Missed Opportunities for Growing your Dental Practice

There are patient statistics dental practices are not tracking and knowing these facts can assist in the growth of your practice. Here are a few types of patient tracking that should happen in a dental office.

Tracking where new patients are coming from is essential. You can include it on a new patient questionnaire or on your health history form that all new patients fill out or as a part of your new patient hygiene note.

Your front office staff should compile this information for you on a monthly basis. If most of your patients are coming from referrals, expand your referral base and start asking for referrals. If most of your new patients say that they just searched the internet, follow up that question by asking them if they visited your website. You will be surprised to hear how those two go hand in hand. People don’t just see you somewhere and decide to come to your dental office.

If you find new patients are coming from a particular source, you want to invest more time and money into that source. If you don’t know what that source is, it’s pretty hard to know where to invest more money, time, and energy.

Once you have a handle on where your new patients are coming from, you need to find out where they are going. Patients move, die, switch dentists, and it is not possible to retain100% of patients over a career. But there are some things you can do to improve your retention percentage.

Overall, with new patients:

• One-third of new patients stay in your practice and do the treatment you recommend
• One-third stay and may not do the treatment that you recommend today, but they may do this treatment in six months or a year
• One-third will leave, not necessarily because of you or your staff, but for whatever reason

While it is very important to increase your new patient numbers, it is more important to keep the ones you are already have. How can you increase the number of patients you keep? You need to know where your patients are going.
Keep track of how many patients are leaving your office with a next appointment. If patients aren’t accepting treatment but they are making their next recall appointment, you are more likely to retain them as a patient. Track this and meet regularly with your staff to review it.

The best way to retain a patient is to get them scheduled while they are in your office. The longer that it takes for them to schedule a next appointment, the less likely are to come back. The goal with every new patient should be that they leave with a next recall appointment.

It has been shown that new patient value is significantly higher in the second and third years of being a patient. Treatment planning is a personal style, but acceptance is significantly higher if they continue seeing you as their dentist. Initially they may not trust you and may need more time before they are ready to have you do their treatment.

Dental consultants sometimes talk about a short call list or a cancellation call list. Every office has the potential to put this into place and at the same time track whether treatment recommended is actually scheduled. Keep a few spreadsheets and have your front office write down the names of patients who need treatment and whether or not they schedule.

When you have a cancellation, this is your list of patients to call and make your way down the list. Use this when there is a cancellation or when tomorrow’s schedule starts falling apart. The rule should be if by today at noon, tomorrow’s schedule is light; you can devote the afternoon to filling it. Sometimes this is a difficult concept for team members to embrace, but filling the schedule is the most important thing they can do. This becomes significantly more efficient if they have a list of patients to call.
Many issues in practices could be avoided just by knowing these statistics, there is power in knowing the numbers. When you know your numbers; you can make educated decisions as to how to grow your practice.

 

Making The Most Out of Dental Benefits Until 2014

We are just days from the end of 2013, and for many that means their 2013 dental benefits are about to expire. For dental practices, this means numerous no-shows, last minute cancellations, and various excuses to delay treatment. With proper communication, these final weeks of the year present the perfect opportunity for dental practices to ensure their schedule is full. Consider sending patients annual insurance benefit letters indicating what is left on their plans and letting them know if they don’t use it, they lose it!

Many insurance companies count on making millions of dollars off patients who never use their insurance benefits. Consumers do not realize many of these plans provide coverage up to a certain dollar amount annually.Insurance companies certainly aren’t going to alert customers, and most patients are too busy to research how much remains on their policies. It’s up to dental practices to get the word out to patients, and soon.

First, identify those patients with unused insurance benefits who are in need of treatment or preventive care. Next, draft an email or place a call to notify them of the unused benefits. If your software is capable, use it to print reports, such as patients that are due for hygiene visits and cross reference it with those with benefits left. Be certain office staff inform patients that call or come into the office, especially patients in need of treatment that have unused dental insurance benefits available to them. Be sure the patient understands they will lose those benefits if not used by the end of the year.

The Five P’s: Have You Reviewed Your Key Success Factors Recently?

According to IBISWorld, a leading provider of industry-based research, the top key success factors for dentists are:

I. Pricing – Ensuring pricing policy is appropriate. Dentists must price services in accordance with clients’ ability to pay, industry norms, and time requirements per service. Your fee structure is a major driver of practice value. Have a methodical and systematic way to raise fees, regularly/annually. See our recent blog, “In Or Out of Network, That is the Question” for further details on pricing and prices accepted for services

II. Patient relationships -The development of good patient relations is essential to create a loyal customer base and referrals. Word-of-mouth is a very effective form of marketing. Positive experiences, excellent doctor-patient communication, and professional and outwardly helpful staff lead to impressive repeat and new patient levels.

III. Practice location – Easy access. Location has proven to be extremely important in generating new patient referrals and encouraging patients to return. When looking for the best location keep in mind these factors:

• population statistics / demographics
• traffic patterns
• visibility & accessibility of the building and your sign
• convenient parking
• competition (the location is not overpopulated with dentists)

IV. Processes – Well developed internal processes result in productivity and profitability. To know how well-oiled your practice runs, evaluate the following list of systems within your practice:

• Scheduling
• Overhead expense control
• Accounts Receivable – See our blog post  “Smarter Account Receivable Management”
• Charting
• Staff (a well-trained and established team)
• Recall in the hygiene department
• New patient levels
• Marketing (image, brand, reputation, internal & external marketing plans, website)

V. Product offerings – Ability to quickly adopt new technology: Technological advances improve productivity, allowing dentists to complete more procedures in a given day and maintain higher profit with less time and labor cost. The introduction of new technology assists the practice to increase the range of services provided and improve productivity, lowering your costs.