Doctors and patients save time with Rhinogram’s text platform

Doctors and patients save time with Rhinogram's text platform

Chairman/CEO/Founder: Dr. Keith Dressler Year founded: 2017

Company: Rhinogram Website: rhinogram.com

Key focus: Secure texting between health care providers and patients

Group text

Rhinogram eschews traditional phone-based communications with your doctor's office by handling most requests via a single text message

You're an orthodontist, but Rhinogram is the third tech-related health care company you've founded or co-founded. Would you consider yourself an orthodontist who is an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur who is an

orthodontist?

I'm an entrepreneur at heart. I come from a multi-generational family of physicians - I'm the outcast orthodontist. I'm a person who doesn't believe in technology just for the sake of technol-ogy. Technology has to do something impactful, for the convenience of everyone involved - the patient, the practitioner and the staff.

What's the main problem Rhinogram aims to solve?

In 2013, I began to see the first wave of Millennial patients in my practice.

What I saw was that they don't want to talk - they want to text or message.

Patients were texting my staff, asking financial questions of clinical staff.

It was breaking down all our systems. If you allow patients to initiate conversations by text, and you manage and control the data texted in, it will be way more effcient. For one thing, the phone will stop ringing.

How has the platform been received by the health care industry?

Industry adoption has been slow. Doctors aren't business-inclined. They don't understand efficiency. When I tell them that it'd be way more efficient if they allow patients to initiate conversations by text, they say that their staff doesn't have time to respond to texts because the phone's ringing off the hook. Well, the phone ringing off the hook is what would change. Doctors still want patients to call, but what happens when they call?

They leave a message and wind up playing phone tag- that's inefficient and ineffective.

How big is Rhinogram today?

We have over 700 locations across 42 states

- pediatricians, ob-gyns, primary care, two hospital systems, orthodon-tists, dentists, oral surgeons and more. It really was built for all of health care because inbound communications are all the same.

I get patients texting me photos of the front and back of their insurance cards and saying

"please update my in-formation." In the same text, they ask for their account balance and when is their next appointment.

That's three questions in one communication.

Rhinogram lets us

bring into that conversation as many individuals as necessary - the financial team answers the account balance question, the schedulers respond to the appointment question and the insurance team updates patient informa-tion. So they're all looking at that one text and responding in close to real time.

My practice is always the alpha site for all these technologies - they're tried and tested with my patients before they're sent off for beta testing.

My patients, my staff and I have to know it's making our lives easier and giving all of us back all kinds of time.

This is just in its infancy in terms of where 1 see it going. It's scattered now because we're the first to tackle the process of having inbound text messages from patients, but our goal is to educate the masses to where inbound texting becomes the standard of care in all practices.

We have seven patents on patient-initiated workflow and an eighth (patent) pending that will complete the package. In the next five to 10 years, 1 want the Rhinogram platform to be the standard of care across this country.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Answered by

Keith Dressler

FEBRUARY 2025 EDGE 23