Does being a dental patient advocate or provider, impact dental case acceptance?

Is it your job to worry about your patient's economics and finances? What holds you back in communication with your dental patients when recommending treatment? Do you as a patient provider; whether it be the doctor, the hygienist or the assistant, provide the information of what you see, regardless of the patient's means to restore them back to optimum dental health? Are you their advocate in the unbiased presentation of their dental treatment?

What responsibilities do we have in recommending treatment to our patients? How do we create that mindset? Too often we prejudge their finances, desires or ambitions when it comes to treatment presentation.

Put some STP in your dental marketing!

New dental patient flow is important for all dental practices. However, looking to gain 100 new dental patients every month for a well-established dental practice does not need to happen and general coupon marketing is not the main answer.
Many practices will spend thousands of dollars on marketing without spending time on STP.

What in the world is STP?

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.

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!