Improving Patient Outcomes – Strategy 4

Today, I’m going to give you a strategy to help your patients that you will have to be very mindful in using.  This is powerful stuff here, my friends.

After motivation, after positive energy, after excitement and after questions, we still end up with a few patients that don’t feel compelled to act.  That’s not good for us and especially it’s not good for your patients.

However, here’s what you have to remember: it’s about getting the patient to see the VALUE and BENEFIT in the OUTCOME – not in the dentistry.

No one wants to do the dentistry.  Not you, not me, not even our doctors receive dentistry for fun.  Go ahead and ask them how long they have delayed something being done before.

It’s not about motivating patients to want the work but to want the result of the work.

It’s a simple premise: no person will do something before they have to.  Read that again, if you need to.  Think about your own life.  Think about the most common behavior amongst us all… Procrastination.

We procrastinate everyday with everything – unless it has to be done.  Unless there is URGENCY.  Unless there is a deadline.  Unless something is time sensitive.

The tactic to moving patients forward (even after all of the other strategies I have given you so far), is THE DENTISTRY HAS TO MATTER and the BENEFIT has to have a sense of urgency behind it.

You can do this by following the previous strategies from the last several weeks.  I have given them to you for a reason.

Telling the patient how to decide and what they should do.

Have great energy and clarity of the problem and path.

Asking enough questions to create belief, buy-in, engagement and understanding.

And now you can (if you really want to be the best team member you can be for yourself, your team and your patients), weave urgency in and out of everything you do.  There is an art to creating a sense of urgency at every step and every problem and every picture and every diagnosis and every treatment plan and every outcome, which is the benefit the patient is going to receive.

Here’s what we know: not everything is urgent, as in it has to be done today or you are going to lose your tooth.  But you don’t have to be timid either.  Any and all positive decisions should be urgent because in life time is of the essence.

Why wait until the tooth is further cracked?  Why wait until the pockets are deeper?  Why wait until the cavity is bigger?  Why wait to fill a hole or have an implant or get straighter teeth?

At some point you have to remove your obsession with what has to be done today or what can be delayed.  Understand that you are telling a patient to keep a problem in their mouths or suggesting you wait for a problem to develop; instead of doing something proactive to help them.

You can’t think you are helping your patients because you do as little dentistry as possible.  In reality, you end up with a practice full of emergencies because you have trained your patients to wait until the problem is unbearable.

Of course, anyone would love a dentist that never does any work on them or as little as possible but it takes a really special practice, team and doctor to have patients love you because you helped them.

I challenge you today to learn to create some urgency in your experience, engagement, interaction and communication with your patients.  Because if it can wait – guess what – they are going to wait.

If there is no compelling reason to do something now, then no one will.

Think about the long-term health benefits of being proactive, of not letting things go, of getting out ahead of problems.

Obviously, you do have those patients even when it is a real legitimate emergency who still delay and object.  That’s where we are going next week.  Onto strategies to help you improve your patient outcomes after they have tried to throw a wrench into your process.

Remember, I’m never telling you how to diagnosis or do dentistry.  I’m only tell you that if you diagnose it – it must be done.  It’s your responsibility to give the patient a sense of urgency around the treatment because you only help those who say yes.