On a daily basis, I have to remind Teams (and Doctors) that more dentistry LEAVES your office than GETS DONE in your office, every single day.
This is a reality that many want to pretend isn’t true. They do this by saying things like…
“Most of our patients are healthy”
“We have great case acceptance”
“Our patients are already completely restored”
“No one buys cosmetics anymore”
I could go on with a long list of excuses about why more treatment isn’t discovered and more patients aren’t helped on a daily basis. We could talk about insurance and money; which just means your patient experience, trust and relationship isn’t very good, if that’s all they base their decisions on.
Growing practices, profitable practices, successful teams – they don’t make excuses.
The other thing they don’t do is waste opportunity.
Since the discussion about capturing more treatment per day is a long one and certainly warrants a special report, presentation or, at least, saved for a venue different than this one.
I’m going to put our emphasis today on how many places, actions, points of engagement that occur with patients every day that many people miss (and therefore waste opportunity).
There is an expression I was taught by a mentor of mine a long time ago. He would say that smart people “always keep their antennas up.” Which meant that they are always on the look out for opportunity and they stay observant.
Here are just a few examples to get you and your team brainstorming and thinking outside the box this week (and, hopefully, every day in your huddle).
Missed Opportunity: On the phone not asking/encouraging a patient to bring their spouse to their first visit.
Missed Opportunity: If you deal with insurance at all, having it pre-verified so there is no excuse for the patient to delay decisions when they visit.
Missed Opportunity: Not finding out other family members in the patient’s life who live in the city you practice…or their occupations or other interests.
Missed Opportunity: Every clinical team member not being in the habit of and having a dedicated protocol for taking pictures with every single patient every single visit to remind, to discover, to educate, to demonstrate real problem areas of concern or anything that could be done to help the patient get healthy, look better, chew easier, prevent problems from happening and so on and so forth.
The biggest missed opportunity in every practice is: under diagnosis. Not always, but often, because the Doctor or Team is bashful about telling the patients the truth or they prejudge the patients, but mostly because everyone is in a hurry and things get left unsaid, pictures get left untaken, communication gets mishandled, treatment doesn’t get handed off.
Another big one is patients leaving without paying or scheduling…
And then there is the stupidest one of them all – I call it “step by step dentistry” – whereas you present one tiny little step at a time therefore forcing yourself to have to resell the patient every time they come in, start all over again, and drag the patient back through the part they hate the most – discussing treatment and money.
Why is this so bad? Because of three facts…
1. Not all patients will even come back multiple times and therefore you leave a ton of treatment (the majority of it) “on the table” or better said “in their mouths.”
2. You rely on your systems and each other to not drop any balls, not miss any steps, not forget, not get busy and otherwise be ineffective at converting patients to the next step on their treatment plan.
3. And above all else, because patients don’t want to think every time they visit your office there is going to be a new bill, a new problem, a new something. You condition them to want to avoid you instead of to trust you by structuring their game plan from the beginning and having full discloser with them about their goals, problems, health and how you are going to help them.
There is a lot of stuff here today. I could go on about wasting opportunity. Please take this seriously, discuss with each other where this happens in your practice with your patients. Remember this, whatever your goals are for the day in production – they are never going to happen if you first aren’t creating, capturing, securing enough diagnosis, case acceptance, scheduled treatment and cash to hit them.
Most people are looking at growth and production all wrong. It begins right here and your goals become easy when you don’t waste opportunity and leave treatment (and your patients) behind.
