Article Common Sense

The Common Sense Philosophy of Patient Retention

You could hear a pin drop. At a recent roundtable event, we had just finished sharing several “success stories” about how we were so proud that we managed to cut several of our top clients’ monthly new patient numbers in half, and the room went dead silent. They were waiting for the punch-line when we explained ourselves to allay their fears and reassure the doctors in attendance that we were not a couple of lunatics bent on laying waste to flourishing practices.

The purpose of this article is not to tackle the entire subject of patient retention. There have been volumes already written on this vital element of practice growth and prosperity. We ourselves have an entire workshop dedicated to all the procedural and practical fundamentals of creating lifetime patients. However, this piece deals with logical reasoning in a concise, critical examination on the subject of new patients, how you handle them, and the need for a simple yet major paradigm shift in your philosophy toward growing your practice. We promise to do another article in the future that has all the “good stuff” that is in our workshop as we mentioned earlier, but for now you will have to settle for us sharing with you some of the fastest ways to boom your practice, all of which are based upon common sense and shifts in mindset alone.
Shift #1:

Stop viewing marketing as the silver bullet that cures all practice ills.

In our new book, The 25 Surefire Ways to Destroy Your Dental Practice, this one was chapter 15. We cannot begin to tell you how often it is that we encounter established practices with a solid patient base with a wall of floor to ceiling files and seeing 20, 30 even 50 or more new patients a month, that are struggling to meet their growth and expansion goals. Why? For several reasons, first of which is that of all ways to grow a practice, external marketing is the most expensive and least effective.

There is very little control of the type of patients you attract with external marketing, most of whom are often looking for a doctor who will take their insurance or who are shopping for the best price which creates numerous problems right from the start. Unless you have a rock solid front-end system that effectively pre-qualifies every new patient inquiry from your external marketing, you are in for further problems. When patients that are not a fit for your practice end up in your production schedule, be they shoppers, budget seekers or people in on special introductory offers with incorrect future expectations, not only does it create upsets but lost production time as well. We had one practice seeing over 50 new patients a month mostly from their external marketing. After investigating and tracking their new patient conversion rate when it was discovered that somehow they were not nearly reaching their financial goals, we found 48 hours of lost or wasted production time in one month spent on unqualified, uncommitted, or failed new patient visits! Their new patient treatment conversion averaged only 10-12% on external marketing patients with only 30% getting into recare. So some shifts were necessary.
Shift #2

The best way to build your practice is from the inside out.

Unless you are new to practice, you have recently re-located out of the area, or every single one of your patients currently in recare have completely healthy mouths free of disease and decay with no desire to improve the appearance of their teeth, and have already referred all of their family and friends for care, then you have no need to look external of your practice to meet all of your professional goals. There may be a couple of others, but the point here is you have developed hundreds perhaps thousands of trusting relationships with your existing patient base who are much more likely to follow your treatment recommendations based on the rapport and understanding you have gained over the months and years they have been in to see you and your hygiene team. It is often forgotten that we have a radically different viewpoint than most of the outside world towards dental health, and it often takes time to educate a patient and change their viewpoint. Your existing patients who are in recare should have and share more of your viewpoint from the repeated learning experience each visit to your office has cultivated over their time with you.

Additionally, if you were to do a chart audit of your active patients you will more than likely find plenty of incomplete, unaccepted, and even non-recommended treatment (i.e. the “watches” that has piled up over time that needs to be confronted and handled). You need to ask yourself if your valuable existing patients are truly being given the best possible care and attention given the state of their current dental health or have you gotten reasonable about and compromised your standard for care regarding healthy teeth and gums?

Mostly this shift encompasses a logical move toward emphasizing and focusing on quality over quantity. Your existing patients are your quality relationships while your new patients should be viewed as your quantity relationships who you need to earn your way with to eventually develop quality, trusting relationships. However, it is critical to understand that converting quantity into quality starts before a new patient even makes it into your schedule. Initially it begins with not having a scarcity mentality when it comes to new patients by realizing that it is better to see 20 pre-qualified new patients that are a match for your practice philosophy and convert all 20 into quality, lifetime relationships than it is to see any 40 new patients just to get the same 20. Being busy does not necessarily equate to being profitable or fulfilled in practice.
Shift #3

Patient Education is the Cornerstone of Your Practice

Patient education is probably the most neglected area of patient retention yet it is by far the most important. It can make or break a practice. It is the difference between smoothly run, profitable practices with high patient compliance and treatment acceptance and those that are not. If there were only one thing you decided to do to turn the tide of practice success in your favor, it would be to implement a strong patient education system. Patient retention is based upon areas of understanding – what is said, what is heard, and what is duplicated or repeatable by the patient. In other words, what you and your team say, how you say it, and how well the patient understands and can demonstrate by their words and actions that they got it. This can be everything from teaching dentistry in layman’s terms with use of support tools like intraoral cameras, x-rays, and models or charts, to clearly understood and agreed to treatment planning and financial arrangements, to a complete review, understanding, and acceptance of the office policies. The points of agreement and understanding are numerous, but the key here is patient reality. Reality is what the patient agrees to in his mind that is real and actual about what you and your team are communicating. Reality is the most neglected element of patient education and subsequent retention. You must take the time and dedicate the attention to creating patient retention through gaining agreement as they go through the process of becoming a patient. Too often it is assumed that the patient understands the condition of their dental health, agrees with the treatment presented, and accepts the policies of the office when they simply do not. Indicators of these are low case acceptance, no understanding of the urgency or need for treatment, upsets with staff, poor recare compliance, etc.

So the shift here is to giving patient education its rightful importance and making it the foundation for growth and expansion of your practice above all else. When patients completely understand and agree with you, your treatment philosophy, your standard for care, and why you operate your practice the way that you do for their benefit, they will accept it, comply with it and value it.

The end result? Less stress, increased case acceptance, and happier, healthier patients who refer other quality relationships to you.