Accelerate My Practice Blog

How can data mining your dental practice with Revenue Well grow your dental practice?

Do you find yourself wanting to market to your existing dental patients? Perhaps let them know you are doing a special on Invisalgn or whitening? Maybe your dental hygiene schedule has fallen apart in the upcoming weeks and you would like to fill it up a bit more? How would you currently go about this? Manually look up a list of people and then send them either a postcard or email? Sounds daunting, doesn't it.

By utilizing technology to data mine your patient files, you can do this much more effectively and efficiently. We at AMP are very good friends with the Revenue Well team, because they have solved this problem. They have a system that allows you to communicate everything and anything with your patients. For example: you can send out welcome packets, thank them for a referral, allow them to find your practice via the internet, take payments over the internet, confirm appointment, get reminders, send a Happy Birthday message, and lastly and most importantly, create a Dental Marketing Campaign for just about anything.

What are the best questions to ask during an interview for a dental position?

Too many within dental offices hyper focus on technical skills when interviewing applicants vs attitudinal skills. When an employee leaves your dental practice, is it usually because of technical skill problems or because of attitude and team issues? More often than not, it has nothing to do with technical skills. So then, when interviewing why do we focus so much on these skills? Because it is easier!!

My suggestion would be to focus on the attitude of the applicant. I am a firm believer that you can teach just about any technical skill, but it is difficult to teach attitude. You either have it or you don't. So how best to screen for attitude issues? I will provide you a few examples to help you along the way.

Can a Perio department be profitable for your dental practice?

Recently I have been doing research with my clients to see what percentage of their patients are being treated for Periodontal disease. It has been very eye opening for myself as well as the doctors. The average has been under 20%! According to the ADA, the CDC and RDH magazine, it is between 50-80% of your patients have periodontitis. So the $400K question is why are only 20% being treated?

I think there are a few answers to this question. First, we are probably treating most of these patients for periodontitis but only billing for a healthy mouth cleaning. If your hygienist is spending 20-30 minutes with a Cavitron in their hand, but billing for a D1110, you are just leaving money on the table and billing incorrectly. I am finding that this is way more common than most doctors realize. The reason for this, is we are afraid to tell the patient that their oral health has deteriorated and perhaps we have been over treating and under billing. Fear is the answer for sure.

The second reason I find many patients aren't being treated for Periodontitis is because there appears to be confusion the definition. Just seeing the range in prevalence between the ADA, CDC and RDH magazine proves this. How can all 3 sources have a range of 50-80% of your patients have periodontitis? I am not a clinician thus can't answer this question for you. I would suggest that the doctor and hygienist have a sit down to discuss this and if needed, get your favorite Periodontist to do a lunch and learn for you on this topic. They clearly will have the answer.

How to have a successful hygiene exam with your dental patient.

Do you ever walk into your hygiene room with your last patient still on your mind and then wonder what is going on with this patient? Do you think this patient can sense this? Many doctors approach us about improving their case acceptance rate, and this step in the process is key to success. If you don't have a great handoff of information during your hygiene check, you will most likely have a hygiene fumble and not see the outcome you are looking for!

I see too many offices where the doctor and the team aren't quite on the same page regarding clinical diagnosis. Now, we all know that it is only the doctors job to diagnose dentistry, but let's face it, every hygienist is prepping the patient with what the doctor will see. How do you suppose your hygienist feels if she sets you up to tell this patient they need a crown and then you walk in and tell the patient, they don't need it, or you will watch it? The answer is they feel undermined and will probably stop setting you up for success. Not to be malicious, but because they were embarrassed. The key to success is being on the same page.

How can I get my Dental Practice off of PPO's?

Many see the PPO as a necessary evil to keep their dental practice alive in this day and age. I happen to believe that you don't have to allow your practice to be dominated by PPO's if you do a few simple things to decrease their impact on your practice.  Now I am not suggesting that everyone should get off the PPO, but if you want to decrease their impact on your practice, here are some tips on how to accomplish this.

1.  How good is your case acceptance? Most practices I see have about a 55% case acceptance rate with the help of insurance. If you were to simply dump the PPO without making some improvements in this area, you are asking for trouble. Improvement here is a must before you can even consider making changes to how many PPO's you have in your practice.

2.  How do you currently acquire new patients? Do they only come to you because you are on various insurance lists? If so, you will obviously have to make some changes here. How else can you attract new patients, preferably cash paying ones? There are lots of answers here and Groupon is not the answer!