OUTCLASS YOUR COMPETITION WITH A PATIENT RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT PROGRAM

By Andrea H. Brockman, DDS

In any business, knowing what to do and when to do it will put you at ease and make the person you are dealing with more comfortable. Practice Management gurus and consultants have passed on great ideas to build practices. Practice Management Software provides the means of communication. What to do is usually not the problem. When it should be done and actually when or if it is done is another story.

There is no shortage of good intentions. I’ve seen the busy day to day activities that go on in dental offices and the best front desk people get sidetracked from handling the necessary communications to follow up with the lists of patient appointments, treatment plans and post-treatment contact. “I’ll get to it when I have time” may come too late. The dentist who only sees the schedule for the day may not find out until weeks later that the patient who set up the four hour appointment for next month cancelled a week before their scheduled time. Poor hit and miss communications can doom any business strategy.

Without Understanding the Commitment to Marketing, a Business Strategy Cannot Succeed

Change is necessary for survival. Dentists are continually reinventing their practices to compete and infuse new energy in day-to-day work. Most innovations come in the form of adding new techniques and products to deliver to their patients. The greater degree of change, the greater is the patient’s need for information.

It is well known that education and marketing drive treatment acceptance and treatment acceptance drives revenues. There certainly is no lack of time, efforts or educational materials that the doctor and employees give to their patients to sell cases. Patients are not motivated to pursue treatment with you only by how much it costs. The capacity to enhance their perceived need and the value of your service is something that should not be left to chance. As good as your front desk staff are at filling in appointments and collecting money, inconsistent and untimely follow-up leaves a great deal of money on the table.

It’s a Crime to Have Brilliant Dental Talents Go to Waste

Being a great dentist is only the start; the real success is when patients commit to and pay for full proposed treatment and then favorably communicate often to others about you. What’s the good of taking courses, buying new equipment and improving your skills if people don’t agree to the treatment or nobody knows about it? That’s exactly the problem with thousands of really great general dentists and specialists. Even when new techniques and products are introduced to their new or active patients, the practitioner is still a long way from educating the needing public. Most dental practitioners are good at what they do, but not good at telling the world. This stems from the conventional view that marketing is unprofessional and so was never taught in Dental School. Even though marketing is playing an increasing role in health care and dentistry is also a business, dentists as a rule have not learned to be as good entrepreneurs as they are technicians. And the fact is that many people that could use your services don’t have a clue that you have anything different or better to offer than any other dentist, whether they advertise or were referred to them.

Who Pays the Price When Patients Cancel, Don’t Schedule or Go Elsewhere?

            Take the case of Dr. Green, a solo practitioner, who has a high-end restorative practice in an upscale suburb. For the past 10 years he has invested in long-term continuing education, new specialized equipment and marketing to attract new patients. His image and philosophy are displayed on his website, brochures and recorded messages and throughout his office. Much has been spent on direct mail, newsletters and display advertising. His staff is quite knowledgeable and proud of the doctor. He has no trouble selling treatment plans. His schedule is always booked weeks in advance, new patients are constantly seeking his services and his staff is constantly working to keep the schedule productive. The office manager believes he is doing just fine but Dr. Green doesn’t understand why the office isn’t more profitable.

It was true that Dr. Green was busy, but one day when a 4 hour $10,000.00 case cancelled and didn’t reschedule, he had time to look over the reports, analyze statistics and dialogue with his staff. What he discovered floored him. The unscheduled work report showed that there was over $900,000.00 of outstanding treatment plans and many of those patients have not returned for their maintenance visits. The office had an average of 40 calls a month from his lead generation, yet the new patient visits totaled only 20. What, he wondered, happened to the other 20 inquiring potential patients? Going through the unscheduled report, he saw patients that had been referred to a specialist. Where were they? Patients who needed to check their calendar or discuss things with their spouse or weren’t ready to commit to full treatment now had been on that list for many, many months. The office manager assured Dr. Green that they had been contacted, several times, and the staff didn’t want to harass people, so they “cherry picked” the list for the ones they thought they could get to schedule and the rest they just quit calling. So, while Dr. Green thought that he was tuned in to things and educating his patients, the list of unscheduled work was getting longer and money was walking out of the practice.

Give Your Practice a Health Check-up

It was apparent to Dr. Green that a thorough assessment of his office systems was long overdue. He had a good Dental Practice Management Software System that tracked all the appointments, recorded the treatment plans, produced every report and had letter mail merging capabilities. His office staff was on top of running reports and who needed to be contacted. Calls, letters and postcards were routinely done. Dr. Green discovered that even with a good software system, an organized dedicated staff and a solid recall system, patients were falling through the cracks. Looking more closely, he was able to identify where the breakdown was occurring. This is what he found.

• Fortunately the office kept a record of every new person who called and what lead or referral source they came from. It seemed that there were a number of prospective patients calling but not everyone had committed to a first appointment. Sometimes office literature was sent out, other times not. Beyond that, there may have been a call to follow-up and no additional marketing was done. This occurred with about 10 patients a month out of 40-50 calls.
• There were a few patients who set up an initial appointment and later cancelled without rescheduling and one or two a month just never showed up. The office staff made a call and if unable to reschedule or contact the person, felt that this was not the reliable kind of patient the practice wanted and dismissed them to the growing landfill.
• Patients were presented treatment plans and had to: check their calendar, talk to their spouse, go out of town, wait for a special occasion, get a loan, see a specialist etc. Follow-up was done for a period of time but dropped off if the person calling got an unfavorable response or was continually put off. The staff felt that they were harassing the patients if they kept calling so the communications became less frequent. If a number of weeks or months had lapsed, it was less likely the treatment would ever be done at Dr. Green’s office.
• Patients agreed to start with one phase of treatment. Once completed, the patient was not in a financial position to continue or did not have a perceived need to continue with the rest of the proposed treatment. The next phases of treatment were put off and many failed to return for maintenance.
• New patients who were seen as emergencies were encouraged to return for a full exam. A large percentage made the appointment and then cancelled. They were dismissed as being bad patients.
• All patients were encouraged to pre-appoint for hygiene. Recall cards went out the month prior to the appointment and confirmation calls were done two days before. The office staff was under the impression that they had a good response. Further inspection revealed that 30% were not responding to the cards, had forgotten or couldn’t make that appointment. A good percentage of the day was spent on filling in hygiene appointments and still there were always 3-8 hygiene cancellations a week. At $400.00 an hour run the office, an empty chair was a great loss.
• There were days that the office got so busy that calls were not gotten to. Sometimes a person had to leave early or called in sick or went on vacation. When short staffed, even less could get done and then the next days were playing catch-up.
• The staff was already busy and preferred not to have another job to do.

Dr. Green had a very competent office team and a good program for practice management. He had a system for his billing, a system for handling insurance, a system for scheduling, and a system for payables. Not a bad start. The office needed a system for follow-up that did not place an added load on his front desk staff.  

 A Marketing Administrator Makes Good Business Sense

Every successful business recognizes the importance of separating operations, finance and marketing into departments and directors to handle the workload of each. In Dr. Green’s dental office, he had long separated out his payables into accounting software separate from his practice management software and hired a bookkeeper to pay the bills, run financial reports, do the payroll and balance the bank statements. It never occurred to him that the Practice Management Software and his existing staff had enough workload with operations and couldn’t be expected to fulfill the demands of a marketing program.

He could rationalize why he didn’t have a person designated for marketing. There wasn’t enough space for another person. He didn’t want the added payroll. He didn’t see the need for adding another software program and the staff did not want to “double entry” patient data. He had always had people calling, sending out correspondence and handling incoming calls. Wasn’t that enough? Apparently not. Dr. Green was frustrated with holes in the schedule and seasonal slow times, especially knowing that there was almost a million dollars worth of planned dentistry out there. He called in OraMedica Consultants.

Patient and Referral Relationship Contact Management Program

Dr. Green was like so many dentists who had transitioned their practice over to a high-tech, cutting edge cash office. He now, not being insurance dependent, had to come to terms with being entrepreneurial and running his practice more like a business. Marketing was never an issue before, but today with more competition, savvy consumers and changing services, the demands have been such that it was time to move to the next level and define that area of his business as distinct and worthy of it’s own system and administrator.

OraMedica International LLC was founded by dentists turned marketing consultants who spent over 50 combined years as practicing dentists and trained and worked with a national marketing firm. Over 3000 hours of research and development went into creating PRIMAS-DR a “best practices” system designed to let no patient or referral source ever fall through the cracks. Customized programmed letter and email sequences nurture patients at every stage of their relationship with your office. Long term educational sequences automatically and timely set for prospecting, reactivation, and existing, new, adult, dependant and referral sources. Campaigns for treatment proposals, referrals, patient satisfaction, dental and hygiene appointments and automatic recalls ensure “top of mind awareness” and results in a 600% return on investment in less than 12 months. The administrator uses customized Action Plans to automatically contact patients in your database at the appropriate established time. Patient retention is assured with consistent and automatic follow-up. Just set it and forget it. The system frees your front desk staff to do more important tasks and positions your practice as the “go-to” choice.

Dr. Andrea Brockman is President of OraMedica International LLC; health marketing perspectives and business growth strategies. She is co-creator of PRIMAS-DR, an automated patient and referral relationship management system.

Dr. Andrea Brockman