Your First Visit

Hi, I’m Dr. Ryan Lepore. First of all, I want to welcome you to our practice and thank you for choosing us. A lot of our patients like to know what the first appointment in our office is going to look like, so I’d like to take a few moments and walk you through it. Right out of the gate, you’re going to be on a phone call with one of our wonderful front desk team members, and I think what you’re gonna find different is they’re gonna want to get to know your story and how we can help you best before you ever come into the building. Next, what they’re going to deliver for you is some new patient paperwork. I know, everybody’s favorite in any new practice that they go to. You’ll find that ours is a little more extensive and I’d like to just take a moment and let you know why. We take pride in getting to know, not just your history, but your family’s history, so we can customize any care plan we might come up with for you. So on the day of your visit, you’ll be greeted by our team member who’s gonna escort you to what we call our consult room to get to know you, we call it our new patient interview, and during that we wanna find out, have you had a good experience in the past because we certainly want to duplicate that. And if you’ve had a not-so-pleasant experience, we wanna know about those as well so that we don’t have any of those happen in our office or with your time with us. What our team member will do is they’ll kind of give you an office tour. They’ll introduce you to myself, to the team members, make you feel comfortable and really make it feel like you’re part of the family moving forward. Then we’re gonna start to get some of the information that’s relative to you specifically, things like X-rays. Now I know that’s not everybody’s favorite part of their visit, but it does allow me to diagnose as accurately as possible to really provide the best treatment for you.

Some things that we have that some practices don’t have are different types of photography, one of which is a little camera that goes inside your mouth, and it can take pictures zoomed in of a problem area if we see it. We put it on the screen, we can show you, we can educate you on what to do moving forward. And on the contrast, what we also do is we take what we call digital photos. Now digital photos are a little more blown out, they’re going to give me the big picture to see not just what’s happening with one tooth but what’s happening all over the mouth. While this information is being collected, I’m gonna start to review it in my office. I’m gonna look at these photos, at these X-rays, and I’m gonna start to think about how to come up with the best plan for you. I’ll then come in, introduce myself and begin your exam, and you’ll notice that our exam is pretty thorough. One of the most important things to me is not that you just say yes to treatment because I’m wearing the white coat but that you truly understand and value the recommendations that I and my team have for you, so we’ll take that time. We may show you patient education videos, we may go over your plan individually, bring you back for a consultation which we don’t charge, we want to make sure that before you say yes to anything do you truly understand the clinical need and feel comfortable moving forward with us.

And after we conclude with my exam, you’re gonna meet one of our wonderful hygienists. Now they are gentle and thorough and I think those are two qualities every patient is looking for in their hygienist. And what they’re going to do is they’re going to measure your gums and the bone around your teeth, and that’s so, so important, especially in our practice which prides itself on something we call the oral systemic connection, which means that we know the mouth is connected to the rest of the body. So what our hygienists are going to do in those measurements is tell you how healthy or unhealthy your gums and bone may be, because they may tell a different story as far as, not just the health of your mouth but also the health of your overall body. And that wraps up your first visit with us. I wanna thank you for giving us the opportunity to earn your trust and confidence and be your dental partner and your dental home.