Dr Phillip Palmer, February 2016 -  

In years gone by, when there was a shortage of dental manpower in the marketplace, it was relatively easy to grow a dental practice. Dentists almost just had to be available and have a small shingle outside the door.

I saw practices with poor locations, difficult personalities and high prices attract a growing patient base just by being open, being relatively neat and clean, and offering basic services. The situation was similar to how we look at medical specialists today. Some do not have particularly attractive rooms, nothing is spent on service levels or training their teams, but they have increasingly long waiting lists, because there is a shortage of them.

It is a very different scenario in today’s dental marketplace. There is rarely a small retail shopping strip without a dental practice, and some quite small suburbs have two or more practices within a short distance of each other.

Many dentists think that simply having a patient base and getting new patients must equal a successful and prosperous dental practice. This is far from true…

Let’s start with what we mean by “having a patient base”. For most, this is measured by the number of patient records that the practice has.  Using this methodology, I have had many dentists tell me that their patient base is well over 10,000. However, the number of patient records that a practice owns is near meaningless. Is a practice with 10,000 patient records necessarily more successful or busy than one with 2,000? Of course not. It depends entirely on how many of them come in regularly and how much treatment they get. “Getting new patients”, by the same token, means very little if they don’t accept treatment and don’t come back.

Rather than thinking about simply having a patient base and getting new patients, dentists need to start thinking about maintaining a patient base and growing their practice.

When you make this subtle shift in thinking about your practice, you start to think not about the names in the patient base records, but how often you engage them and the quality of those engagements. You start to obsess over customer service, so that the patients who are there stay and want to come back. You start to care as much about how many re-appoint and accept treatment as about how many new patients come in. Growing a practice, after all, isn’t just all about who walks in the door; it is also about who stays and what they do when they are inside the door.

In my experience, there are essentially 2 ways to maintain and 3 ways to grow a practice:

Maintaining

1. Minimise patient attrition
2. Get patients to regularly attend for maintenance of their oral health

Growing

1. Doing more types of treatment on the patients that you have (being clinically capable and getting case acceptance)
2. Get referrals
3. Marketing

1. Minimise patient attrition

Patient attrition is like periodontal disease - it is silent. The vast majority of patients don’t announce that they are not coming back or are going to another practice...they just quietly move on. It’s impossible to know exactly why this is as it is different for each case. The only way to minimise patient attrition is to be obsessive about providing excellent service every time!

So, what constitutes good service?

This is multifactorial, and can be different for different service consumers.

Dental Patient Surveys (dentalpatientsurveys.com) statistics have shown us time and again what patients rate in terms of service. Patients want:

- a phone manner when they call that is courteous, knowledgeable and helpful
- to feel value for money - not necessarily cheap treatment, but value!
- to be ‘known’ at the practice and remembered, to feel cared for, a “home” for their teeth
- to have their time respected (be treated punctually)
- to have treatment options explained to them in everyday language, and be given options
- a clean, cared-for facility
- a harmonious team to treat them

2. Get patients to regularly attend for maintenance and checkups.

I will often ask a practice owner: “What percentage of your current patient-base do you think has attended in the past 6 months?” Most dentists think it’s more than 70%. We have yet to see a result higher than 50%,

Every patient that enters your practice needs to be reminded that a dental practice isn’t just a place to get you out of pain. Regular attendance is important for the following reasons:

It stops small problems from becoming big problems
It reduces emergencies
Unchecked inflammation due to perio disease can cause all kinds of other health problems
Regular visits to the dentist are the most likely way for a patient to have an oral cancer diagnosed before it becomes lethal

Regular attendance is also important for the practice:

Prophylaxis and maintenance generally may not be lucrative work, but a practice can almost afford to look at it as a loss leader (it’s not tho). It allows for relationship building between the practice and patient, for when there is more comprehensive work that needs doing.

To be continued...