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How to Track True Treatment Acceptance by Kirk Sweigard

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Most doctors prefer predictable outcomes, rather than surprises.

Over the past decade, I've had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of dental educators who have shared ideas they believe can help dentists and their teams get their patients and practices to a healthier state.

A common theme of many of these conversations is that many doctors are not tracking treatment acceptance. Additionally, they find that those who are tracking their treatment acceptance are doing so inaccurately. Therefore, doctors may believe their acceptance rate is higher than it actually is.

When practices consistently—and accurately—track true case acceptance, they often find the results surprising, to say the least.

Tracking helps encourage accountability
Let me share with you an example of a dental team that accurately tracks and manages its treatment acceptance. Lisa Barrera is the office manager for 21st Century Dental. Lisa had been tracking treatment acceptance through a tool she got online, but found the reporting a bit limiting. So she created and implemented her own "committed care tracking form," which measures the outcomes from every person who presents financial arrangements. This is the point in the patient experience when commitment to care happens—when patients accept treatment, make necessary appointments and make payment arrangements.

"With our custom form, we track two different outcomes: the percentage of patients scheduled for any level of care, and the percentage of treatment fees that are accepted," Barrera explained. "Because we have a larger practice, we track who the patient interacts with through the entire process—the doctor and clinical team, including the hygienist and the team member leading the financial conversation. This helps us identify trends—good and bad—and the best practices that lead to healthier patients. We also capture notes that indicate the patient's mindset, especially if she or he did not schedule or commit to care. This helps guide our follow-up conversations with the patient."

One key insight Barrera found through tracking was that the way comprehensive care is presented to the patient often determines whether or not the patient will commit to care. Patients are given an overview of everything they need to achieve oral health, but the practice immediately breaks it down into manageable portions, both clinically and financially.

"Our goal is to have 80 percent of patients who are seen, subsequently schedule some level of care; and 60 percent of needed dentistry that is presented, committed to by the patient," Barrera said. "We look at the numbers daily, weekly and monthly. It gives us accountability on how we are performing individually and as a team, which helps empower and motivate us to achieve our goals."

Tracking helps facilitate positive change
Another good example of how tracking true treatment acceptance can positively impact a practice comes from Christian Perez, a practice administrator in a well-established practice. He began using a treatment tracker when they found they were not meeting their goal of being booked out two weeks in advance.

"It's hard to understand why people aren't accepting treatment unless you track it for a period of time and can see trends and areas that need improvement," Perez said. "Our tracker includes the patient name, total treatment amount presented, total treatment amount accepted and, if a patient chose not to accept care, notes indicating why along with a plan of action to follow up. Before we started tracking this way, we all thought the biggest barriers to care were cost and time. But we were wrong. The largest reason was that people didn't feel treatment was necessary. In our case presentations we found we were using words like, ‘It's not that urgent and it's just a crown' which led patients to believe it wasn't necessary. This was information we could all use, including the clinical teams, to improve the way we're communicating the value of dentistry to patients."

Perez also found that his team was incorrectly assuming that some of the patient base would shy away from using something like CareCredit as a payment option.

"But the tracker showed us that we were missing opportunities to help patients get healthy, and we began introducing the CareCredit credit card to patients and using the payment options form so they could easily see how to fit care in their family budget," Perez said. "For us, using a treatment tracker has simply given us the information we needed to make positive changes and additional improvements. We now know how we are doing. We are no longer guessing."



Kirk Sweigard has nearly 15 years of sales and marketing experience and is the strategic partners director for CareCredit, one of the largest health, wellness and beauty credit cards in the nation. Collaborating with dental professionals, including consultants, associations and suppliers, Sweigard provides the opportunity to develop and enhance relationships that support association members and dental practices. 


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