Fast Track Your Practice Growth by Offering More Procedures In-House

When many dentists approach practice growth, they immediately start at new patients. While more new patients is definitely an approach to growing your dental practice, it is really only one factor in the equation. When I used to work at Dental Intelligence, I would see this all of the time. Dentists would be frustrated by their production numbers and immediately tell me that they needed more new patients. After analyzing hundreds of dental practices all across the country, I can tell you that more new patients was the biggest concern about 20% of the time, but dentists felt like that was the issue about 90% of the time. There is no question that the main two things limiting the growth of the majority of practices were patient retention and production per visit.

I recently had the privilege of getting to know Dr. Todd Miles who owns Delaney Park Dental in Anchorage, Alaska. Dr. Miles has done a great job growing a small practice that he purchased two years ago. The thing that was very interesting to me about the growth he has accomplished was that he has done it disproportionately to the growth in patient base. When I talked to Dr. Miles, he mentioned that his main growth strategies had been introducing new procedures into the practice. He had the opportunity to receive a lot of advanced training, so when he purchased his new practice he was able to introduce several new procedures that patients had been going elsewhere to have done. He introduced dental implants, implant supported dentures, wisdom tooth extractions and a number of other high production procedures that he had received training for. This allowed him to increase production substantially by simply not referring patients out.

Patients Love Convenience

We all expect a growth in production when we introduce new procedures into the practice, but the thing that Dr. Miles was not expecting was how much patients would love the convenience of not having to schedule at a number of different offices to complete their treatment. Patients started telling Dr. Miles about how nice it was and even started referring friends and family members to the office who also needed more complex procedures. This has done wonders for the growth of his practice.

How to Determine if Offering Additional Procedures is the Right Strategy for You

Before you jump right in and start signing up for a bunch of CE courses, there are a few things that you should look at to determine whether or not adding new, advanced procedures is the right step for you and your practice.

First, you should know what your production per visit is, and how that stacks up against other dentists in similar situations. This gives you a few insights into things that you might want to look at before jumping into new procedures. For example, if your production per patient is low, you may have a case acceptance issue. While additional procedures could improve production, that improvement would be magnified if you fixed that case acceptance issue. You would also increase production without adding any new procedures just by fixing case acceptance.

Second, you should determine how many cases you refer out that could be treated by the procedure that you are considering adding. Yes, it is true that people might be more apt to do a procedure if you offer it in-house, and it may also be true that you will be more proactive about diagnosing it, but if it is going to take you five years to recoup the cost of your training based on what you are currently referring out, you may want to choose a new procedure, or figure out a different area of focus.

Third, make sure that you are honest with yourself about whether this is a procedure that you would like doing on a regular basis. I once had a dentist that I worked with who invested a lot of money into a dental implant training because he decided he wanted to add placing implants to the procedures that he offered. After he finished the course he told me that he really didn't like surgeries, so he wasn't going to add the procedure in his practice after all. That would have been better to figure out before taking the course.

Take the Next Steps Today

If you are looking to take action on growing your dental practice, don't assume that investing heavily into marketing is the only option, or even the right option for that matter. Do yourself a favor and set up a demo with a dental business analytics software company first. They can connect to your practice management system and provide you with some data on your practice, along with some valuable benchmarks of similar practices. Figure out what is going to give you the best production boost for the least effort. If that is marketing, great! Find a great marketing company. If that is increasing case acceptance, find someone who provides great training on case presentation and acceptance. If that is decreasing patient attrition, try to solve that problem, or find a coach who can help. If it is adding new procedures, find a procedure you have been wanting to offer and get training to be the best provider of that procedure possible!