“You train people how to treat you.”
-Dr. Phil
Many dental offices are reporting that it is more difficult than ever to keep the schedule filled. Patients can be more likely today to cancel or fail their appointments. However it does not have to be this way! You can train your patients to value their appointments in your office.
“Failure to prepare is preparing to fail.”
-Coach John Wooden
Holding a very brief team meeting at the beginning of every day is absolutely necessary if your practice is going to achieve peak performance!! I cannot emphasize this point enough.
Every successful practice I have ever worked with not only conducts a morning huddle each and every morning, but they have mastered the morning huddle as a means of making the most out of every day.
A couple of years ago I had the privilege of speaking on the same program as Terry Bradshaw, the legendary Pittsburgh Steelers Quarterback. This was a real treat because it turns out that Terry Bradshaw is as good a speaker as he was a quarterback! In this blog post I will re-tell my favorite story from Terry’s presentation.
“Seek first to understand, then to be understood.”
-Stephen Covey
Perhaps the best way to increase your case acceptance and do more ideal dentistry is to slow down your new patient appointment and really spend some time getting to know your new patient. Unless your new patient is a three-year old pediatric patient, every patient has a dental ‘story’. Taking the time to get to know their story and more importantly, their desired future regarding their dental health will greatly improve your effectiveness when presenting the treatment plan.
Our Treatment Coordinator starts the new patient experience with a tour of our office (see blog post below). Next she takes a series of six digital photos (see Aug. 22 blog post). As Karle is taking these photos, she asks a short series of questions.
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”
Consider starting your new patient experience with a tour of your office. The reason I like to do this is twofold; 1) The tour allows you to differentiate your office from every other dental office the patient has ever visited (they typically have never had a tour before) and 2) The tour allows you to subtly showcase what is available in your office. In our office, Karle, our treatment coordinator, provides all new patients with an 8-stop tour that takes 3-4 minutes. Here’s a checklist of our tour:
Using photography for patient education is another strategy that will help your office thrive in a down economy. We have all heard the saying that a picture is worth 1,000 words and this concept is especially true when helping patients understand the condition of their teeth and why they might want to move forward with treatment. The key to making this work in your practice it to develop a simple system to use digital photos for patient education.
While you may have reasons to take a more extensive series of photos for some more advanced cases, we typically take the following series of 6 photos for patient education:
Last blog post I discussed five specific strategies to thrive in a soft economy. David Rice was kind enough to send me a message on facebook after reading my blog post. In his message, David wrote, “What’s helped our team is finding the positive opportunity…the negative outside world is not welcome in our office…” David is right on!!
I absolutely love the comment, “the negative outside world is not welcome in our office!” I simply could not agree more. If you want to succeed today, and grow, and help more patients enjoy the benefits of great oral health, then it must begin with your attitude. To help you with this, below is a wonderful poem that I read every morning as a reminder. The poem is titled, “Promise Yourself”:
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