Customer Overview

Heartland Dental is the largest dental support organization in the United States, supporting more than 1,900 dental practices nationwide. Fifteen years ago, Heartland Dental built its Patient Service Center, a centralized contact center that answers patient calls when in-practice teams are too busy serving patients in the chair to reach the phone. Inbound phone calls remain the dominant front door to patient acquisition for supported dental practices. At Heartland’s support scale, every percentage point of answer rate, booking rate, and attribution accuracy compounds into millions of dollars of revenue for the dental practices supported in 38 states.

The Challenge

For years, Heartland Dental had visibility into the top of the funnel and almost nothing past it. Ring Central gave the Patient Service Center team good data on which calls came in and which went unanswered — that visibility was the original reason the Patient Service Center existed. But the path from a marketed phone number to a booked appointment was largely invisible.

Supported practices outside the Patient Service Center were answering only 60 to 70 percent of inbound calls. That is a structural problem at any scale, and a serious one when those practices are paying for local marketing that drives the phone to ring in the first place. Even when calls were answered, practice leadership had no reliable read on what was happening on them. Why were patients calling? What were team members saying? Where were bookings breaking down? At the office level, Heartland was effectively blind to providing data to and assisting its supported practices’ booking rate.

Marketing attribution was a separate fight. Calls could be tied to campaigns at the phone-number level, but matching a caller’s number back to a patient record to confirm the call became an appointment required manual data entry that was, in Pat Bauer’s words, a guessing game. Marketing dollars were scaling. The visibility was not.

“We could measure calls increasing at supported practices, but it was very complex to see whether those calls turned into appointments. If there was not a solve for it, supported practices would have kept scaling inefficiency and losing opportunities already paid for.”
— Pat Bauer, President and CEO, Heartland Dental

Why Patient Prism

Heartland Dental evaluated multiple call intelligence and tracking platforms before consolidating on Patient Prism, including running CallBox and CallRail in parallel for several years. While alternative tools provided basic recording, tracking, and dashboards, none delivered the recapture workflows, dental-specific intelligence, or operational depth required to drive measurable revenue at Heartland’s scale. Patient Prism differentiated in five key areas:

• RELO Recapture Workflow: Patient Prism’s Recapturing Lost Opportunities (RELO) technology surfaces inbound new patient calls that fail to convert and routes them back to the Patient Service Center for an outbound recovery call. No other tool in the evaluation connected a missed call to an actionable next step.
• Conversation-Level Insight, Not Just Call Data: Patient Prism revealed why bookings were being lost — call types, common objections, scheduling friction, and the language top-performing teams were using. Other tools counted calls. Patient Prism explained them.
• Dental-Specific Intelligence Out of the Box: Patient Prism understood dental call patterns, terminology, and workflows from day one. The platform spoke the industry’s language, which meant Heartland Dental’s supported practices could act on insights immediately rather than translating generic call data into dental context.
• Stack Consolidation: Bringing marketing line tracking, conversation insights, and recapture workflows into one platform simplified Heartland Dental’s technology stack and gave the organization one source of truth instead of three competing ones.
• Proven Partnership at Scale: Patient Prism evolved alongside Heartland Dental’s deployment over multiple years, listening to operational feedback and shipping features that matched the realities of assisting 1,900 practices across the support network.

“Patient Prism won because it connected calls to outcomes and gave operational insight, not just dashboards. Call tracking told you what happened; Patient Prism tells you what to do next.”
— Pat Bauer, President and CEO, Heartland Dental

Implementation

Heartland Dental’s relationship with Patient Prism evolved over years rather than launching in a single rollout. Initial deployment runs in days from a technical standpoint; the telephony connection is straightforward and Patient Prism supports the integration end to end. The real value, however, comes from investing in the people and processes around the platform.

Heartland Dental began with the RELO use case alone — a single problem to solve, with a defined Patient Service Center team and workflow built around it. Once that workflow was producing measurable recapture revenue, the organization expanded into booking visibility at the support office level, then into full marketing attribution, eventually consolidating CallBox and CallRail into Patient Prism entirely. Today the platform is a daily operating tool across the supported network.

“Onboarding new supported practices is easy. To really gain value, you have to invest in your people and processes. We would recommend stepping into it, working on solving one problem at a time, and then moving to the next.”
— Pat Bauer, President and CEO, Heartland Dental

What Patient Prism Enabled

RELO Recapture as Incremental Revenue

The RELO workflow is where Heartland and its supported practices saw, and continues to see, the largest single source of incremental revenue from the platform. New patient calls that would have been forever lost are now surfaced, routed to the Patient Service Center, and recovered through outbound calls. In the last year alone, Heartland recaptured nearly 60,000 new patient appointments on behalf of their supported practices through RELO outbound calls. Every recovered appointment is revenue already paid to acquire that would otherwise have been lost.

Office-Level Booking Rate Visibility

For the first time, Heartland could see booking rate at the practice level, not just inside the Patient Service Center. That visibility surfaced where teams needed coaching, where capacity needed expanding, and where the language of top-performing teams could be replicated across the support network. Booking rates inside the Patient Service Center have climbed to historic highs — up 65% — and office-level rates are improving alongside.

Marketing Attribution Tied to Booked Appointments

Marketing attribution moved from “this campaign drove X calls” to “this campaign drove X booked appointments by call type.” That shift changed how Heartland makes spend recommendations to supported practices, lifting estimated ROAS by 10%+ and giving the marketing team a confident answer to which channels actually produce patients. The downstream effect shows up everywhere: smarter channel allocation, sharper team coaching at low-converting supported offices, and informed staffing decisions that match capacity to demand.

“Patient Prism showed us exactly where calls were dropping and which marketing sources were driving real bookings, not just call volume. It unlocked operational fixes and clearer marketing decisions in the same week.”
— Pat Bauer, President and CEO, Heartland Dental

“For the first time, my team can connect marketing spend directly to booked appointments, not just call volume. That changes every conversation we have with our supported offices about where to invest and why. Patient Prism gave us the confidence to make smarter, faster decisions with real data behind them.”
— Sherianne James, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Heartland Dental

Results

Across years of use, Patient Prism has become embedded in day-to-day operations for Heartland Dental and its supported practices. Three numbers tell the story most directly: an 800-basis-point lift in Patient Service Center appointments booked, a 95%+ answer rate on new patient calls, and nearly 60,000 new patient appointments recovered from outbound RELO calls in a single year. Estimated ROAS has lifted by 10%+ as marketing decisions move from call-volume reporting to booked-appointment attribution.

800 BPS

Lift in Patient Service Center appointments booked

60K

New patients recaptured for supported offices from RELO outbound calls last year

95%+

New patient call answer rate across the supported network

The platform now informs marketing channel spend, supported office-level training and coaching, and staffing and capacity decisions across the supported network. What started as a single-use RELO recapture workflow has consolidated CallBox and CallRail into one system of record and become a daily operating tool — not an analytics layer the team checks once a week.

Future Outlook

Patient Prism is now part of Heartland Dental’s operating rhythm rather than a tool to be evaluated. The platform’s value has shifted from one-time discovery to a continuous coaching loop that compounds with every campaign launch, training session, and capacity decision. As Heartland continues to scale its supported network, the same operating muscle that recovered nearly 60,000 lost patients last year is now pointed at the next layer: tighter booking rates at the supported office level, sharper channel-level marketing decisions, and a faster feedback loop between what the front line says and what the marketing engine spends.

“Our mission is to deliver world-class marketing solutions that attract and retain patients who repeat and refer. Patient Prism is central to that. It closes the loop between the marketing that drives the phone to ring and the experience that turns that call into a patient. As we continue to scale, that closed loop is what separates good marketing from great marketing.”
— Sherianne James, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Heartland Dental

“If you removed Patient Prism, we’d be less effective in marketing and our booking rate would be lower. It’s a part of our day-to-day operational process to support Doctors and their teams as they deliver the highest quality of dental care and experiences to the communities they serve. It paid for itself quickly.”
— Pat Bauer, President and CEO, Heartland Dental