Patient portals are widely implemented in dental practices but remain largely unused.
- Nearly every dental practice has a patient portal, yet many report low adoption rates among patients.
- The core issue: vendors sell and implement portals, then provide minimal ongoing support for training and troubleshooting.
- Without internal championing and real vendor partnership, portals become unused software investments.
- Practices need to understand whether portal failure stems from poor technology design or inadequate vendor support.
Nearly every dental practice today has some version of a patient portal, a place for patients to book appointments, review treatment plans, pay bills, or message the office directly. And yet, anecdotally, many of those portals sit largely unused, a feature practices pay for but patients quietly ignore.
DrBicuspid.com is partnering with Ackerman Research to launch a new series of surveys to understand what’s actually happening in dental practices across the industry, and we want to hear directly from the people running the practices, not just the vendors selling the software.
The paradox
Practices have portals, but patients don't use them. That gap is the starting point for this survey.
If patient portals are supposed to streamline scheduling, communication, and payments, why do so many practices report low adoption rates among the very patients they're meant to serve? Is the problem the technology itself, how it's introduced to patients, or something else entirely?
The real problem
Our early conversations with practice owners point to a familiar pattern: A vendor sells a portal, implements it, and then largely disappears, leaving the practice to handle ongoing training, patient adoption, and troubleshooting on its own.
Without real partnership after the sale, portals can become one more piece of software nobody has time to champion internally. Is that consistent with your experience? We want to know whether the technology is falling short or if the support behind it is.
Your voice matters
This is where we need you. Are patient portals actually valuable to your practice and your patients, or are they overhyped? Should vendors be building better, more intuitive tools, or should they be partnering more closely with practices to drive real adoption after implementation?
Your answers will shape how we report on this topic and, we hope, push the industry toward solutions that actually work for the people using them every day.
The survey takes less than four minutes to complete, and your responses will directly inform an upcoming DrBicuspid.com feature on the state of patient portals in dentistry today.
Take the survey.
We'll share results and key takeaways in a follow-up article. If patient portals aren't working the way they should, we want to find out why, and we want the industry to hear it directly from the practices that are experiencing it.
