As a dentist, you are certainly out of the norm if practice growth is not on your mind on a regular basis. As business owners, we typically focus on increasing the inflow of people into the business. This was the same strategy that my business partner and I adopted when we purchased our practice. However, because of my background as a data analyst in the dental industry, we knew this was not the only piece of the puzzle.
Dental Practice Growth Requires a Three Pronged Approach
If you goal is to grow your dental practice, you need to be focusing on three key areas. The front door, the back door, and the holes. Let me explain what I mean.
Opening the Front Door
When we talk about opening the front door, we are typically talking about getting new patients into the practice. I'm not going to go in-depth in this article about how to go about this, but if you want some advice from people who are excelling at new patient acquisition, feel free to read some of the interviews that I have done with other dentists. To summarize those (I have done a lot of these), provide a patient experience that is second to none, find someone who can get your practice ranking in Google and Google Maps, increase the number of Google Reviews that your practice has to help with ranking and increase conversion and ask your patients for referrals.
Closing the Back Door
This is an area that dentists are becoming increasingly aware of. This is great news, because it is an area where there is often room for improvement. What you are looking at here is how well your office is re-appointing patients after their visits. In our practice we re-appoint at about 92% in hygiene. Which means that our back door is closed pretty tightly. If you don't know what this is for your practice, it might be eye opening to find out.
Plugging the Holes
You might already be laser focused on the first two pieces of this puzzle, and if you are, chances are high that your practice is growing. If it is not, you may need to look at ways that you can plug the holes. So what do I mean by this? Let me take you back to our practice. We re-appoint at 92%, so we should have been growing pretty easily with the success we were seeing in getting new patients, but our total patient base growth was less than expected. After diving into the metrics, I quickly realized that we had a hole in our practice that we needed to fix. We had a high cancellation percentage, and we were not doing very well at getting those patients back on the schedule. We implemented a few things that have helped us drive this number down significantly which I will go over in the next section, but this is still something that we are heavily focusing on.
Minimizing Last Minute Cancellations
We revamped our reminder system by switching companies and re-scripting those reminder texts. After a lot of research, we chose to use Weave as our practice phone system and this included one of the best reminder systems on the market from what I could find. I won't get into all of the features, but you can check it out at https://www.getweave.com/custom-reminders/. Our reminders are now more personalized. We can open up a dialogue with our patients because we now have two way texting right from the office phone number. The system also has built in recognition for any affirmative response, so we can ask better questions to confirm patient appointments. These additional features have helped to decrease cancellations.
Getting Cancellations Back on the Schedule
As far as getting cancellations back on the schedule goes, our calls are now recorded, so that helps us with training and scripting for handling those cancellation calls This has proved to be extremely valuable.
These two aspects of our new phone system have helped us plug the hole in our practice.
As you focus on practice growth, it is vital to have a pulse on the numbers that make your practice grow. If we didn't have analytics in our practice, we might have never realized that we were losing so many patients through cancellations. Plugging this hole has allowed our practice to grow at a much more accelerated rate.