There is no greater point I can possibly make about the first domino of success in all of Dentistry – regardless of what type of practice you have or dentistry you do, regardless of what your goals are, and regardless of what part of the country you are in – as I explained last week, it all comes back to the origin, the creation, the inception, the diagnosing of the dentistry.
You will never out collect, out produce, out schedule, out accept, out earn your total value of diagnosis. Of course, the better you are at case acceptance and complete treatment, the less of the diagnosis you need in the first place, but this is really the key factor.
The majority of Doctors are chasing the wrong objective and wondering why they are not achieving consistency in their goals or hitting the numbers they know they are capable of. It is because far too much focus is on the end result of the collections instead of the beginning with the creation of treatment.
Your goal should be to out collect your production every single day by out diagnosing, scheduling, and getting acceptance on more dentistry than you need to achieve your goals and make your practice work.
This gives you the ability to grow profitably, on demand. By the way, this actually removes the focus on numbers and money by putting all of the focus on the patients and their health.
Your commitment to yourself is to have the right amount of patients who desire to get healthy and have means to invest accordingly to align your practice for success.
The key phrase is: the right amount for you – not too few and not too many. Being able to do more with less because you are bringing to life your comprehensive vision of health and making your experience truly experiential to lift your patients’ view, vision, and value of what you can do for them up to your level.
I promised the sentence that sums up the secret to expanding your diagnosis and getting patients to want it and be a part of it.
I call it establishing the “reality” of the patient’s mouth and health as it is right now today. Talk about facts of where they are at based on all of your pillars of health that make up your clinical philosophy.
Once you have this, you now build the “vision” of what the patient’s mouth and health could look like if they were at state of ideal with optimal and complete health; again anchoring it back to the principles of your philosophy so that it is incredibly objective.
Far too much diagnosing is subjective. It is just problem focused, talk through numbers of teeth, what you see, and hodgepodge the treatment together (at best organize it into quadrants).
That is NOT a vision, that is NOT complete health, and that is NOT comprehensive. It must move beyond doctor dictated and become patient directed. When that happens – it’s magic. You follow-up everything by removing limits from the patients’ minds (whether money, insurance, belief, fear, or anything else), ask them what they would really want, and expand their understanding of the benefits they will receive.
If you build a truly comprehensive treatment plan, you will have exhausted all of the problems but more importantly you will have explored all of the possibilities. In doing so, you will discover what your patients really want and you will give them an opportunity to say yes to a pathway to health that they deserve.
It goes like this: establish Reality, create the Vision, and build the Bridge in between resulting in the personalized Pathway to Health that the patient has helped to develop. You will win just about every single time. Additionally, you will find you can achieve a lot more with a fewer patients by moving patients faster towards their goals thereby lessening the volume and the number of visits.
And, by the way, the same process works for any Specialty Practice. While your treatment plans might be more limited in type, style, or procedure, the approach to getting the most complete case acceptance and advanced pre-payment on the treatment is done exactly like this.
To review and go back to my requests from last week, the challenge is for you to assess how well you are doing by tracking your average case and treatment plan values for each compartment within the practice and every team member. This will ensure you are truly diagnosing comprehensively and that you are reviewing (not just finishing off single treatment plans) every patient with fresh eyes.
We can work on case acceptance all day long but often it’s the fact that the diagnosis was short changed and patient’s desire and value was not established. This leads to defaulting down to steps or stages or phases or pieces or parts instead of complete and comprehensive pathways to health.
This all begins with what is said from phone call all the way through to follow-up. Every word, step, process, and team member either enhances or detracts from the creation of treatment.
Begin with the end in mind for your patients and reverse engineer your entire experience around this. Take it very literally with how you diagnosis, put together the plan, and how you present it. Be truthful and transparent with your patients about your goals for them and how you go about creating their pathway to health and their involvement in it.
Here’s the thing: this always mattered and it will always be the difference maker. Especially now when the days are certain including who shows up and who doesn’t, what the news will say tonight or tomorrow, and what new restrictions or requirements will be forced upon you.
What is always certain and what offsets this is the significance of every single individual patient and your ability to take your time to thoroughly build the case by creating the vision to help your patients get healthy. This is how you change the game, break free of limitations, and set yourself up for the most profitable growth possible.
Go to work on this and we’ll revisit the five profitable leverage factors to set you up for success through the year end. Consider it our very worthy “back to school” topics to focus on the basics. Rest assured, for us, school will always be in session.
