Is your practice a leaky bucket? Do you keep pouring water in, only to have most of it flow back out? Then it’s time to plug those holes! To help you fix your bucket, Kirk Behrendt brings back Carlie Einarson, one of ACT’s amazing coaches, with a framework to improve patient retention. Keep your schedule full, and with the right type of people! To learn how, listen to Episode 766 of The Best Practices Show!
Learn More About Carlie:
Learn More About ACT Dental:
More Helpful Links for a Better Practice & a Better Life:
Episode Resources:
Main Takeaways:
Quotes:
“Of course, we always want, as dental professionals, to keep our schedule full. Whenever we have holes in the schedule, most of my clients are always like, ‘Carlie, I have holes in my schedule! I'm really stressed! What do I do?’ When that happens, we want to keep our chairs full because we can then produce. If we can't produce and our chairs aren't full, then money is going out the back door, in a sense. So, having that patient retention is really critical to keep our schedules full and profitable, and we want to maximize that capacity.” (2:15—2:45) -Carlie
“I always have this visual. I think it was Katherine Eitel-Belt who said it. When you have one of those days and the schedule blows up, you just grab all this mud from the bottom of the river, and you start slapping it in the schedule. Now, the first time I heard that, I laughed out loud because that's what a lot of people do. They're like, ‘He or she is going to freak out, so I'm going to take this mud and slap it in the schedule.’ We don't want you to do that.” (4:00—4:23) -Kirk
“Every office does have attrition. It is very normal. People move away. We lose patients. People become inactive due to the lack of commitment to their dental care. They don't care about it as much. It's a normal thing for every practice, and continuously putting water in the bucket with water coming out the bottom or the side is way harder. We're using more resources, more time, and more energy to keep filling the bucket instead of plugging the hole and keeping what we have already in the bucket retained. So, it does balance the growth of the practice. And most of the time, it then is easier once we plug those holes and then still add water and have little people fall through the cracks.” (4:40—5:24) -Carlie
“I don't want to stress you out, but I kind of want to stress you out a little bit. Go to the office on the next day that you work and look up one number. It's called unscheduled inactive patients. In a lot of great practices, we’ll find 700, 800, 900 of those patients. Now, what that means is you actually have active patients that aren't tethered to the practice with an appointment, and that becomes an incredible opportunity. Even if it is 900, go to 800. Then, go to 700. Then, go to 600, and watch your practice grow again. You want to keep it healthy.” (5:26—6:06) -Kirk
“When we own our responsibility to take care of our patients, they respect us and trust us more, and we have that stronger patient-practice relationship. So, it encourages patients to stay loyal and encourages them to make future appointments and have them come in the door. That relationship and that communication, as it continues, it's easier to get them in the door. Because think about life. We get really busy with birthdays, work, anniversaries, travel, X, Y, Z, and we're not necessarily always thinking about our dental appointment. If we have that continuous communication with patients, then it will pop up in people's minds and be a great reminder.” (6:18—7:03) -Carlie
“Sometimes, the best way to fix the schedule is within the schedule. We have people in the schedule today that you can talk to about the next appointment that they have. Or if they have advanced restorative needs, we can move this over to next week. So, it becomes an incredible opportunity. That's why this retention is so important. It is much easier to talk to somebody who already knows you, who has purchased from you, likes you, wants to come back, than trying to talk to a complete stranger that found you on Google. Now, some people would argue with me, but that's my opinion.” (8:09—8:41) -Kirk
“If — your sandwich shop [example] — you knew every single person that was going to come in that line once a week or every other week, then you would really create that relationship and that value. Hygiene recare, people come in every three, four, six months, and you know that they're coming back — or we hope that they're coming back — with the relationships that we're building with them. But it's really easy while they're still in the chair to make their next visit and pre-appoint their appointment. It will save us so much time. So, no matter what system we have, at the top of the system, it should be creating those appointments while the patients are in the office and saving the time so that when they leave, we don't have to go track them down and we already have an appointment for them. It saves a ton of time for the team members on the back end.” (9:30—10:18) -Carlie
“This is an acronym that we use quite a bit in our coaching process. It's called OHIO, Only Handle It Once. Think about this. The patient is in the chair. We're going to schedule them again right when they're in the chair. We're going to talk about their unscheduled treatment instead of passing that along to a team member to follow up with them after they've left the office. The best time to do anything is in the office, not on the phone.” (10:20—10:48) -Kirk
“People don't like answering the phones. They just don't. You might think, ‘Well, my patient . . .’ No, they don't. They don't. So, that being said, I think the phone is going to be answered less, and less, and less in the future. So, what that means is we've got to do more, and more, and more when we are face to face with them. We can actually see them. We can actually ask them a question to see if they're even listening. We can look at them in their eyes and see how their body language is when we talk about these things. It's so great. You could also create a sense of urgency, like individualizing things. I think the important thing to recognize is it's always still going to be trust, and you can't build trust so much socially, on the phone, or in a text.” (11:09—11:55) -Kirk
“Of course, we want every patient to leave with an appointment from the office. If they don't, what happens then? Whether it's for hygiene or unscheduled follow-up treatment, the goal is to make sure we have designated times to follow up, they're documented, and we have multiple ways to contact the person, whether it's automated, personal, a team member calling them, texting them, email — there are many ways to get in touch with people these days — and making sure we have really good notes in their chart so that we can follow up with personalized messages, not just, ‘Hey, we're hoping that you'll come in for those five fillings that you need, Kirk. Are you ready?’ It's more of a, ‘Hi, Kirk! Dr. Awesome asked me to reach out to you as it's been since January 2023 since we've seen you last,’ or it's personalized as to when we saw you. Or for unscheduled treatment, if you told me in the office you wanted to follow up after your vacation, I can then, in my text, personalize it to you and say, ‘Hey, how did your vacation go? Are you ready? I would love to answer any questions about treatment. What does your schedule look like?’” (14:39—15:52) -Carlie
“It doesn't even have to be about your patients in your practice. It can be about your patients in another practice. For instance, let's say you're a GP. You're going to send one of your patients over to the periodontist’s office, and you know that you've got that perio procedure scheduled two weeks from this Friday. You can put that in your schedule and go, ‘My patient, Joe Jones, is going over to my periodontist,’ and you could follow up afterwards because it was in your schedule. You knew your patient was going to go over to that office. Go, ‘Hey, I know you saw the periodontist today. Just thinking about you.’ Now, you're taking your practice to a whole other level.” (17:05—17:42) -Kirk
“It's way more resources, time, and energy to find a new one than it is to keep your existing patients.” (18:33—18:41) -Carlie
“A huge part of this is creating the system, figuring out the timeline, how we're going to do it, personalize it, and then having someone own it and somebody take responsibility or add it to another checklist to make sure that it's getting done consistently, which I think is another piece of this, as well as making sure that we have it built into some kind of list. And it's determined based on our practice management software, Dental Intel. Sometimes, it's our team members creating a list of who we are actually going to reach out to, and who has this treatment, and having it be on their ownership list to make it so that they come into the office, and you are filling the schedule with things that you need in that timeframe instead of just putting mud on the schedule.” (18:43—19:34) -Carlie
Snippets:
0:00 Introduction.
2:07 Why this is an important topic.
4:27 Keep a healthy active patient count.
6:06 Have continuous communication with patients.
8:06 Pre-appoint while patients are in your chair.
14:26 Systems for unscheduled treatment follow-up.
17:43 Finding new patients is more costly.
21:21 Final thoughts.
Carlie Einarson Bio:
Carlie Einarson is a lead practice coach who has a passion for helping others succeed in the dental field. She loves helping to create a stable foundation for practices so both professionals and patients have a great experience every time they walk in the door!
Carlie graduated from Utah College of Dental Hygiene. She has ten years of experience in the dental field, including clinical dental hygiene, front office, and leading teams.
In her free time, she enjoys spending quality time with loved ones, traveling, skiing, playing volleyball, and golfing.