Have you heard the saying, “Math Doesn’t Lie?”
It has no feelings or emotions. It can’t be subjective. It is what it is.
We have been talking about the greatest number of them all inside of your practice; the number that is bigger than any other. No one number is bigger than your diagnosis and total treatment value of opportunity you have to help patients. And therefore, it is the number we should go to work on the most because the biggest number stands to have the biggest impact, obviously.
Here is what I didn’t say over the past two weeks: add a chair or a hygienist or a procedure or a doctor or hours or even patients or team members. I didn’t even say raise your fees or negotiate your insurance contracts (though yes, most certainly all of those are ways to impact the math of your practice and they could be appropriate for certain practices at certain times).
For now, we are going to stay on Diagnosis for just a more couple weeks. We are headed in the direction of talking about how to actually, clinically, diagnosis more dentistry – always based on your philosophy and the patient’s reality, nothing more and nothing less, never forget that.
Today, we’re talking about math and specifically how dentistry moves through your practice in the terms of value from your patients before we get to the obvious other ‘numbers’ that can be moved, increased, repositioned to make a difference.
There are four primary target or key indicators of how well you are doing at taking the TOP LINE Diagnosis number and moving it forward through the Practice – for the patients benefit – and ensuring it impacts your practice in a profitable way.
Stating the obvious, you can diagnosis more per patient by being more complete and comprehensive. I have encouraged you to identify, write out, present, illustrate, educate, and ultimately diagnose by a set of health-based principles throughout your experience with every single patient, new and old.
As a reminder, usually something like guns, teeth, bite, smile, airway, could be cancer, jaw/joint, hard tissue, soft tissues, occlusion, aesthetics, etc – you are the expert. You just have to have something outlined and stick to it.
And here’s the real key: TELL THE PATIENT WHAT AND WHY …please.
And don’t forget to tell the team. For extra credit, teach them how to engage patients with all of these principles and pillars of health as well. This goes back to week one and two on philosophy and dialogue.
So, here’s the big treatment movers.
You must commit to presenting what you diagnosis, in totality. Most every Doctor is experiencing self-imposed limitations to growth because of this absolute one factor.
No money, production, treatment, or schedule flow will ever be greater than the amount and size of the treatment that is presented to patients (as in what is appropriate for the patient to do or not do, now or later, ideally altogether in as few visits as possible).
From ‘total diagnosis’ comes complete and comprehensive treatment presentation. Go ahead, you’ll catch yourself next week screwing this up many times. Try to track the diagnosis that is in your head that never comes out of your mouth because you second guess or doubt yourself or the patient.
The next step is obviously based on treatment presentation. You then have the amount of dentistry that is actually said yes to by the patient.
What is commonly referred to as Case Acceptance. Though it has very loose meaning because patients agreeing in concept or nodding their heads or even scheduling without paying or when patients schedule one piece instead of the whole you – do not have case acceptance. More than likely you have insurance acceptance, not treatment acceptance and definitely not vision, outcome, benefits, total, and complete case acceptance.
The bottom line: the next tier down from presentation is case acceptance.
And then we have my favorite which I like to call “money on the table.” That’s right, back that “yes” up with some cash. The way diagnosis flows into your bank account the fastest is by way of pre-payment. This is a game changer and a leverage maker because it is what breaks apart the dependence on production and provides peace of mind with future scheduled value that you can count on.
This is my mantra for you: get paid to do dentistry instead of doing dentistry to get paid.
You follow me? Money moves from diagnosis to presented treatment to case acceptance to money on the table. Next we have the end-all-be-all biggest plateau of them all in every single practice no matter whether you are still doing single units or you are doing full mouth cases (with the exception of our Sleep and Ortho practices; and even then there are phases or steps or therapies or other things that could be bundled and scheduled).
It is the Production Leverage Point that determines the final lever in the flow of treatment and that is… the size of appointments that are placed in the schedule.
How you build the production value per day and what you determine, accept, and tolerate being done in size and scope of treatment in any one patient’s mouth.
The bottom line is, especially if you are tied to production to get paid, until you commit to scheduling larger amounts of dentistry, surgery, procedures, treatment as a whole per patient per visit, you will be forever stuck. Even though you may think a lot is going well but you just can’t figure out why your numbers are plateaued or you can’t seem to move the needle, this is likely the cause.
And it is no one’s fault but your own – including the people responsible for your schedule – because it is still your schedule and you’re letting it happen.
Alright, are you ready for some good news?
The good news is you, right now at this moment in time, will find that at least one (and probably all), of these can be leverage points for you.
Someone somewhere inside of your practice is screwing up one or more of these leverage points and your Diagnosis is getting watered down, broken down, chopped off, lost, misplaced, delayed or denied. Therefore, you are stuck in the math problem that you are creating and perpetuating every single day; all while expecting more out of the same process, system, beliefs, and approach.
There you go. I’ve just made growth in dentistry very simple.
It really does boil down to 5 stages that make up the flow of dentistry (and ultimately how money moves) through your practice.
The greatest source of all leverage in dentistry comes from this. This is everything that affects the movement of the TOP LINE NUMBER down and through the practice into the patients’ mouths in terms of health and into your bank account in terms of dollars.
Yes, there are all kinds of bells and whistles and tips and tricks and strategies and ways to create artificial volume based growth and there are other ways to expand the practices capabilities and potential – we’ll cover them in a couple weeks – but what there isn’t is this…
There is no GREATER way to grow a practice’s PROFIT than this right here. Period.
Follow me on this path. You can think about it as a funnel…
You start at the top with the more diagnosis, the more opportunity you have.
Then you move to the total and complete presentation of that diagnosis.
Then the Patient says yes to some or all and we have case acceptance.
From there we receive some commitment of money, again some or all.
Finally, dentistry is placed into your schedule in amounts that may or may not be linked to anything to do with the above flow.
At any point it could have been lost, it could have been disconnected from the previous stage in the process or it could even be arbitrarily arrived at. The more these things are linked, the more leverage you create. The more they are dictated and determined top down instead of bottom up (which is the majority of all practices), the more control you have over your numbers.
That is the business of dentistry from a math perspective.
If you want control and leverage, if you desire success on purpose instead of by accident, if you really want to help your patients get healthy in a comprehensive way… this is the only way that is purely and completely related to VALUE over VOLUME that drives Profitability (not to mention having a whole lot of fun doing what you love the most!).
You must commit to mastering this and making it the focus of the systems that manage your practice and patient experience.
This, by the way, actually makes it MORE about the patient, it makes it MORE personal and intimate, and it makes it far MORE customized and relationship driven than ANYTHING else ever could.
Which brings me to the obvious statement in your mind: What about the Patient? They are the biggest variable in the formula.
Well, ultimately you’d be wrong because patients only knows is what they are told, what they go through, and the experience they participate in. You own the outcomes of the patient visits. If you buy into that, you’ll never feel helpless about your results again.
That said, of course the patient is the most important part of the whole thing because they are why we are doing this to begin with. They just don’t have the most control over it, unless you give it to them. It is in your hands to help them help themselves.
We’ll go to work on their decisions and role in this math problem and patient experience next week. Get ready, it’s going to be a lot of fun.
Seems to me you’ve got some tough thinking and thorough assessments to do on the math and treatment flow in your practice. Enjoy.
