Practice Success Through Consistent Case Acceptance – Part 2

Last week, we put in place several key principles around how to keep your schedule consistently flowing the way you want.  Ideally, that has to do with a daily objective that you wish to achieve for production.  Most would underestimate the significance of actually orchestrating and owning the schedule.

You might have expected tips and tricks and formulas.  But, that’s not what it takes to achieve consistent success in your practice.  It takes action.  It takes you and your team (and usually one particular person who is going to drive the schedule forward) paying attention to it – in the future – not just in the moment.

Now, all that said, of course the statement I get back by Doctors is, “Yeah, but Scott I need the patients to do my schedule that way…”  Or they will say, “Well I don’t have any anchor appointments or not enough for one a day right now…”

Ultimately, while that might be correct in the given circumstances, it is not the first place to focus.  If you do not take control over the schedule no matter how busy or slow you are, then it will always come as feast or famine.  It will be productive days and unproductive days.  Big days and little days.  It is important to create consistency in schedule because that is what allows you to operate every other part of your practice consistently.

So, yes, we need the dentistry to build a better schedule but you need the principles and commitments to set your schedule up for success first.

Now that I’ve beat that up even more than last week, let’s talk about the magic that must happen inside of your practice every single day with every single patient.

Case Acceptance

You can use a lot of terms here but we’ll stick with Case Acceptance because I want to really dive deep into the meaning of this and ensure everyone understands that not all case acceptance is created equal.

Today, my goal is to layout for you the five major success factors to Case Acceptance that when embraced and brought into your culture drive consistent results.  This will prevent even patient economics and insurance dynamics from affecting the integrity of your practice, diagnosis, and overall case acceptance.

Before we go there let me explain why I said not all case acceptance is the same.  That is because many Doctors will say their case acceptance is good and they either mean one of two things or maybe both.

First, they don’t really know whether it is or not; they have no numbers.  Second, they mean that “most” patients “do something.”

Now, that is NOT case acceptance.

Case Acceptance is: the comprehensive diagnosis (the total amount of treatment value in the treatment plan) compared to the amount of and value of dentistry the patient actually commits to, pays for, and schedules.

Of course, you could have some treatment phased in or spread out but the patient gets 100% of the work done over a period of time.

Generally speaking we are talking about the percent of the treatment presented that patient said yes to.

This is why this statistic is so skewed because you can get almost everyone to do what insurance pays for or at least get the one problem they came in for in the first place fixed but that isn’t true case acceptance.  That is going to represent a lower value or percentage of case acceptance.  We want to be looking at accurate data in order to assess actual performance.

Here are the five principles of Case Acceptance…

1st – Preparation and Awareness of Treatment

This can be chart reviews as well as paying attention inside of the room.   I always say you must “know thy patient.”  Every single clinical team member (and really every team member) should study what is going on with each patient coming in today.

This goes such a long way to bringing the next point into play…

2nd – Have a Strategy and a Plan for Engaging Patients with Treatment

Obviously, in a new patient experience you have a system you follow to ‘build the case.’  However, for existing patients, what’s the plan for the patient that has said no for years on something?  How are we going to go about it today?  What’s the plan for introducing the idea of invisalign or screening for sleep or moving to a new recommended treatment?

The best practices operate with specific strategies for each patient category.

Of course, any strategy should utilize things like my 3 P’s (Pictures, Proof, and Pain), as other ways to bring the treatment to life for each patient.

Next, maybe the biggest shortcoming of all…

3rd – Communication Across All People

That’s not just with your team and not just with patients, but with everyone.

You need to really grasp and take to heart my Triangles of Trust.  Those that are in the Mastery Series and Advanced Levels, you understand that these go beyond just handoffs and transfers into tag teams with integrated conversations with your patients.

The reason why communication brings about consistent case acceptance is because you can’t possibly know how a patient feels or what a patient is thinking unless you ask.

When I’m helping an already high performing Doctors improve case acceptance, it almost always comes back to more candid conversations and more authority with patients by guiding them to the right solution and helping them get over the hump of money or fear or whatever is standing in their way.

However, no one conversation can stand alone.  All communication in your practice must flow and be linked together otherwise it loses its impact.  And I can tell you when you make your communication more consistent, you will make your case acceptance more consistent.

4th – Of course, I’m going to say you have to present Total Comprehensive Treatment

Today’s Report is not about that so I’m not going to elaborate too much.  I could take every one of these points and write for weeks on them.

The bottom line is you must have a system for how treatment is presented effectively in order to facilitate case acceptance and carry the momentum from the operatory through to the end.

I encourage using pictures and a piece of paper to literally demonstrating through words and markers what the treatment is going to be – the pathway to health.  I have a very methodical and controlled way of starting with the big picture and going for all the money up front.  Then working our way down as we need to in order to accomplish one more important thing every time.  The goal is to secures as high of a percentage as possible of accepted treatment on the TOTAL Treatment Plan.

Most people start with steps or stages or worse than that visits.  They never even given themselves a chance to breakthrough schedule plateaus by securing larger amounts of case acceptance.

5th – Finally, there has to be Follow-Up.

I always say more dentistry walks out the door than stays but you don’t have to limit your efforts to only being inside the four walls of the practice.

The best practices are truly amazing at extending the conversation for those who simply refuse to make a decision today.  They get the patient in motion, they have next steps, and they follow-up with structured measures (not just when they get around to it or “in a couple weeks”).

Do not mistake follow-up for letting patients off the hook and being too busy to close cases by saying “I’ll email you.”  Or worse, “We’ll call you when we hear back from the insurance.”  Or whatever other completely unacceptable excuses for not executing on the culmination of every visit – acceptance, collection, schedule.

It’s always going to be easier to secure the case acceptance while the patient is still here.  Playing chase after the fact is tough and often unnecessary – that is why you have to have a commitment to professional follow-up and keep control of the experience even after the patient leaves.

With these five leverage points, it’s possible that you are doing all of them to an extent.  The real value is in asking what can you do better and understanding that the more consistent these 5 Principles are the more consistent your case acceptance will be.

I’ve left out some obvious things that are going to happen to focus on the higher level execution by all team members to take ownership over case acceptance.  You can insert patients owning their own problems, tough-love, overcoming objections, tracking results at the end of the day and all of these would be right too.

However, if we are going to stick with being proactive instead of reactive then your commitment to these five and how you bring them to life with every patient will be a difference maker in delivering to you the dentistry that you need to achieve the schedule you want.

Of course, most of all your goal is to help your patients get healthy and nothing does that more so than case acceptance – which has to happen first before any dentistry can be done.

There is a lot to chew on here.  Remember this: it’s not about how many patients you see, it isn’t even about how many patients say yes, it is about what they say yes to.  Case Acceptance matters and everything in your practice should be designed to drive and create more comprehensive case acceptance based on your diagnostic approach and treatment philosophy.

Next week, we’ll be talking about achieving consistent performance with your Team Members.  Stay tuned.