Some awards reward the achievement that’s easiest to see, the biggest numbers, the fastest growth. nGAGE wanted its name next to the one that rewards something harder to spot: a practice genuinely getting patient experience right. That’s why nGAGE chose to back the Patient Experience Award.
Why patient experience, specifically
Dental care gets judged often on clinical outcomes. But ask most patients what actually shapes how they feel about a practice, and it’s rarely just the treatment chair. It’s whether the reminder arrived on time. Whether rescheduling took one message or five. Whether the practice seemed to know them, or just processed them.
That’s not a small operational detail. For a DSO managing communications across dozens or hundreds of sites, it’s the difference between patients who feel looked after and patients who feel handled.
Rebecca Lyon, general manager at nGAGE Dentally, puts it plainly: ‘We built nGAGE because the gap between good clinical care and good patient experience usually comes down to communication. Communication can be the thing that’s easiest to get right, and yet the easiest to let slip.
‘The benefit of keeping the door open for existing patients, rather than just focusing on acquiring new patients is something our customers have seen first-hand with nGAGE. Sponsoring this award isn’t about visibility for us. It’s about putting a spotlight on something the industry doesn’t talk about enough.’
Why it matters to nGAGE
nGAGE exists to help practices communicate with their patients with the ‘right message at the right time’ reliably and without it becoming another admin burden on already-stretched front-desk teams. Every improvement we chase in the product comes back to one question: does this make a patient feel more looked after, or less?
There’s another layer to this that’s easy to miss. Patient experience isn’t only about being on time with a reminder, it’s about noticing what a patient might actually want next, and saying so, rather than letting the moment quietly pass. A check-up is often the natural point to mention a hygiene appointment. A hygiene visit can be exactly the right moment to talk through tooth whitening.
An extraction might open a conversation about an implant, if that’s genuinely the right path for that patient. None of this works as a script. It only works when it’s offered at the point it’s relevant, so patients feel given a real choice, not sold to, and not overlooked either.
Leanne Smith, head of commercial operations adds: ‘The DSO Awards celebrate a lot of things worth celebrating; growth, innovation, clinical leadership. We wanted to make sure patient experience had its own moment too, because it’s the hardest thing to measure and often the easiest to overlook when a group is scaling fast.’
What the Patient Experience Award recognises
Not the biggest practice group, and not the flashiest technology, but the entries that show a genuine, considered approach to making patients feel informed, respected, and in control of their own care. That might be a DSO that rebuilt its communication system from scratch. It might be one that simply listened harder to what patients were telling them and changed something small but meaningful as a result.
Whoever wins, nGAGE thinks the shortlist alone says something useful: that patient experience is being taken seriously as a strategic priority, not treated as a soft add-on to the ‘real’ metrics.
A note on where this sits for nGAGE
This sponsorship isn’t a one-off. It reflects what nGAGE thinks the next few years of dental communications should look like, less about which platform sends the most messages, and more about which organisations use communication to make patients feel genuinely cared for. If this award pushes that conversation forward even slightly, it’s done its job.
Find out more about the DSO Awards.
This article is sponsored by nGAGE.
