One of the greatest Powers of Private Practice is your ability to control, determine, and create processes that align with your vision. Processes that actually orchestrate success.
All too often doctors and teams fall into the trap of doing things the same way because that’s the way they’ve always done them. They adopt these methods based on industry norms or passed down from colleagues that they think are right. They become entrenched and deep rooted, where questioning their validity is never even considered.
I’d like to give you back your power and with that permission to make them your own. It’s time to elevate and improve so you can better ensure your desired outcomes are a natural result of your predictable, customized processes.
Last week, we talked about practice from your perspective. Today, let’s flip this to your patients’ perspective as we talk about process and protocols and how they facilitate or inhibit your goals for you by way of achieving your goals for them.
Depending on your nature, you either have developed your own way of doing this, you have combined many educational experiences to come up with your tried-and-true method, or you are following someone else’s method passed down by a mentor… usually these are all clinical ways of doing things.
All of these become habits, behaviors, and steps for every different component of your dentistry. It’s impossible to operate without a multitude of processes (intentional or not) in your practice.
However, here’s what most practices never have (and where they lose their power), is that the patient experience process always happens by chance and convenience instead of a legitimate and deliberate – on purpose – PATIENT SUCCESS PROCESS.
Of course, they have to walk in, sit down, be greeted, called back to room, exited, and checked out. This is the absolute minimum to do anything. It also happens to be boring and accomplish nothing but a transactional visit. There is no meaningful progress made with the patient with the bare minimum.
I don’t care whether it’s a brand-new patient or a hygiene patient for decades or an emergency patient of record who’s fully restored. This is your greatest power of all – the power to influence patients by operating on purpose.
Most practices fail first at process. There are other shortcomings too, including consistency, communication, and overall objectives they are trying to achieve. Still, the first place most practices miss is that they have no real process to build a better patient and achieve success more often.
I’m talking about getting a patient prepared not just for the doctor but for the diagnosis; not just for the diagnosis but the value of dentistry; not just for the financial discussion but for the outcome, benefits, next steps that are inevitable.
Quickly, imagine you are a new patient and immediately outline the process that you would go through in your practice. This is not what you think should happen; it must be what reliably occurs nearly every single time.
Then look at that list and ask yourself: is it more transactional or relational? Is it more sterile or interactive? Is it more passive or proactive? Is it more clinical, operational, speed focused or is it more human, educational, trust focused? Is it more problem fixing, order-taking, emergency minded or it is more health-based, possibility discovering, optimal outcome minded?
If you are really serious, you will break apart that last paragraph and literally dissect every step you are doing in your patient process to see where you can improve in each of these key qualitative measures.
I will give you some buzz words about the patient process in your practice that everyone should strive for… Consistency, Positive, Energetic, Attentive, Optimal, Personal, Engaging, Future Focused, Curious, Interactive, Together (i.e. no patient is alone at any time of the process).
Of course, the list could go on and on. It would be a fun exercise for your team to talk through these words and make your own list of what you want a patient to experience and feel during the process in your practice.
There are nuances inside of the overall experience (such as the verbiage, the gifts, the dialogue), but before we can enhance an experience, we must have a process to follow.
This is not just a checklist of steps as if we are performing a procedure. You are dealing with another human, so instead of identifying a task to check off, think about a response you want to elicit. You are trying to accomplish the ultimate goal of every patient interaction…
CASE ACCEPTANCE with a patient who has trust, feels loyalty to the relationship, and is proud of the successful outcome which the patient values.
The big lesson of this week is to put as much energy and thought into how deliberate you are with your NON-CLINICAL PROCESS as you do your clinical procedures and protocols. You’ll have more of those to do (and more at one time with the same patient) if you go to work on this.
You think through what process looks like in your practice right now and how you can improve using your team’s keywords. This is also about thinking deeply on details of the experience and the nuances of the psychology required to move patients forward with their health.
Here is what I can tell you from having more intimate knowledge and experience of more patient processes in more practice than you could fathom – poor case acceptance on comprehensive dentistry is not because patients are no good, it’s because practice process are so bad.
It’s flat out not understanding the purpose that leads us to a ‘take what you can get’ mindset instead of educate, cultivate, and create what you want with your patients.
When you are in the mouth during a procedure then a clinical protocol is fine to follow but to get into the mouth, you have to go through the person – the living, breathing, feeling, thinking person – and that requires a different approach. In order to take them to the state of ideal for you, you must have a process that takes them to state of ideal for themselves.
It is all in the approach to the practice process for turning in ordinary patient into an amazing A Patient.
The good news is everything here is actually a PROCESS change, more so than anything else.
It is about the experience we are taking the patients through that enables them to be insurance minded and to accept only small, minimal dentistry. This then requires you to see so many patients that you are slammed and packed full with no time to really engage patients for anything else.
This vicious cycle repeats again and again. At least until you reach burnout; or until insurance companies keep suppressing fees so much so you are practically losing money; or until your team is so stressed and overworked they can’t keep up (which means more hiring, more overhead); or until you are working harder and harder while making less and less.
That doesn’t describe every doctor but it describes a lot more than would admit it.
And then you have the opposite… sitting around starving as you want more dentistry but are unwilling to do anything differently than sit back and wait for patients to volunteer themselves up for treatment. And when you do get the chance, you are so passive and bashful about real comprehensive dentistry tied to optimal health that you become stymied and wonder why.
You can imagine how often I hear doctors say that they need more patients but they are operating with a column or two of hygiene, have been in practice for decades, and their new patient flow is stable and steady.
I don’t care if you want only one hygienist or a lot. The point is patient retention matters whether that is in hygiene or simply moving through treatment plans and accomplishing their pathways to health. If you don’t keep them in motion in the practice, you aren’t going to get a lot of dentistry done.
These patient process issues disguise themselves quite easily. In fact, they often all show up as something else entirely. Which, I get it, it is easy to pass the blame onto insurance, patients, team, time, city, economy. And while all of these things can and must be managed and controlled deliberately – the problem is still always going to come back to the PROCESS in place for patient success.
You are getting what you are getting because of what you are doing…
- Daily production averages
- Referral creation
- Treatment out of Hygiene
- Overall value of Treatment Plans
- How much and how fast a patient completes their treatment plans
- Small visits, single teeth, quadrants, arches, full mouth
- Case starts on Ortho, TMD, Sleep
- Implant units
- Phone call conversion
- The list goes on and on.
If you want to improve of any of these it’s… process. Period.
I don’t mind being tough on you but that isn’t my intention. What is, is for you to understand, accept and buy into the fact that every result is happening because of the way things are being done. If you don’t like the result or you want a better one – improve the way it’s being done.
I am challenging you to go beyond just the patient experience into the compartments of your practice and the key leverage points that you expect certain outcomes and results from. Question them, reflect on them, assess them, and you decide what and how they could be better.
Anybody can make up excuses about all the variables in the world and all the things that can go wrong. Instead, push yourself and don’t give in to the easy way out. Even though every day is a different day and every patient is a different patient, you can manage success by relying on the power of process that gives you a shot at winning more frequently.
There are principled ways to get where you want to go and there are smart strategies that stack the deck in your favor – all leading you to a higher probability of success for the results you want. And that’s what I’m going to be bringing to you in my brand-new Power of Private Practice Whiteboard Session… details coming next week. In the meantime, you’ve got some homework to do to apply the power of process for patient success.
