technology infrastructure.

Stephens said the new call center also sends patients automated reminders via SMS, email and interactive voice response (IVR), and uses the electronic health record (EHR) & practice management integration system, EPIC.

Stephens said the call center also directs emergency cases to on-call doctors or urgent care with Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery covering emergencies.

Since its implementation of the centralized call center, the percentage of calls answered on the first call by UCSF SOD has increased from 25% to 90%, which Seefeldt said now puts the school in line with call center industry benchmarks. Specifically, call center, hospital and ambulatory standard benchmarks, Stephens noted.

“It's not a fire being put out anymore,” he said.

The call center handles most of the appointment scheduling and follow-up appointments, but patients can still follow up directly with dental school students at the clinic when needed. Seefeldt said that element of patient management hasn’t changed under the new system.

“The students actually give out their cell phone numbers, and they communicate that way, so that, by no means has diminished,” Seefeldt said.

He noted that the cell phones are encrypted and HIPPA compliant.

In many ways, Seefeldt argued, the implementation of the centralized call centers has “only contributed to the student experience, because when the patients come to clinic, they’re not fuming with rage .... They’re happy to see the students. It’s actually making the student experience better, and the educational experience better.”

The centralized call center also helped UCSF SOD increase “patient visits by 20% in the first 9 months of the call center going live,” Stephens said.

UCSF has also seen a positive ROI from investing in its centralized call center.

“Our call center makes money because we're scheduling more visits that we have,” Seefeldt said. “We made $2 million a year more, but our call center only cost us, like, a million.”

Seefeldt said UCSF SOD is still “refining” and “tweaking” its new centralized call center to maintain and improve performance levels. He said the school plans to hire a couple more staff and hoped to increase the “answer on first call” rate from 90% to potentially 95% to 98% by early 2025.

By December 2023, U-M SOD had launched its own centralized call center with EHR and practice management integration, Axium; Zoom and secure VoIP for remote calling; and end-to-end encryption and MFA through Zoom.

“The school uses an automated appointment reminder system that sends an initial notification via email and SMS as soon as an appointment is scheduled in the system,” Morefield said. “We use Zoom's call queue management system to monitor call volume, reduce wait times and analyze user performance.”

Morefield said the call center triage calls to ensure "urgent" cases are taken care of in a timely manner. “After hours calls are handled within the specialty clinics. The call center doesn't manage those,” she said.

Much like UCSF SOD, U-M SOD has experienced positive results since making changes, though the school could not provide exact data regarding “answer on first call” rates before and after the centralized call center’s implementation.

“I do know that we have been able to increase our satisfaction with having the call center and the ability to contact patients,” Morefield said.

After launching its centralized call center, U-M SOD decided to make even further improvements to make the call center more successful.

“The technology and personnel setup have remained unchanged since implementation. However, an evaluation revealed a need for additional support to handle the high volume of calls and inbound referrals for new patients,” Morefield said.

Secure Stakeholder Buy-in for Success

Both Seefeldt and Morefield credit the success of their centralized call centers not only to additional staffing and call management systems but also to stakeholder buy-in.

“Yes, stakeholder buy-in was necessary,” Morefield said, though she noted that some stakeholders at U-M SOD “chose not to adopt the call center support, opting instead to rely on their existing staffing to manage incoming calls and referrals.”

Seefeldt said it is important for dental clinics considering a similar implementation to “go slow” and “ensure the architecture that is set up is robust and takes into account all stakeholders and perspectives, including patients, providers and staff.”

He said some at UCSF SOD were hesitant about the impending changes at first, and not just because of the additional cost of centralized call center.

“Whenever they hear something with centralization, they think, ‘Oh, this is going to make my experience less efficient. I’m going to lose control,’” Seefeldt said.

So, the groundwork needed to be laid with providers, students, trainees and supervising faculty “to assure them that the end product is going be better than what they're experiencing right now, and we’re not taking anything away from them,” Seefeldt said.

With the help of these stakeholders, both schools implemented an innovation in practice management at their dental school clinics that brought about positive results on multiple fronts: decreasing call-waiting times and abandonment rates, increasing the overall number of patients seeking treatment and improving the experiences of both the dental school clinics’ patients and students. Also, in the case of UCSF SOD, the centralized call center provided a positive ROI for the school.