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We're halfway through 2024! That means we're halfway toward the goals made at the beginning of the year. In this episode, Kiera reminds listeners to prep for the end of the year now by touching base with the right people, and adjusting or pivoting where necessary. Episode resources: Reach out to Kiera Practice Momentum Group Consulting Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Become Dental A-Team Platinum! Review the podcast Transcript: Kiera Dent (00:00.622) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and welcome to today. I hope you guys are just having such a great day and I hope it's an amazing day for you. And I truly do hope that you're remembering that life is amazing. Life is beautiful and we get to be so blessed to be alive. Now, if you guys are struggling, I know I have been struggling a little bit lately. that's okay. Like every day is not meant to be a perfect day. And so I think it's just remembering to find out like, what are the beautiful things that we can be grateful for? In one of my meditations, yes, I do meditate every morning. I try to, I believe that strengthening our minds is kind of like working out, you guys, we deal with a lot of hard things all the time. And so getting that mental stamina, I think is something so pertinent. And the other day I was meditating, I use calm. And then actually just recently found out about a company called inner armor. that really does like they train actually athletes with it and utilizing your breath and also your eyes. so if you guys are interested in our armor, jury's still out for me on using it. But I was super excited. I got introduced to this company for it. But in my meditation the other morning, they were talking about how they do a gratitude countdown. And she was in this really dark place. And so it's just like, whenever you're kind of in that schmucky zone, just to say like, all right, gratitude countdown, and you can do it with a buddy, my husband, I started doing this. And I actually think it's helped me a lot to get kind of out of my schmucky zone of like 10 things that you're grateful for. And then the other person says 10 things that they're grateful for. So the other night I've been kind of in a, in a slump, if you will. I think that I'm in this weird, I don't know. It's a morphing. It's a, I don't really know my purpose currently. I'm sure all of us go through this. I meant seven years in the business and I hear it seven year stitcher itch. And so, but that gratitude countdown, I think actually can be so pertinent for us of building that mental stamina. So, Every day, I know that this lady on the meditation, she talked about how she just does, like even on her daily walk, she'll do 10 things that she's grateful for. And it actually was really awesome to hear my husband's things that he was grateful for as well. And so just kind of like building up that path as opposed to the path of negativity. So if you are not having, if you're on the Cloud9, amazing, keep going with the gratitude. Kiera Dent (02:19.758) Maybe you're kind of in a slump right now. Again, remember it's just seasons and this isn't forever. And I think it's just figuring out how to manage those tidal waves again through that mental stamina. So welcome to today. I hope you guys are looking forward to what we have. Our goal in Dental A Team is to bring positivity to the world of dentistry and to remind us why we're here and why we're doing what we're doing and to give you tools in your tool belt to be able to master your mind, master your emotions and be able to execute on the best team and patient experience. So if you guys are loving our podcast, shout out to you all. You are keeping us as one of the top most listened to podcasts. So I just ask that you guys leave a review, share this in a Facebook group. If people are asking for podcasts or if you heard a great podcast that's helping you, be sure to just share it. You can share our reels that we have out there as well. But that just really helps us do that. So I wanted to say thank you to all of you who did it. I always love to do a shout out and I actually just noticed a review that I really loved the other day. So I'm actually going to shout this person out. So pulling it up on our podcast page and the way you guys leave a review is just you go to wherever you listen, Spotify, Apple, whatever streaming you've got, go down to the bottom and then you do a, you actually just leave a review right there. So you can either do the five stars or you can write one, but Shelby A actually posted, and that's why I like this one. It's special. It was. on my birthday. So thank you, Shelby. She said, this is a great resource for dental offices and someone like myself that aspires to be a better dental consultant. Thanks for all your wisdom. And then Jamin came in and said, thanks for sharing your knowledge and wisdom of all things dental. It's a pleasure to listen to your tips and tricks. There's almost always something that I hear you say that makes my office a better place and me a better person. So just wanted to give them a shout out because I do appreciate and I do read them. So thank you. All right. Today's topic is on kind of preparing for the year and this is releasing in July. And so we are halfway through the year. And I just want you to kind of do a halfway midpoint check -in to see where are you at? What are you doing and what things do you need to be working on? We have this really, we have two awesome groups in Dental A Team. I've got our one -on -one coaching clients that come to, we call it Think Tank and we do it on the first Tuesday of every month. And it's our doctor mastermind and with such an amazing one. Kiera Dent (04:33.71) And then we also have our group that comes together and they meet all the time. They're meeting every single Thursday and the first Wednesday of the month, we actually do a pretty deep dive, Dr. Mastermind. And I got to be lucky. I got to be part of it the other, the other day. And it was interesting because we were talking about numbers and we were talking about KPIs and we're talking about making sure the foundations of their business are in place from their core values and their org chart to their numbers, to their systems. And one of the doctors in that group, he said, Kiera, I love how you guys have set this up because you really were intelligent in helping us as leaders build up first. And then we actually do a secondary part where we as Dental A Team, take it to your team for you. But in conjunction with what the doctors have already done. So for example, for the core values, we actually take you through an entire exercise as the, the doctor and the owner of the practice to go through, figure out your core values, figure out your mission. And we do it from a completely doctor business standpoint. And then we have like a week or two later where you actually can take it to your team. So that way the doctors are creating the vision, but then you take it to the team to execute and to build and to expand it. And he said, Kiera, the way you guys have built this is so brilliant because, and I was so glad the doctor came to this aha moment on their own. He said, you did it in a way to where the team built in and they created the goals with us. And so it's not just us creating these goals and saying, this is what we need to do, but it was all of us. creating these goals and I can go back to them and say, remember, we did this together. We built these goals together. And I was like, I'm so grateful because that's how you get goals and that's how you get your team bought in is you have them co -create with you. You have them take the autonomy. They're asking me, Kiera, how do we get the numbers to where our team cares about them? And the goal is where it's not Dental A Team just teaching, but it's truly a group mastermind of all of us working together on it. And I loved the group because what they said was, You know, we actually have gamified it. We've told our team like, these are your numbers, like you take it and run with it. Like, what do we need to do to hit this big goal that we set together as a team? What do you need to do in your department and really take that ownership? And I said, that's the key to making numbers matter with your team is getting that ownership where they feel like that's my number and I own it. Hey, shout out Tiffanie all the time. You guys hear her on the podcast often. But I love Tiffanie for so many reasons. But one thing that I use in this example is Tiff, if you listen to her, Kiera Dent (06:49.934) She feels like Dental A Team is her company. And I agree. I don't believe that Dental A Team is just Kiera's company. I believe that it is everyone on our team's company. And I want my team to have that ownership. I want them to feel like they have the autonomy to build things. I want them to feel like these numbers are their numbers. They're not Kiera's numbers. Yes, I'll bring the bumper guidelines of what I want them to be. But ultimately, I want my team to own their numbers. And so, It was really beautiful in the group. I loved being able to share ideas and our group is amazing. It's very intimate. It's very real. Some people get so nervous about groups, right? Like I don't want to go to it, but it's crazy because I felt the same way. I thought, no, no, no. I only want one -on -one, but it's interesting because I joined Tony Robbins group and I actually have paid to be in the top tier where I actually got to go to Tony's house and I got to be a part of his mastermind. But something I noticed is, Well, I love talking to Tony. I've talked to him a few times. I've done some interventions with him. He's helped me personally on my personal life and my business, which is incredible. This man is a genius, but it's interesting because he talks about it and he says, oftentimes the power that you guys are getting from these events is not me coaching you. It's you hearing everybody else's experiences and you're learning from them because you're hearing ideas that you wouldn't even come to the table with on your own. And that's why I love this group. That's why we built the group was because I felt like one -on -one is so incredible. And we still have a ton of one -on -one help. You get to come every single week and ask your questions of your practice. You get to have an online chat that the consultants are a part of. But it's so cool to hear other people's experiences. Like in our doctor think tank, the doctors all are learning from each other and it's like, well, I did this in my practice center. Let me give you this perspective of me who might be your associate. Let me give you this perspective. And I just think that... So often we're not looking at that. And so using your team, but then also being a part of a community or a group where you get to learn and not have to go through the success tax on your own. Being able to learn from other people, I think is one of the most valuable pieces we can do. And I thought about myself and what do I value in business? And I said, I value being around other people that are like me, smarter than me, and can guide me where I need to go. And so just when I'm having you guys look at halfway points of your numbers, your overhead, getting your team bought into this, Kiera Dent (09:02.286) being in places where you do have other people that you can lean on for support because going back to even the beginning of this podcast where I was talking about mental stamina, I think oftentimes mental stamina is required, but the way we have it and we're able to fortify and continue through is by having people and connections. I was talking to my therapist the other day and she said, you know, Kiera, what makes life worth like having meaning is connections in life. And I've thought about it. How, how many connections do we have? that aren't necessarily like patient connections or team connections. Do you have colleagues around you? Do you have friends around you that are supporting you, that are pushing you forward, that are reminding you, hey, it's our halfway point. How are your goals? How can I support you? What can I do? These are some of the things I've done. Let me share them with you. Because I think back to, you know, go back 50, 60 years ago and community was so much more. People lived in their same places. People grew up in their same places. People didn't travel as much. We're more of a transient society now. And so, Do you have community within your work? Like I purposely have joined DentalAid, Tony Robbins, because as a business owner, and especially as a consultant, where do I go for that support to be able to buoy myself up? Where do I go to have people that can work on my business for me? Where can I go with people that are like me? And that's actually what we've tried to create in Dental A Team is a space for doctors to come and connect together, a space for office managers to come and connect and learn from each other. So really building a community. So with that, as you guys are looking at your end of year, I hope you're thinking about a community and who do you have and do you have someone guiding you? Do you have someone giving you these checkpoints that's also holding you accountable to it? That's something I'm really, really big on is that you don't just come and hear words, but you actually take actions. So going from podcasts of listening to action and implementation is truly where the magic is. So for your end of year, I hope you guys are meeting with your CPAs right now, that you are. taking the time to look to see where you at, have you saved enough for taxes? I believe that when people have a bad December, it's due to lack of planning. And so right now you're at mid -year, be the proactive office who reaches out to your CPA and finds out where am I at? What's my profit? What do I need to have saved for taxes? Am I on track or am I off track? Because you still have six months through the year to be able to make up if you haven't had it versus trying to catch up next year when it's another year. Are you guys on track with your? Kiera Dent (11:23.726) numbers and your goals of where you wanted to be for this year. And if not, can you pivot? Can you pull your team together? Can you lean on the community of doctors around you and ask them for support of what do they do to be able to move forward? I know all of our doctors are leaning on each other. I know all of them are working together. Are you looking at what you need to build and making sure you have a good block schedule in place that's actually going to support your goals rather than it just being a hope and a wish? I believe that goals can be hit successfully with a plan. And so often we just set a goal, but we don't actually have the plan or the pieces in play to actually make it happen. Are you getting your team re -engage? Are you taking the CE that you want to do? It's mid point. How are you doing on your goals personally as well? Are you doing the things you want and how can you pivot and adjust so that way at the end of the year, it's not like, well, just had another year with no goals being hit, but you can actually say, no, we had a plan we pivoted. And I don't believe this is where we change goals. I'm really big on. Keep the goals consistent. That way we can make better goals and we can learn from them. Goals are stars to gu…
Full show notes at the publisherTiff and Dana talk about why videos are such effective additions to your practice's operations manual. Their guidance includes the software to use, what topics to start with, who records them, and more. Episode resources: Reach out to Tiff and Dana Watch DAT Podcasts on YouTube Practice Momentum Group Consulting Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Become Dental A-Team Platinum! Review the podcast Transcript: Tiffanie (00:02.174) Hello Dental A Team, I'm so excited to bring you Dana back in the house with some operations manual excitement. I don't know if you've heard her or not, but she is my ops manual guru. Dana, thank you for allowing me to lean on you for these pieces constantly. You do more with our operations manual and our clients operations manuals than I think any of us do. And it's just super helpful for me. So thank you for being here today, Dana. How are you? Dana (00:27.72) I'm doing good. Thanks for having me. You know I always love podcasting with Sif. Tiffanie (00:33.214) I love it. Thank you. Thank you. Today's been a weird day for us. I think it's like, is it gloomy where you are? I know you're an hour and a half south, but my weather usually comes from you or California. So yeah, yeah, it's like intermittently gloomy, super hubby looking. We'll see. We'll see if we get it. You'll go you'll go down before me. So just let me know. Yeah, keep me posted. So I promised some operations manual stuff today. Dana (00:53.544) I'll let you know. Tiffanie (01:02.174) There are just so you guys know, I mean 200 probably I have no idea. We've done so many podcasts on operations manuals. So go back through and listen to them. If you're on the website or on your iTunes or whatever, you can use the search and within dental A team and just search for those podcasts. If you say operations manual, I'm sure a slew of them will pull up. So go listen to some of those if you need help building them out. If you're our clients already, you're an active client with dental A team. There's been courses that you can watch. You have access to an operations manual. And if you're practice momentum client, bring it to your Ask Consultants everything hours every Thursday. And that's something that the consultants are there to help with as well if you guys have questions. So we're kind of layering. I say all of that because we're layering onto an operations manual today. So I don't want you to feel like this is like. ground zero start and you're getting just a little bit of information. This is a layering on top of. So listen to it now. If you don't have an operations manual yet, start wherever you want. Listen to this, take your notes away and then go listen to the other ones as well or work with us directly to make sure that we get that done with you. That's my plug for today. Like don't feel overwhelmed by this. Today I wanted to talk with Dana and I'm gonna have Dana do most of the information today because... You truly do more dental, a team operations manuals than anybody on our team. And I really wanted to talk about layering on top of that with videos. And it's something that we've done in our company that I think has made our onboarding, our transitions, our education a lot better and easier for the team that's currently here, a team that's come on team that's been here, all of those pieces. So just. So you guys have it, the companies that we really like to use that are just super simple, Loom. L -O -O is literally the easiest. It puts it into a library, you download it, you upload it into Google Drive or wherever. So we use Loom a lot, but then also Zoom. So not to be confusing, Loom and Zoom. Zoom, you can record and screen share, do all those pieces, download it if you have an account with them already, and then save those as well. So. Tiffanie (03:20.382) Those are my company plugs. Those are my company recommendations. You can do it with your iPhone. You can do literally whatever you want. Don't over complicate it. Don't pay a lot of money for something just simple free as always best. So whatever is free unless you're already paying for something that has it use that but Dana you had some awesome suggestions that I wrote down that I want you to go through for how you're recommending to your clients and to generally teams whole world here. of what to use those videos for. Because I have to be honest, when you said this, I was like, duh, that makes sense. But for me, I was thinking the how tos, right, which I think I hone in on how tos and like, making this we both do making systems more efficient and easier. So like, that's where my brain went as videoing taking these taking these screen shares and things to show how to do a big deposit or whatever. But I really like your piece of it for simplifying. some onboarding pieces. So Dana, I'm gonna just like be over here silent while you walk us through how you have teams do that for some onboarding pieces, because I think that's huge. Dana (04:27.24) Yeah. I love video as far as operations menu. And really the reason I like it is people have different learning styles and in dentistry, there are a lot of visual learners, right? Like we, we have to watch setups be done. We have to watch handoffs in procedures. We have to watch those things. And so video allows you to do those pieces so that a person can ideally, right? With any great onboarding system, you want to have pieces that a team member can do without somebody standing there beside them during the training, especially right now. today's hiring climate where we don't always have a person to train a new person. So we need those parts and pieces that allow training to continue, even when someone can't be directly beside them walking them through it. And video is just a way of taking it to the next level. Can a team member read through a how to Yes, can a team member read your core values? Absolutely. But video helps them connect to it on a different level and probably spend less time to because I feel like if you can read it and you can watch a video and you you can do all of those button clicks, right? Or you can see the person on the screen talking about the mission, vision, core value. You connect with it a whole lot differently. And I would say probably better when you have both of those parts and pieces. And so I say, look at your onboarding as a whole and anywhere that you can add video to streamline things and to make things easier and to make it to be that. that person can pretty much do that thing unassisted or learn that thing unassisted. It buys us valuable training time. Dana (05:59.624) within a practice. So the first place I start is mission, vision, core value, right? We hopefully you're hiring for core value, you're looking for those team members who match that. But in that onboarding period, having those things that a person can watch and really connect with and hear the owner or the visionary of the practice say, Hey, this is really where we want to go. This is why these are the pillars of our team, right? It helps them align with that. And again, it doesn't have to be delivered one on one. It still gets that personal piece though, because again, it's on video and I think... I can have a phone call with someone and those are great, right? I can read something and that's great, but that visual really attaches some meaningful things to that. So I think mission, vision, and core values are a great space to elevate operations manual with video. I think too, all your HR pieces, right? When you're onboarding a new team member, yes, we want the how -tos, we want the written protocols, but anything that you can turn into video as far as... Hey, this is how you log into payroll. This is how you get your pace up at the end of the week. This is how you clock in. This is how you set up your password for things. All of those HR pieces that happen in the beginning, usually there has to be a dedicated person to walk them through the takes up time, right? The trainee that has to say, okay, this is how you I know in Arizona, you have to verify employment, right? If we could just have a video that shows that then the office manager or the front. Tiffanie (07:01.438) Mm -hmm. Tiffanie (07:16.926) Yeah. Dana (07:27.688) office person that is training them to do that can be hands off with it and buy valuable time back. So all of your HR pieces I think are fantastic areas to add in video again to streamline processes and to free up training time with a trainee and trainer too. Tiffanie (07:45.054) Yeah. Yeah, I love that you said like, the payroll, right. And I'm thinking like the clock in clock out, like you said, how many times as an office manager was I asked, how do I clock in and clock out again? Where do I find this? How do I do this? And it's like, it was always a can you show me and I'm willing to show you but what if I could show you infinite amount of times because you can just press play on this video or and whatever it is. So I almost feel like Dana. making sure that those HR pieces and that onboarding from the get -go is your first space, like that's your baseline of videos. And then moving into the how -to's is almost more important because it offloads so much stuff from the doctor or the manager or whomever is onboarding these team members and really allows even the current team, like current team forgets things, right? Where do I find my pay stubs? Where do I, how do I put in PTO requests? Like, What do I do for this? How do I find coverage? All of those pieces are stagnant. Like they're not super changing where your systems sometimes are changing, right? So you're having to go back in and re -record or re -update your systems. These ones are not typically changing very often. So you can do this video and it's almost a forever space and peace because it's not changing. It's not moving. It's stagnant and consistent. So I would start there. Dana, you talked about the mission vision core values. Who do you suggest when you're doing these, who do you suggest records those videos? Because I know we're in the business of delegating. I know we delegate a lot. We train a lot of doctors to delegate. Is that something that you delegate, or who do you have recording those ones? Dana (09:33.64) actually have the owner doctor record that and that's one of the reasons why I have it recorded, right? The owner doctor may be hands off, right? You may be a practice that, hey, I've got my associates in there, they're running the day to day, my office manager is really running my onboarding, but I do think mission, vision, and core values should come from the owner and I think recording it is a space where the owner doesn't have to be there to deliver it, but it's still delivered in a personal message via video, so the office manager can certainly play it for the person or give them the link to the video to watch, but I think the message coming from the owner, just makes it more meaningful and that really should be who sets the mission and vision for the practice too. Tiffanie (10:10.366) Yeah, I agree. And as you're thinking, I'm like, gosh, this is something we need to do for dental a team. Because I'm thinking, that's something to as you hire someone that your manager when they send, you know, you hire someone, you send the offer letter, they accept it. And then the office manager sends all the paperwork to get started, right. And that's the I nine and the W twos and the eight fours and the All the paperwork that needs to be done, that usually gets sent off earlier, done that first day, but it would be really cool to have like a welcome email to new employees, to new hires, that you send this beautiful welcome email that has these videos attached that's like, hey, we wanna introduce you truly to who we are. This is us. And there's these three videos, super simple loom or zoom or whatever, your iPhone, doesn't have to be hard, videos from the owner. And you could even do like an intro, like I know for new clients, for dental A team, we always try to send a little welcome from the consultant that you'll be working one -on -one with if you're a one -on -one client. And what if your office manager sent a little like, can't wait to onboard you when you come in, I'm excited to meet you because I mean, the climate right now, like you said, the hiring climate, it kind of, it's a little rough right now. And I have had, Dana, I don't know if you've experienced this, I have had practices that have, fully quote unquote hired someone, offer letters and whatever is accepted and then they don't show up or they're like, hey, actually I accepted a different offer. But what if they were already tethered and tied and bought into who you are as a practice with these simple videos? I think that could help retention. It could help, what am I trying to say? Team members on board, actually on board, right? And then those stagnant pieces. So then I think the question, The doctors then are saying because you know, I can see doctors going like, yeah, sure. But then what I have to record all of them. Mission vision core values. But then Dana, I don't think it matters. If like if your office manager records or your, your HR director or your billing representative records how to clock in and then six months from now your billing representative decides to have a baby and not return to work but recorded the video. Tiffanie (12:33.47) I don't think it matters that forevermore she's the person who's on the video on how to clock in because Dana, do you think that's something if you are a team member, you're going to be like, wait, who's this? And why isn't she here anymore? What's going on? Are you already bought in? You're going to be fine. Dana (12:47.208) I think you're going to be fine. And that's usually what I say when we do this is the great thing about this is oftentimes when you are training a new team member, right, you might want an assistant to walk you through OSHA pieces. You may want the assistant to walk you through medical emergencies, like where we keep those things, right? Because they stock it. They know where those things are inside and out versus the front office person. But typically if you're coming in as a biller, right, it's going to be a front office person that trains you. Well, the great thing about videos is... The person who does it best can create the video, which then makes it full team training versus just one person doing all of the training for the new person, which kind of divides and conquers, which is great. And so, no, I don't think it matters if it was a billing person or if it was the OM. Really the core piece that I feel like does matter is that mission vision core values coming from ownership. I think the rest of the pieces, the team member will just be so thankful to have a video to walk them through it, regardless of who created it. Tiffanie (13:44.622) Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree. Totally agree. I love that. I was like, I know exactly what's gonna come next. So I love this. So I think Loom or Zoom, those are fantastic options. Again, we use Loom. We have used Zoom too, though. And again, just don't pay a lot of money for something because it's just not necessary. So save your pennies, add it to your overhead. We don't want to see that overhead increasing. Take your operations manual and I'll probably start it sounds like with your employee manual. So what are th…
Full show notes at the publisherWelcome back to DAT Book Club! This month's selection was Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work by Nick Sonnenberg. As you'll hear, Kiera had a ton of takeaways from reading this book. She specifically touches on the following in this episode: Best ways to communicate internally Questions to ask yourself about what needs to be done and when Principles for efficiency Planning and work management And a ton more Find the full book club rundown here! Episode resources: Reach out to Kiera Practice Momentum Group Consulting Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Become Dental A-Team Platinum! Review the podcast Transcript: Kiera Dent (00:00.942) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and welcome to book club. It's June. How's your summer going? Are you guys having a ton of fun? I hope you're living up your life. Jason and I are living up our life. We bought a boat last year and I have wanted a boat. Jason and I, before we got married, we always said, we're going to buy a boat before we buy a house. And Jason had a truck and then we went to pharmacy school and Jason sold his truck. So then we had to get a truck. So then it was like truck, boat, house. We bought the truck. We bought the house, then we finally bought a boat. And everyone said the best day of buying a boat is the day, like the best day of owning a boat is when you buy it and when you sell it. And Jason and I luckily have not experienced that. We love boating so much. I grew up on the lake. We wake surf. And so it's summertime. We are on the lake all the time. So if you guys are ever wondering like, what does Keira Dent do? I geek out about dentistry and I boat and I wake surf and I love it. I crank the music up. Um, I love driving the boat. I love sitting out there and I'm such a fair skin beauty. So, uh, I hit the lake early in the morning between 10 and two. I'm definitely not on the water. That's usually when most people go, but fun fact, evening boating, no one's on the lake. You don't get sunburn. The water is the most warm. It's so calm usually, and it's the best time to go. So I usually hit early, early morning and then evening sunsets and do dinner on the lake. So I hope you guys are living it up. Uh, with that cheers guys. We're halfway through the year. We are halfway through. So I think this book club is so perfectly timed. I am so jazzed. This book, I actually read it a couple of months ago, preparing for this podcast. I'm not going to lie to you. It has lit a fire under my booty and I messaged all of my team and said, especially my leadership team. And I said, I want everybody to read this book. And we're actually going to do a really deep dive book club. We always do a book club within our team. Ours is on the third Monday of the month. And we just do a book club and happy hour. Like we hang out, we're virtual. And so it's just a fun time for us to hang out and just pick up pearls of knowledge from books that we read. And so, but for this one, I said, we're doing an actual like, I want us to figure out how we can implement this. So truth be told, if you did not read Come Up for Air, How Teens Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning and Work by Nick Sonnenberg, read it. I think of all the books that I have recommended this year in our book club. This and Buy Back Your Time, but this one especially, like I took, I don't know if you guys can see, if you're watching. Kiera Dent (02:25.774) Literally here are my notes and I don't know how I'm gonna summarize this in a quick podcast But I mean, I'm still scrolling still scrolling Okay, and there we're finally done That's a long time and that's a lot of notes and so I was trying to think of like I'm just gonna start to rift and hopefully you guys love it, but There's so many great ideas from this book that honestly when I read it I felt like this is my life and this man is speaking right to me and he gets it and I think the word leverage I know my words decisive, which I feel like I shouldn't switch. But I kind of want to switch my word, and I've never allowed myself to switch. I mean, I even have, guys, this year we got all of our team, our words for the year. Nice little journal here. I have a bracelet on today. But I actually, I think I am pretty decisive. That's funny, because I'm going to talk about switching gears. I think the word leverage is something, because I think I've grown so much of being. the doer and the dental assistant and the office manager that growing into being a leader. And I'm sure some of you have this where we've been the doers. How can we leverage ourselves to basically all of us be working at the top of our licenses or the top of our degrees and leverage our teams around us. And everybody's going to be happy and stop drowning for work. So leverage might be my word. It might just switch mid -year. We'll see what I decided to do. I mean, I should probably stick with decisive since I'm switching mid -year. But leverage is really speaking to me strong. And so I'm just going to, like I said, rift on this book club. I hope you guys loved it. I hope you geek out. I hope you do this with your leadership teams. And I hope if you've read it before that you reread it because I think there's so many pearls in this book that are impossible to input. I shouldn't say impossible. I feel like it's very lofty to implement the bulk of them, but good night. It was amazing. So, uh, first thing is he talks about CPR, CPR for a business. And that's kind of what the whole thing was premise around is communication, planning, and resources. And. I mean, I'm just gonna quickly go through some of the highlights of things that we've already changed because I think one of the biggest takeaways I took from it is within teams and organizations, there's gotta just be simpler ways for us to retrieve information, not necessarily of how we like store information. And I've thought about that so much, like for your team to know where are the procedure, like the protocols of how do we do things in our practice and how do we make sure that everybody's on the same page for it and how are we communicating and how are we planning things? And so, Kiera Dent (04:41.742) Just a couple of things that they mentioned is email should only be communication with people outside of organization in email. I love that he actually talked about for those of you, because I know there's some dentists who just like they're like drowning in emails and there's no way for them to cut up to catch up. And what he said was basically it's like the rip the bandaid method. And he said, you go through your email basically for like the last 30 days and you just look at those emails and you respond to anything pressing. And then what you do, and you give yourself about a week to do it, and then after that you delete everything else. And he said, because if it was really important, it's actually gonna pop back up, and everybody freaks out about it. But guess what, if it's something really important, it will come back, and you can literally get your inbox to zero, and then we keep it at zero. And if we also switch our communication with people outside of our organization in email, so I will tell you from someone who had... thousands of emails when I first started the company and it just always felt like I could never catch up and I was like I was literally drowning in this. It's like I'll catch up with my emails, I'll catch up with my emails, but I just didn't. And so two things I did, one, I put all of my promotional, I have one, it's Casey Staples, that's my very original OG, Go Back in Time. That's where I put all of my emails from. Old Navy, I don't know why I said Old Navy, I don't usually shop there, but I recently bought some leggings, so they were in my inbox. When I sign up for books like High Output Management, they go to that one. And what I do with that one is I actually, anytime I realize I'm not opening these emails, I just go and unsubscribe. And so that's where all of that almost like junk mail goes, and I have an inbox literally over there for just that. And so that way my work email and the ones that are really important, I'm not getting all those promotions, I'm not getting anything in there because... Really, I only want that to be important things. So within my work email, Keira at thedentalateam.com, we actually switched it because they said email should be for external communication. So with clients, with podcast listeners, with all of our vendors and sponsors and affiliates, like that's what that communication should be for. Internal should never be coming from email. It should be coming from Slack or something that's your internal communication software. And so we switched, we used to do WhatsApp, now we're into Slack. I was a Slack hater and now I'm a Slack lover. Kiera Dent (06:50.606) And that should be your internal communication. So we used to check our team for like KPIs and reminders. And instead of doing that, we moved all into Slack. So all of our reminders, there's ways that you can set it all up. But that way, because you talked about, if you have to go retrieve something. So I have a conversation with a team member. If we simplify the streams of communication and the lanes, you're like, okay, it was a client. I know that's an email. It was with a team member. I know that's in Slack. And then it becomes much easier for you to organize and retrieve information. And that's what they talked about so much is we drown in work trying to retrieve information so much rather than just getting the information. They also talked about getting work management tools. So they recommend Asana, ClickUp, monday .com. And that's where we need to see that work is getting done. So, so many offices tell me, Kiera, we don't know what projects are working on. We don't know how to follow up with it. Well, they said you need to have a work management tool. So it's email, internal communication, work management tool, a knowledge base where this is where everything about our company is actually. sitting in a knowledge base and it's like a wiki, org charts, coda guru, or some of the companies they recommend. I did just see a company that has their knowledge base sitting in monday .com and it's just own separate thing because things get lost in Google drive and things get lost all over the place. And so if everybody knows, because also there's outdated things, I know our Google drive has a lot of outdated things, but you really have one set space where this is everything that needs to go in there. And then they said you need process management tools. So that would be like SOPs, Checklist for the Company, Insurance Policies. And they did mention this process management tool might come later when your organization gets larger. But having it to where it's not in the Google Drive and it's not so impossible to find, but it's actually in a place like Train You All or Sweet Process or Process Street. But again, that could be something that might come later. And so it was interesting because everybody processes the same way, but... We don't all know how to retrieve it the same way. That's I think why the alphabetical system was there. And so they talked about how business can only grow for how fast knowledge can be retrieved. And I thought like, I had never thought about that being a stopping block in our company of people can't retrieve knowledge fast enough. Think about in your dental practice. We don't want it passing from person to person to person. We want it to really be something where no matter who you are, if you're brand new or if you've been here for 20 years, that all of us know how to retrieve the knowledge without having to go to somebody. Kiera Dent (09:11.822) And they said that you've got to align as a team of how to use each tool and more people hired. It actually gets harder in the organization and you need to have the processes. Otherwise we're just, we're not necessarily making more money. And so he said, get the systems right first. And it was just like, he said, like live up to a full potential. There's always a better way doing things, right. It's efficient and must purposefully improve. And so I felt like his thing was he's just constantly looking for like, where can I leverage? Where can I leverage? How can we leverage this? And, um, like, how can I put myself in a flow state more often and double my productivity? You like batch your tasks, you minimize the pings and dings, you automate your processes and we, we really get all of our pieces automated. And so I just thought about like, he looks at his email and how can I automate this through Zapier? And there's so many zaps and different automations that you could do within Slack, within email, within our softwares. And can we actually do that? And then another key point I took away is the power of saying no. And he said, say no more often. And it's not a good use of resources. Does this need to be done? Does this seem to be done by me? Does this need to be done by me now? And I thought that was just such a beautiful thing of, does this need to actually be done? And does this need to be done by me? And does this need to be done by me now? And again, so we're not like getting sucked into tasks that actually aren't moving us forward. I, and it was funny because we actually just had this in the company the other day. We were headed out to an event and because I speak at events, I have kind of been dubbed to be the event person who sets up and does the banners. But, um, my team doesn't understand because they don't present per se that a presenter's mind is very different than a tactical setting up an event mind. And I told them, I said, you guys, it's starting to get really, really hard on me to have to go to fly in to set up this booth. which I don't mind doing, but does it really need to be done by me or are there ways? Just because I'm there and it's convenient doesn't necessarily mean that I need to do it and I need to do it now. And it was crazy because when we thought about this, we realized we're actually just doing it because it was easy per se. It was easy for everyone else and not necessarily easy for me. And in doing that, we actually were able to save me two days on the road and still get the best experience at an event. It was crazy, but I think really questioning, Kiera Dent (11:33.198) does this need to be done and doesn't need to be done by me and doesn't need to be done by me now, will actually free you up a lot more than I ever realized. And it was such an interesting mindset for me to just start thinking in those terms because I think leverage is something where it's not, I feel like there is tactical, but there's also a lot of things that aren't necessarily tactical, but I think it's changing our mind of almost putting on like a pair of sunglasses where we look to see. Does this need to be done and doesn't need to be done by me now? And is there a way that I can possibly leverage my time and my resources better to get a better result? So I felt like it was just beautiful how they talked about that. And then here's something you guys are going to love. He talked about, there's a lot of different principles for efficiency. And he said some ways that we, cause I love offices…
Full show notes at the publisherWith the changing landscape, Kiera gets very real with practices in this episode. She's joined by Paul from Dental Menu to talk about why it is absolutely critical to get a membership plan in place. They lay out the steps to take if you're considering dropping insurance, and how Dental Menu seamlessly slots into your practice: Create a good product Set up marketing Establish an operating procedure Go out and market Paul even has a Dental A-Team special for those interested in working with Dental Menu! Visit www.dentalmenu.com/dentalateam. Episode resources: Learn more about Dental Menu Get a Dental A-Team special! Connect with Paul directly: paul@dentalmenu.com Reach out to Kiera Watch DAT Podcasts on YouTube Practice Momentum Group Consulting Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Become Dental A-Team Platinum! Review the podcast Transcript: Kiera Dent (00:00.558) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera. And today, you guys, I am so excited because I have an amazing guest on here. And right now, I'm going to come in a little bit more firm on getting prepared as a practice. Because as I'm watching the geopolitical landscape, as I'm watching inflation, as I'm talking to practices, as I'm watching DSOs come into place, practices need to start getting prepared. And so I'm going to come in a lot stronger today on insurances, you cannot keep running your practices the same way we've always done insurance reimbursements with inflation. Like you guys are getting a squeeze and I'm watching and I'm seeing there's very successful profitable practices. And there's also the ones that are really, really struggling. And I feel like it's kind of like an hourglass and we're starting to squeeze out that middle and you'll either be the profitable practice or the struggling practice and it's going to happen. It's already in place. And so my job on the podcast is to educate you. And so I'm really pro. Prepping and preparing for when you will want to drop insurance plans. And I think you need to have a membership plan in play. So Paul with Denil Menyoo, welcome to the show today. I'm glad you're here because I think people will be dropping insurances. It's not going to be an if it's a when, it's also helping people get higher practices, but they're doing it because they're annoyed with the, the reimbursement rates with inflation, but they have no plan in place for when they drop. And I'm watching a lot of offices that drop these patients with insurances. that they have no way to retain these patients. They have no way to get them back into the practice. And then they have to turn into this fee for service with heavy marketing costs that they weren't expecting to have. They didn't have anything in place before they dropped. And I think a membership plan is crucial for success of dropping insurances and being prepared. We're also in a weird election year. We're in all these different pieces. There's like people are nervous or worried about their benefits or worried about spending money. And membership plans, I think can create a lot more security for practices. So Paul, welcome to the show today. There's my soapbox. Welcome. Paul Lowry (01:50.522) Yeah. Thanks, Carissa. Would you say you're a prepper today? We need to, we need to like include some freeze dried food storage with every purchase or something. Kiera Dent (01:55.246) I think I would say I'm a prepper for sure. Kiera Dent (02:01.038) Seriously, I just think it's like a I don't know. I feel like my job as a consultant is I mean, it's for better or for worse. I'm constantly expected to look for what's going wrong and how do I solve it? I don't think that that goes well because I can't really shut that brain off in my marriage and I don't think my husband loves of like this and we need to fix this. We need to fix this. I don't think he loves that piece of me, but I think for practices, my job as a consultant is to be looking down the pipe six months, 12 months, two years from now. And what's going on? What's going on within the world? What's going on within dentistry? What's going on with the trends? Like, I feel like Paul, I hate research. I've always hated research. In college, I hated research projects. And I feel like as a day consultant, this is why I podcast because this is how I get all my research in, in a more fun way. But yeah, for sure. I'm a prepper. Like, I don't think the world's gonna end. But I do think dental practices, the landscape of dentistry is shifting and it's going to continue to shift. Paul Lowry (02:55.162) Yeah, absolutely. And membership plans are definitely a way to help with that as you're trying to change your practice. I know we've been on this before, we quote this stat a lot, but one of the studies again we've done, 250 ,000 patients, we did ourselves only 12 out of 100 patients without insurance were still active within five years. So you're losing your patients without dental insurance. And we see a lot of practices that are like, no, we're not. It's like, well, let's see the data, because the data... Kiera Dent (03:00.814) Yeah. Paul Lowry (03:24.506) I know you hate research, but the data doesn't lie. And so, do you love numbers? Yeah, I mean, that same study, 64 out of 100 insurance patients were still active. So insurance, we all hate insurance for a lot of reasons, but the bottom line is they get patients to come back to a practice on a regular basis and they've packaged the products in a way that is easy for consumers and employers to purchase. Kiera Dent (03:26.99) I do love numbers though, Paul. So let me just throw that out there. I don't want to run a research project, but I do love the data from it. I do. Kiera Dent (03:38.478) Wow. Paul Lowry (03:54.138) So if you're going to complain about insurance, but two things that drive me nuts is your best patients you're charging double or triple for, that's dumb. It's like, hey, you're going to be a really good patient. I'm going to charge you triple. You're going to be a pain in the butt. I'm going to charge you half. Like no business does that. We want to take care of our best patients, you know, my, for us, our best clients. I'm going to do whatever I can to keep them. My clients that maybe aren't as good. Kiera Dent (04:03.566) Yeah. Paul Lowry (04:20.122) Maybe I don't care as much if they decide to leave, right? I mean, that's just business in general. So first thing you've got to do is create a good product of services to offer your patients. If you're no longer going to be either in network or you're, you know, they don't have dental insurance. What are you offering? And if it's your full UCR rates for an exam cleaning x -rays, that's not market competitive. To me, UCR rates are who pays MSRP when they go to Coles. If you do, you're a moron, right? I mean, Kiera Dent (04:22.446) Right. Kiera Dent (04:43.566) Mm -hmm. Kiera Dent (04:49.742) Even like on cars, right? Like we see that too, like no one does. Paul Lowry (04:51.546) Anything like in retail if you pay retail Why like why would you do that and we've all had? medical bills right where it's like Okay, you have medical bills that are just absurd and then all the insurance company beats them up And then they only pay this much no one's gonna pay the full rate on a on a medical bill I mean, are you really gonna spend? $75 ,000 for you know the birth of a baby like you can't Kiera Dent (04:57.774) you Paul Lowry (05:20.538) You pay that for a wedding nowadays, Kiera, but we won't get into that. Kiera Dent (05:20.974) We'll be in the woods. I'm gonna go to the woods. I know it's ridiculous, no one is gonna pay those fees. They're inflated fees feed the ego. It's like, yeah, I could charge this much, but who's doing that? Nobody. Everybody does that. It's a sales tactic, right? Like normally it'd be this amount, but you're actually getting it for this amount. And insurance funds, I agree with you. If you want to look at a good marketing company, insurance companies are brilliant. Like they figured out how to get these patients to come back to you consistently over and over and over and over and over again. And they're still paying out of pocket, which I think is ludicrous. Like here's a small little coupon. but they keep coming because they've trained them into patterns and habits of what they're supposed to be doing. It's brilliant, like truly brilliant. Paul Lowry (06:14.874) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So instead of, instead of ragging on the insurance companies, why don't we see what they're doing well? And why don't we mimic what we can? Because dental insurance is a prepaid benefit. So why don't we offer something similar to our patients where we're collecting that revenue? And that's really what a good membership plan should be. And I've been on here before, Kiera, talking about the difference between a discount plan versus a membership continuity plan. You know, you've got a discount plan that's a coupon or a groupon. So let's say you, I'm in Utah, you guys want to come out here and go skiing. We're going to try to find the best deal possible for a Lyft pass or a Lyft ticket. Doesn't mean that we bought a season pass to that resort. It just means we're going to go there one time for as cheap as possible, which nowadays isn't cheap. So we're going to try to find it as cheap as possible versus a continuity plan like membership, Netflix. We're seeing car washes pop up all over in Utah. Kiera Dent (07:09.71) Mm -hmm. Paul Lowry (07:09.85) There's a reason it's $25 for one wash or $29 for their pass, because once they get you on that, you have two or three cars. It is crazy. You're like, I'm paying $100 a month for car washes, and I have to go to that specific wash, right? And so that's what you're trying to do is don't just sell a discount plan where it's like, hey, I'm gonna give you a discount on services. That's pretty short -sighted. What you wanna do is get them to commit to your practice long -term. You can't just buy insurance. Kiera Dent (07:20.59) Yep. Mm -hmm. Paul Lowry (07:40.57) and get that kind of one time discount and then cancel the next day. I mean, they have the open enrollment periods and you're paying and all that. So you want a true continuity program like a gym membership. They're paying every month to have access to care so that you can get them on the membership plan long term. That's how you're going to make money. But also it's how you're going to take care of patients. This isn't just about, you know, making money as a practice. This is about giving patients access to preventive care, which is pretty cool. And to dental care in general. You know, we, we heard. Kiera Dent (07:59.31) Mm -hmm. Paul Lowry (08:10.266) there's an NFL player that died because he had periodontal disease. I mean, it's crazy, right? So we're not just trying to maximize profits. What we're trying to do is make sure our uninsured patients have access to dental care at regular intervals so we can keep them healthy. And if you're charging them a ludicrous amount for that preventive service that isn't really market rate, what you're doing is saying, hey, Kiera Dent (08:14.094) Yeah. Paul Lowry (08:33.722) You can either pay me triple or you can go buy insurance and then I'll give you a better deal and you're driving them to the insurance companies because you're not willing to offer any good alternatives. Kiera Dent (08:42.478) Right, or you're driving them to not come back. Right? I think it's this like weird, weird piece. I'm glad you talked about the data. I truly do love numbers. I love to read people's research. I don't like to go do the research. But just thinking about it, I mean, this is what I watch practices do. They come, they complain to me about their dental insurance reimbursement rates, which I agree with. I'm not here to combat that whatsoever. But then after that, what they say is, Paul Lowry (08:44.89) That's mainly what you do, right? You drive them up. Paul Lowry (08:52.922) That's good. Yeah. Kiera Dent (09:10.158) So what we're gonna do, Kiera, and they get so excited, we're gonna drop insurance because we charge all these patients our UCR fee, this is how much we're gonna make. And we don't even have to see all of them, so we're fine if they don't come back. And I'm like, that's great, but you realize you've got a team, you've got an overhead that you've already budgeted based on the patients you're currently seeing. So we go and what a lot of offices do is they drop the insurance. And then I get a frantic phone call of like, Kiera, we dropped and not a lot of them are coming. So we've lost all these patients. Now we have open holes, my hygiene schedule is wide open. I don't know what to do because I don't have a marketing plan. We've tried to get these patients to come back in, but they don't want to pay the office fee. Like it's a mess. And then they panic. And then I kid you not, Paul, usually about six months a year, it's usually about the year mark after they've dropped insurance, I get a call and they're like, Kiera, I'm considering going back in network. What do you think? And I'm like, my gosh. Like the reason we're having this like, because they're panicking. They don't have the patients in there. They didn't. Paul Lowry (10:02.746) You Kiera Dent (10:08.078) all these patients that they thought loved them so much, they really were truly coming due to the insurance plan, you drop them, they're gonna go somewhere else unless you prep and prepare and have these patients, you educate them, you start to turn them on to the membership plan, you start to make this a more appealing alternative. Like my husband has insurance through his employer. I don't like the dentist. So I literally pay for a membership plan. But Paul, I'm such a good example of this. Before I was on a membership plan, I only went in once a year. because I have access to dentists, like at my fingertips, I work with hundreds of them, I can get probably a dental cleaning anywhere in the world, like I really could go to a dentist anywhere, I'm like wherever I move, it's fine, I'll know somebody there. But I didn't even go twice a year because I didn't have a set cadence of needing to go and feeling like I needed to be there. Insurance and membership plans will force a patient to feel like they need to use their benefits. And so again, it's just because it's been ingrained in us for years through the insurance company. So right on that insurance company's coattails, Paul Lowry (10:41.146) Yeah. Kiera Dent (11:04.974) Prepare your practice so that way people are already trained and ingrained. You have a plan. Your team knows how to do a membership plan. So when you drop that insurance company, the patients will still stay with you and you don't have as big of a drop from it. The offices that I see do this very successfully have a membership plan in place. They've done it for about six months to a year. So the team is trained up and then they go and they start dropping i…
Full show notes at the publisherKiera gives listeners three steps to set up an ideal emergency after-hour protocol response.
Define "true emergency" — what should the doctor actually have to come in for?
Role play! Listen to example calls and set language to use.
Place daily blocks for those emergency appointments.
She adds a couple additional pieces of advice, including using a rotating emergency response schedule with other practices.
Episode resources:
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Transcript:
Kiera Dent (00:00.782)
Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and welcome to the Dental A Team Podcast. I hope that you guys are having the best day of your life and I hope that you guys are just enjoying your time. I hope that you remember that right now you get to be a part of dentistry. It's a great time. It's an amazing profession and you get to change people's lives and I hope you just remember that you are changing lives and it is a great place to be. Also, if this dental podcast has blessed your life in any way, please do me a favor and leave a review. Share this in a Facebook group.
tag us while you're driving because my goal is to get this podcast into the hands of every single dental office out there and I can only do that with your help. So please, I will provide the free content. I will be here every single week with you guys. I just ask that you do me a favor and share this at least once a week with somebody or some group that you think it could benefit. That means the world to me and it's how we're going to be able to reach that mission. So today I just want to jump in a quick tactical podcast with you guys today on how can we actually handle emergency after call after our calls.
to keep our patients happy and cared for, but also to allow doctors to have a stress -free life. And this is for solo doctors, because obviously if we've got associate or other doctors, we can rotate the time. So I'm just gonna dive into it. We saw this as a question that came up. I always love when people ask me for podcast topics. If you ever wanna leave me a podcast topic that you want for your practice or for you, head on over to thedentalateam.com
click on the podcast link and right there, there's a place for you to actually submit ideas. You can also just email us, hello at thedentalateam.com. I would love to hear from you. I love a good pen pal, but really any topics you guys want, this podcast is built for you. So the more I get your ideas, your questions, the things you want, the more I'll be able to build podcasts for you and for your team. And also we can create quick rules for you, make it very simple for you. You can also post questions in our Facebook group. So head on over to our Facebook group, join our group, enter the discussion. I'd love to have you there.
All right, emergency after calls. So let's say you have multiple doctors. I think that everybody doesn't want to have to always be on call. And so like our success team, they rotate every other weekend and they know who's going to be on call, what the expectations are. And they also know the weekends that they're going to be off. And so that way they can really get that balance. And so I think that's a great way. If you do have other providers in the practice that they can actually rotate that. And the second thing is I've seen some offices actually have,
Kiera Dent (02:20.046)
their team members more on call. So the doctor doesn't necessarily have to be on call. And this is in solo practices, larger practices, but you can actually rotate the team. There's ways you can do it. Check with your state laws to where it's on call pay and not regular pay. And so if there is a call, they take a company cell phone and they just take, they vet those calls. So that way the doctor doesn't need to always feel like they're on call and handling those emergency calls. Also is to make sure that it truly, truly is an emergency when they're calling you after hours.
A lot of times we can train our team members to find out is this truly an issue or is it something that could be solved on Monday? A lot of times, offices will save a spot on Monday for those emergencies that do come in over the weekend of like, perfect, let's take some ibuprofen or we can call in some medications if needed. Doctors, that's your world. But really educating our team of like, what is a true emergency? So something for me that was kind of like an art practice of what we saw as the standard of a true emergency where doctors going to go in.
was usually, it was a broken tooth. Like if someone got in an accident, their tooth was broken. Obviously that's gonna be a weekend emergency that we're going to go in for. Another thing like a lot of times abscesses, the abscesses ignore an extreme pain. But remember, it didn't happen overnight usually for an abscess. It's been there, we probably diagnosed it on that patient. And if you want to, you can have that. Some practices prefer to call in a medication. Some practices don't because they don't want the patient to get out of pain and then never show up.
So you guys can make that determination for your practice of what's going to be best for you and how you want to do that. But I think like really those are our true two emergencies. Everything else like a popped off temporary, there's temp cement that they can put on at the grocery store. Other things like we want to take care of our patients, but we have to remember like what truly is an emergency. And I think about it like a doctor at a hospital is not going to come in if I have like...
you know, my cast got wiggly, they're going to say perfect, like, you can just manage it. We'll see you on Monday. It's not something urgent. They're going to come in if I like cut my finger off in the blender, they're going to come in if I like poked my eye or I broke my bone, things that have immediate consequences. And I think in dentistry, we think it's an emergency because the patient is frazzled. And so I think actually, a lot of times those emergencies to help these doctors have stress free lives is let's actually role play these. So there are some
Kiera Dent (04:44.91)
some companies. So like if you have your phones, you can actually have them record the calls and we can listen to these emergency calls and let's see if it truly is an emergency on the weekend. I think a lot of people just want it to be taken care of and if the dentist is willing to come in, fantastic, but like true emergencies, a broken tooth and usually an abscess were pretty much the only two that our doctor would actually go in on the weekend. Also, if the doctors have it set up of if there is an emergency, this is the time I'm willing to come in. You guys, I did break
my ex -fiance, notice X, and he did smash my face into a wall on a Saturday. And I had to go to the dentist. And I will tell you that dentist was out and about and I did not see that dentist for about five hours. So just so you know, I do feel like my case was extenuating circumstances and I did need to see a dentist that day and I'm grateful he was able to come in. But just so you know, if it's a true emergency, they're going to be willing to wait until it's convenient for the doctor as well.
So doctor who's like, I know you want to care for these patients, but remember they are paying a premium and you do get to have it on your own time. Some other offices will rotate with offices too. I know that that's an option for solo doctors. If you don't have an associate, you and maybe a couple other practices in the area that are our solo doctors, maybe you rotate. So one practice takes it the first week of the month. The next one takes it the second, third and fourth. Obviously that's on our honor that we don't try and take each other's patients. But it can be set up to where.
Fantastic this week, we become the emergency call line for all four practices and they can come in the next time it's going to be for the other one. They'll be on call for it. And that can sometimes help you to where you're only then having to be available one weekend out of the month that we can go on vacations. You can be free, but I want you to also remember and let's pretend doctors that you are on vacation. You are completely out of the country and a patient called in with an emergency. What would you do? Odds are the only two you'd go in for is probably a broken tooth or that root canal.
But odds are you'd probably call in a medication. You'd see them on Monday when you got back. And so remembering that if, if we're on vacation and we wouldn't be coming in, we like, we'd probably call another doctor and send them to that. If the emergency is not to that level, when you're on vacation, is there a way within our practice that we can change it into where those emergencies aren't coming in? They're not overwhelming our schedule. It's not as having to give up our weekends. So I really do think, um, our team practicing, reviewing the calls, let's see what we could have said.
Kiera Dent (07:11.246)
How can we get it to where this patient feels so happy? Maybe having a block space on Mondays for emergencies in the morning to where like amazing, no problem. We're going to have you take some ibuprofen. We'll get you in right away on Monday morning. No problem. We actually reserve spaces for that. I think some really good word ninjaing verbiage for your team can cut down those ER after hour calls. And honestly, if it's an evening one, they're fine. They'll come in the next morning and there'll be a spot for them.
I used to hold two emergency appointments every single day, morning and afternoon, and it was true emergencies. And I want to remind you if it's a true emergency, they'll come at any time I have available. So I put it in my schedule right where we actually wanted it every single day because true emergencies will come. Everybody else can fit into our schedule where it's ideal. And so I really, really think most of these, we care so much about our patients being happy and cared for, but I think we oftentimes maybe overdo it when it's unnecessary. And so biggest takeaways from this is one,
Let's define what emergencies you're willing to come in for. Doctors, this is your life. It's you giving up your time to go in. Worst case scenario, there are emergency dental cares that they can go to on the weekends. And I know we don't necessarily want to do that, but I want to remind you there are other options. And 99 % of the time, unless they're in some fluke accident like I was in, the problem has been there. They just elected not to get it done. And so I also think like there was a chance for them to get this done when it wasn't in pain. And not to say we punished them for it.
But I want you to remember you didn't cause this problem and they had choices prior that they chose not to do most of the time. So number one, identify what are true emergencies you are willing to come in for and train your team and let them know these are the ones. Number two, let's role play and let's listen to calls of what the emergencies are and how we would respond to that patient to help them see that they can come in on Monday. Number three, place that block every single day so we do have those true emergency spots where we're holding them for true emergencies and that patient can come in.
And when I talk about a broken tooth, let me just clarify, that's like they were in an accident. It wasn't like decay and it fell off. Okay, so two very different scenarios, fluke accident, face, longboarding accident, car accident, things like that where really, I mean, you guys, I had no decay in my teeth. I just happened to get a nice concrete wall to the face. Those are things that I would say true emergencies and that patient will be so grateful and appreciative because that really is something you do need to take care of that day. And then,
Kiera Dent (09:39.406)
After that, let's just remember if you were on vacation, what would you do and who would you actually go see? And then possibly look to see, can you rotate the days, the weeks, the months with other offices? So that way you feel like you can be off call. You don't always have to be on call because it is true. They come in on the weekends. And so, but we also do need to have balanced lives as well. And so that would be my recommendation. We're really great at training on verbiage for teams, helping you doctors also realize.
what's truly a true emergency versus what's one that really could be handled on Monday and giving you that, that confidence to still care for them and take great care of them and do it on a day that you're already in the practice, really, really, really can give you the confidence. So if we can help train your team, reach out, hello@thedentalateam.com. We're here for you. And as always, thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time on the dental a Team podcast.
We've talked about it before: Your patient avatar is crucial for success (listen to episode 747, Creating a Raving Fan Patient). Now, it's time to understand what the value of that avatar can add to your practice. Tiff and Dana touch on… Reverse engineering your ideal avatar Considering the right metrics Working with your marketing team And more! Episode resources: Reach out to Tiff and Dana Listen to episode 747, Creating a Raving Fan Patient Watch DAT Podcasts on YouTube Virtual Consulting Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Become Dental A-Team Platinum! Review the podcast Transcript: Tiffanie (00:01.844) Hello, everyone. We are so excited to be here with you. I have Miss Dana here with me again today. I love podcasting with her and I love we were just going over like what we're going to talk about today and we're reviewing the content for today. And she just Dana, you always have this perspective like what you just said to me and like, my gosh, you're totally right. You always have this perspective of whatever system it is, what it actually can provide and deliver. So thank you for being here. Thank you for all of the work you put into all of our and our company. A lot of the content that you guys see, that you read, that you're getting on your newsletters, that you're getting delivered to your inboxes, that you're getting delivered to your offices, your gifts, all of your things, these come, most of those items, if I'm honest with myself, come from Dana. And Dana, you are an incredible asset to this company and to all of our clients. So thank you for the hard work that you put in. Thank you for constantly. thinking out the side of the box and seeing things from different angles that even I don't always see. You are incredible. Thank you for being here with me today. Dana (01:03.51) Thanks, Tim. Thanks for having me. And you know, I think it's like efficiency queens over here because we both I think, self admittedly, are that I'm not going to do a system if it's not going to give me a result or give me something to see. And so I am always looking for just those little diamonds in the rough when it comes to systems. Tiffanie (01:10.552) Yeah. Tiffanie (01:22.74) I totally agree. Totally agree. And you, you see so many systems because you do work with so many clients, both in person and virtual. And I think you're constantly seeing like trial and error on how things are working and how different teams are implementing and doing them. And I think the, I think the positive side of all of the virtual clients that you do work with is that you get a lot of exposure to them because you're working with them constantly every month. And so you're seeing that. ebb and flow and you're seeing the immediate direct results of them actually implementing the system. So I think it's just really cool. I think it's an advantageous space that you get to sit in and that your clients sit in honestly, because you have so many clients in of your own and then even in practice momentum that you've been working with on ACE, like there's so many clients that just get so much exposure to you, to Nicole, to Britt and all of those different spaces that are just. getting so much value because you guys are able to see the immediate results and kind of help them pivot and change on the drop of a dime. And I just think it's really cool. Whereas other clients I see like quarterly or, you know, every six months, I'll just see them for visits. And it's like an overhaul of all these pieces. So I think it's really cool what you're able to do. So we've been talking about we've talked about a lot of things. And we talked about a lot of marketing in the past couple of months and One of the pieces that we brought to the surface was the idea of building on an avatar. I thought it would be fun today to kind of just like hit in on what the avatar's value actually is, right? Because we talked about the avatar, how to do it, why we want people to do it, but then now looking at the actual value, and I think you hit on some absolutely wonderful pieces. I was thinking like being able to hone in on the patient that you want, the patient base that you want, should be. help exponentially. One of the first places that I saw it was really knowing when you know who you want in your practice as far as patients, I think it helps us figure out who we need working side by side as well. Because when we know their end result, we can work backwards from there. And oftentimes we're reactive and we're like, gosh, we need a dental assistant. I need someone with this experience. And sometimes that experience, I'm going to say like comes at a cost. Like sometimes the experience you're looking for, Tiffanie (03:43.316) comes at the cost of them knowing everything and maybe not being super engaged with how your practice does it. I know I hear from doctors all the time, the words she keeps saying at my practice we did and it's like, no, you're here now. So I think sometimes we don't reverse engineer things, we just react and we respond. So when we know when we built out the avatar, we built out our goals, we're like, this is the practice that we want. This is the patient that's going to get us there. Now we can say who are the people, the team that will work with that patient to get us the best results because I think in a second, Dana, I want you to go through those pieces that you're talking about because with the right team, with the right patient, those trackable measurable items that you're going to speak on in a second, that's the only way they're going to get there. If we have an avatar built of a patient and we don't consider the avatar of a hire, it could be really messy in between and we could have a clashing of personalities. So I think the valid one of the values of an avatar that I see is that it's going to simplify hiring for you. So you can build that avatar of hiring off of the avatar of the patient that you want and really dial in on what that's going to look like. My other piece was like marketing spend and I think that's fun Dana into yours. We can decrease marketing spend because our targeted ads are to the people we want and we're getting a better ROI because we know exactly who we want. That's who it's going to. We can decrease our marketing spend and increase in other areas. So Dana on that marketing piece, cause I think hiring aside, like we can bring that back in a second, but on that marketing piece, have you seen that you implement avatars? We talked about this before a lot with a lot of your practices as you're going through operations manuals and as you're. really building out the goals and the dreams for practices. So when it comes to that marketing spend, have you seen that even get more clear for practice managers and practice owners on what the marketing is going to look like because they have the avatar? Dana (05:45.398) Yeah, I think the great news is when you build your avatar, you're thinking about services too. Like what is the kind of dentistry that they're gonna value? Because does that align with the dentistry that you do? Because you want your avatar and your ideal patient base to want the kind of procedures that you want to do or that you're offering, which then ideally does give you an idea of new patient value, right? Because when we are... doing these marketing dollars to bring in this ideal patient, we should actually have a pretty baseline of what is our average new patient going to be as far as production or value because we've designed that avatar to really, really want the things or the services. that we're ideally serving them with. And so I love that you said, okay, let's think about it in hiring. And I think when you link it to hiring, I always say, okay, well, what is the experience then for that avatar that we're trying to create and which team members will create that experience because all of that then leads to increased case acceptance of the things that we are targeting, which then does give you a baseline value of that patient, which I think. helps with marketing spend, helps with knowing really like what you should be putting into marketing and if you're getting your ROI because you should have an idea of patient value just based on avatar alone. Tiffanie (07:01.332) Yeah, I totally agree. I love that. So you brought that to me and I'm like, my gosh, you're totally right. Because not only does it increase your patient base, but it increases the value of each individual patient. And this one makes me think too Dana, there's a lot of practices out there that are going to be for service that are dropping major insurance plans that will go unnamed that have always scared the dental industry, but they're doing it and they're doing it. A lot of them are doing it successfully. And I think if you don't have, these things in line, if you don't know your avatar patient, your avatar team, we start dropping insurances and going towards fee for service, we can get really scared, right? Because I think the people that we lose, this is just me making an assumption, I guess. The people that we lose or I've seen practices lose when dropping an insurance are typically people who are very insurance minded, who are saying, no, I'm not gonna do fluoride because my insurance doesn't pay for it, I'm over 18. who are saying, well, if they're not going to pay for the crown, then I don't believe I need it. Right? So there are the x -rays or any additional anything at all. They're the ones that are like, no, because insurance said, right? Well, if my insurance downgrades, why aren't you doing a silver? I could have had those conversations and drives you wild. So those are the patients typically that are going to follow the insurance. So the patients that are retaining are probably more. geared towards your actual avatar patient. But if we don't have our hire in line, we don't have our team in line to serve that avatar patient. And we've got a team who's insurance focused and insurance minded that doesn't match the avatar that we're targeting. Now we've got this issue where we've got maybe a team member who's super insurance focused and driven, talking a patient out of coming to your practice because they don't accept. Right? We're not in network. We're not participating with that insurance. So that is a huge flip -flop, I think, in our brains that we've never, I've never actually like sat down and thought about how those things are so in alignment. I think it's huge. So just that alone, right? Just that alone increases your patient value. So I think the value of an avatar and the things to do really is to go listen to the avatar. Tiffanie (09:23.924) podcast, we're not going to break it all down for you now. Go listen to that. We already did it. Build out your avatar from your goals, right? You want to build out your avatar from your practice goals and your life goals. What is it and who is it going to take to get you to those goals and reverse engineer? So know your patient avatar, build that out. And from there, I want you to consider and think about sometimes it's helpful to just like journal ideas out and then figure it out. But really think about who Could be working with that patient who's gonna be the best team member. What's their personality? Like what are they doing? How do they think about insurance? What are their goals and dreams and aspirations? What are the things that they're pushing for in life? How do we get that avatar for our new hire now right or for our team making sure that our team is in line? I do want to put the caveat whenever I have my doctors or practice administrators at all do exercises like this. I need you to delete your team from your brain. I Don't think about the things that your team brings to the table. Don't think like, well, Joanna is, you know, she's so sweet and kind and I want somebody sweet and kind just like Joanna. When you put the person to it, it makes it much more difficult to be objective with the person, the ideas of the person you actually want. And that may be your full team, totally fine. But you need to come up with a very objective list to be able to score from to make sure that you're in alignment. So delete your team from your brain. as you're building these, just like I want you to delete your patients as you're building your avatar. Don't be like, well, I don't want to Jack, Jack's the worst or Mary Sue is always here and I want more Mary Sue's like, that's fantastic. But what does that patient actually look like? So go build your patient avatar, build your team avatar from there. And then let's talk metrics because I think you guys need to start playing metrics now or prior to having done this exercise before and start looking at what's decreasing and increasing. So once you've got your marketing avatar narrowed in, chat with your marketing company, get things retargeted, make sure that we're super focused on the patients that you want. You should see an increase then in like patient acquisition, you should see the right patients coming to your practice. I did this with a client in Utah. And prior to building out really what he wanted the new patient to look like, he was like, I just need patients. So we're just grasping at everything. Tiffanie (11:52.34) And there were a couple months where he was overloaded with quote unquote new patients. And he was just like, I Tiff, I can't do this. Well, we broke it down and I started noticing that his quote unquote new patients, right? Label them how you'd like. Were limited and comp exams, mostly limited. And these people were coming for extractions and they were in town and had a crown fall off, but they don't live there. And they're just like these one stop shop patients. rotating through this very small practice, he's only got two operatories to himself and two hygiene. So he just didn't have the space for it. So I pulled back and I started with the marketing company like, what are we? What are we marketing here? They're marketing emergency dentist, right? So he's getting everything and I'm like, well, do you want to be an emergency dentist? Because that's what you're doing 100 % they're getting the results that we're after. they are getting the results for emergency dentists, but is that your forte? And he's like, No, I really, really am getting into cosmetic and implants. That is a far cry from where we are. So building out that avatar, I had him go through it based on the, the procedures he really wanted to do, like you said earlier, Dana, like really honing in what it is that I want to do, and then build the avatar from there, we scale back marketing from emergency dentist and switched it over to family cosmetic and routine dentistry. Now his new patients went down, right? He didn't, he wasn't getting as many quote unquote new patients because he wasn't getting these emergency limited exams. But the value of the patients that he was bringing in far outweighed the value of all of the one stop shop because he got two cosmetic cases in three months. So his marketing spend, reduced because we were targeted. We didn't have to pour as much money into marketing. We were super targeted and the value of those patients went up exponentially while building his active patient count because active pat…
Full show notes at the publisherKiera lists out exactly what doctors should be looking for when either buying a new practice or hoping to systematize their current one. Considerations such as: What's the AR? What procedures are being offered and is there room to add more? How is the team communication? How are supplies purchased? Then she suggests how to boil down the most critical items to implement and ways to go about doing so that won't overwhelm the team. Episode resources: Reach out to Kiera Watch DAT Podcasts on YouTube Practice Momentum Group Consulting Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Become Dental A-Team Platinum! Review the podcast Transcript: Kiera Dent (00:00.91) Hello, Dental A Team Listeners, this is Kiera and I am so excited to be podcasting with you today. So I just wanted to get on and do a quick tip, tactical one with you of tips of buying a practice. But if you already own a practice, some things you can do to just maximize and optimize. There was a really interesting post where we found that someone bought a practice. They wanted to own their practice. They thought the practice was going to be a great practice. They were super excited that the schedule was full. So when vetting the practice, they saw full schedule. They also saw like perfect. The patients are coming in. They had a lot of amalgams, a lot of opportunity for them because they weren't doing amalgams. So like we could do that. When they were visiting the office before the sale, they couldn't figure out like why the AR was so high. And good news that they didn't buy the AR. So some tips on that. And then they were just kind of looking at like, why would like the business aspect of the practice and CE and things like that. And like, they were trying to figure out fraud and ordering supplies. And so they made this list of changes that they wanted to do. And I read this post in this article. So this person's listening. Hello, nice to have you. Thanks for sharing your story. But they thought of just some different things. And so I thought about when you're looking at a practice to buy and or in your own practice, A few things to look at is number one, with their AR being high, are they collecting patient portions? My husband told me, I kid you not, he just went to the dentist. We actually go to two different dentists here in Reno. And he said that, yeah, he left the office and they're like, oh yeah, you can just pay next time. That is a great way to have high AR. And so really making sure that your practice, even if you've been doing that for a long time, that you work on making sure that you are collecting at time of service. I know that sounds so silly, but people ask here, how are you able to add 20 grand to a schedule? And I'm like, I literally had them stop at the front and make sure that they actually collected their balances before they left. You can go a step further and actually pre -collect before they even go to the back. So if they've got balances, think about when you go to the doctor's office, they always have you collect the copay before you go back and see them. They're very proactive on collecting. And I just think why in dentistry do we not do that? So that's one thing when you're looking at of that high AR, what can be also looking to see, are they billing out? Kiera Dent (02:22.222) claims? Are we sending them out? Are we running our procedures not billed to insurance report constantly and consistently going all the way back to the beginning of the year? Because if we're not running that, we're actually not able to see like what procedures we actually did that just they got stuck in the funny zone and they did not send out. And so looking at that, and so for this office, I just thought let me give you some tips. Where A few things when you're buying this practice, good things to look for are what's the AR? Do I want to buy that? Do I not? If it's a high AR, are they collecting at time of service? Can we get that there? Another thing to do is looking about billing out same day. Are we doing that with hygiene? How's their hygiene department and are they doing perio? What's their perio percentage? How many new patients are coming in? Where are those new patients coming from? There's another practice that I talked to and he's looking to buy the practice and he's like, here, we're only getting like two new patients a year, a month. And I was like, whoa, I would not be buying that practice until I found out why and am I confident I could increase that new patient flow? Other things to look at when we're buying this are what are all the procedures that they're offering in the practice? Are we able to add in additional services? And even within your own practice, if you own it right now, can we add in additional services like ortho, Botox, implants, all on fours, smile makeovers, any of those things sleep? Are those things currently in the practice? And if not, What one's going to be, excuse me, the least amount of effort with the most amount of ROI and could we add that in? What else about like, what is that doctor doing? And are they delegating the tasks of the business? And could you set up your schedule to work on the business for even two hours a week where we look at the financials, we're going through the billing, we're looking at the reports, we're running those reports. We're also looking to see what other things we're cross checking. We're going and grabbing an EOB and just checking to see was it posted. Also, we're looking at the AR. We actually have a spreadsheet. Dental A Team has this for a lot of our clients where we have an AR spreadsheet where you download all the AR. Your biller is expected to go through every single account. And then every single month, you actually have a meeting with your biller. And we go through every single account. Is it first, second, third statement? Are they set up to go to collections or are we writing the accounts off? The doctor is gonna review all those information before we do that. These are the accounts we need to do. Insurance follow -up, how long are claims taking to get paid? Kiera Dent (04:45.294) Doctors, you don't have to do this, but you could simply just have an insurance AR spreadsheet and patient portion where you look at it and your biller knows that they need to get this done. So I think that really can also help and make it easier for you too. That's a good way to prevent fraud. You're checking all the payments. We're also closing off the audit trail of who can actually take things in and out of the ledger, making sure nobody can delete the audit trail, putting up passwords on your computers, making sure that's there. making sure that payroll, you have a good company for payroll and QuickBooks and making sure you're actually looking at your P &L every single month, looking to make sure all the charges are there, putting your P &L into an overhead calculator to make sure are we in a line with industry standards to make sure we're not overpaying or underpaying or where we could maybe chip down one or two zones to get that a little bit stronger, making sure that we have goals for our whole team. looking for production and collection goals and what our overhead is and new patients. With new patients, are we having referrals? Are we making sure that we're getting our Google reviews? Are we using a company like Swell to make sure our Google reviews are high and to be drawing in new patients even when we're sleeping? Are we looking for other zones that we could be attracting more new patients? Can we do monthly giveaways that are for our ideal patient avatar? And then looking at... when you guys are diagnosing treatment, are we reactive? Are we proactive? What are we doing with that? And, you know, some dentists are like, we'll just watch it and see, could we move it into even where we do one more item of treatment than we would normally do, not over diagnosing, but maybe something that we would watch. So we're going to watch five teeth, let's watch four teeth and actually treatment plan one of those. And so I think that there's also so many other zones that can help. And also the question is like, when we go and buy a practice or when we're trying to make changes, people ask us all the time with consulting, like, how do you actually do this? And how do you get a team bought in? And what I found is make a running list of all the items that you want to change. Teams enjoy change. I don't say that they don't like change. Teams don't like unnecessary changes and teams don't like to have a ton of changes put on them all at once that are just going to fall off the bandwagon. Teams like to have less stress, more fun. And so what I found is if we Kiera Dent (07:05.07) I like when I consult a practice, I literally make a running list of all these items. I'm looking at the AR, I'm looking at how we're scheduling patients, I'm looking at handoffs, I'm looking at how the exams go. I'm looking at all these different pieces. I'm watching their morning huddle. I'm looking to see are they tracking goals? I'm looking to see how do we answer the phones? I'm looking to see how is the front office working? Do they have it separated out? Are we sending our claims? Looking at their AR, pulling an EOB and checking that, listening to how the hygienists are teeing up perio and fluoride. I'm looking to see our... Assistance looking for additional treatment they can add on I'm looking for handoffs between doctors and and team members I'm looking at their financials. I'm looking at their overhead. I'm looking at their costs of things I'm looking at their supplies in the practice. Are we putting them in all the operatories? Do we have one set space? I'm looking at their sterile Are they cross contaminating and not realizing it? All those things I look at and you better believe that if I go tell a team all the things that they're not doing or things that they could improve I'm probably gonna lose a team. Just like if you buy a practice and go try to change everything all at once, you're probably going to lose a team. So again, I have a whole list. I'm putting it in a notebook. You can have a document for it. And then what I do is I consolidate, I combine, and I also look to see what if I could implement only three items will move this practice forward the most, the quickest, and I get the team bought in for a six week time period. The reason why I do six weeks is it's just easy, perio, a six week retreat, come and check it out. But I've also found that that way the team feels like there's not too much. And what I also do is before I go implement anything, I already know usually what I want to implement and what I think would help this practice the most. But I go to the team and say, hey, where are our struggles? Where are the hot fires? And what do we need to do to change? Like the hot fires are our communication. Our hot fires are this. And I already know I want to implement X, Y, Z. I want to implement. handoffs between doctors because they know it's going to increase case acceptance. I want to implement an AR spreadsheet to make sure we're tracking that because our collections might be low and let's see if we can get that. And I'm going to collect like perfect handoffs where we collect money. Those might be my three things that I'm going to implement. And then what I do is I get the team to tell me what their problems are and then I bring the solutions to their problems to the table. And that's what we work on for six weeks. And so I think when you're buying a practice, do the same thing. Kiera Dent (09:23.15) When you're looking at your practice, go around, be a consultant, listen in, spend an hour just walking around and you'll be shocked at how much you see and then look to see of all your great ideas, what's going to move your practice forward the most and then stick to that for six weeks. Don't let anybody off the hook. That's what I think people really love when we consult them because we don't let you off the hook. You are with us. You are, uh, you're accountable to us. We're going to check in because what I found is people have shiny object syndrome. So we start this when we want to change all of these things. So we try to do 500 things and we actually don't end up doing any of the things. And so if I can just get three items put into place, maybe it's three items as a team and then an additional one or two for people to just get things rolling, but it's very manageable and it makes their life easier and more efficient because it's solving their perceived and true problems with actual solutions that will make a difference. And then I make sure it's sticky. And that's how you're able to truly make change in a practice. That's how you're able to, when you buy a practice or things to look for, or when you're having your team and you wanna make changes because buying a practice and having an existing practice oftentimes have some of the same problems. Just when we're buying it, we're very, very nitty gritty because we wanna make sure we're taking care of our investment. When we own it, we forget that we should be constantly protecting our investment because we want to refine and make it better. But that's not just better for us, it's better for our team and for our patients. And when we come from it with that approach, your team's bought into it. So I might suggest buying a practice, here you go, here's some tips of what to do. owning a practice, these are also some tips, but I might suggest no matter where you are, make your whole laundry list of items to improve, consolidate and combine any of them that are likes with likes, and then figure out what are the top three items that if implemented for the next six weeks would exponentially move your business forward and then stick to those consistently. And I think that that is just a really, really lovely way to do it. Another way to do it is what we do in some of our consulting where we have all 12 systems. and we run it on kind of a monthly cadence for you. So yes, you've got your hot fires, but you're also starting to implement every single system. And so we're chipping away and we're not necessarily looking at like, what are the big issues right now, but we're chipping away at systems. So over the course of the next 12 months, you literally will become systematized. And I think that that's another great way to do it. It's a little more streamlined. It's a little more structured. We're not shaking the tree as much. We're not coming in and implementing as many things, but you know, over the course of 12 months, you'll really get your practice very systematized. Kiera Dent (11:48.558) We'll be able to still address your issues, but this is a good way for you to also do it. So either it's let's go pick the top three things or let's just follow a map of the 12 items. Like with my finances, I usually don't go look for the big three items to move. I don't really even know what I should be looking for. But in Dennis advisors, they have 12 elements of things like my trust and my finances and my PNL and tax strategy and my burn rate, my save rate, and it's set up on months. And so I just know I need to work on that one little area. And at the end of 12 months, I will have my financial portfolio much, much better. S…
Full show notes at the publisherSomething many dental practices tend to forget: passing off information with open communication in mind. Tiff and Dana review why handoffs are so critical to building trust and increasing patient acceptance. They touch on diagnosing with the patient in the room, having conversations directly with them, why NDTRs need to be implemented, and more. Episode resources: Reach out to Tiff and Dana Watch DAT Podcasts on YouTube Practice Momentum Group Consulting Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Become Dental A-Team Platinum! Review the podcast Transcript: Tiffanie (00:02.055) Hello everyone, Dana. Thank you for being here. I am so excited to be here with you today. And before we get super into what we're talking about today, I have a question I haven't pulled out, I feel like in far too long. So for all of my fitness enthusiasts who listened to us specifically for Dana's tips, I apologize. I know you're out there. But Dana, I have a question for you. I am in the market for obviously always leggings and I will be buying new leggings soon. Okay, restart. I will be buying leggings soon. And do you have any new legging brands that you cannot live without that the rest of the world needs to know about? Or favorites in general? Dana (00:50.292) Hmm. That's a good one. I have to be honest. I don't know that I have a new ones. Now I will say I definitely have my solid go tos for different activities. So depending on what you want leggings for, I think I can give so I wear different leggings for running than I do for like doing CrossFit than I do for just like everyday wear, right? Because now I can expand all of the expenses. Tiffanie (01:04.775) Okay. Tiffanie (01:16.871) Mm -hmm. They do everything. I like there's daily wear leggings and I'm like, I get that because I wear my leggings. But okay, so running, let's see running and CrossFit today. Dana (01:30.612) Okay, so for running, I really like the Wonder Unders by Lulu. They're more of their running. A lot of people like the Fast and Freeze. They're actually not my favorite. I like when I'm running things to be more compressive. And then there are several different athletic ones that I like for running too. So I feel like if you haven't tried athletic leggings, I do really like their stuff for running. For CrossFit, I will forever ever go to FLEO. They're just my favorite. They stay in place. They don't move. They are squat proof. So for anybody into leggings, that's an important thing. Tiffanie (01:59.639) Okay. Tiffanie (02:07.015) Yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel like we need to like, get it to where you're getting an affiliate with these things when I ask you. But it is, this is such a side tangent for everyone. But I, my for my birthday, my sister and the kids got me all these gift cards. So I got Lulu, obviously, and Athleta and then GNC, all of these things. And I've been saving it because I'm like, I don't know which ones I want. But Dana (02:13.364) Right. Tiffanie (02:33.415) I really want to try the athletic stuff. I just always shy away because you just never know. You know, you just never know. So I'm going to try athletic. Thank you. And we'll get you an affiliate discount one day. I have. Dana (02:38.324) Mm -hmm. Yeah, you should. But you've been hiking a lot, and I'll say, I can send you the link, but Athleta has actually cross leggings that are partly hiking pant material, part legging material. So the front is hiking material, the back is leggings, and they're amazing. Tiffanie (02:52.231) Perfect. Tiffanie (02:56.839) Awesome, yeah, because we are doing Grand Canyon Rim to Rim, not Rim to Rim to Rim, because I'm not Dana crazy, but Rim to Rim in the fall. So that would be fantastic. Thank you. Yeah, awesome. All right, fitness enthusiasts, now you know. Lulu, obviously, always a bet. Athleta, and then yeah, get me those hiking pants. Thank you. And if anybody would like them, let us know. Hello at thedentalatd .com. We are happy to send them over as well. And that my friends is how you get things done and I think today's conversation is super fun because I love communication. I love face -to -face communication. I love written communication. I love all of the things and I love over Communicating not to the point of you know annoyance but over communicating to the point that we know without a shadow of a doubt our patients fully understand exactly what they need to come back for, what was diagnosed, our team understands what they need to come back for, how they're going to schedule it. Dana, let's break down some of, I'm going to think of like my top three things that clients complain about or need help with, right? Because everyone comes into the dental team and they're like, we need systems. I'm like, my God, that can mean anything, right? So the top three things I feel like we get complaints on are communication in general. My team's not talking to one another. case acceptance is low or patients aren't coming back and the schedule is chaos. Just pure chaos. Dana, can you think of anything else that would be top notches? Dana (04:28.436) I mean, the other thing that I hear is patient flow, but I feel like that's incorporated in the communication and scheduling. Tiffanie (04:35.175) Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. Patient flow, that's going for number four. And I agree. What I like to do, well, what we like to do in the building team, we do this for our own personal meetings. But then we also do this for our clients as well. We look at all of the complaints, we're like, okay, what's not working right now? What are all the things that are not working? And then we try to see, okay, if we could fix one thing, if we can implement one thing, how many of these items could we take off of this not working list? So if we could fix one of these pieces, communication, schedule, and patient flow is helped immediately with this tool. So we've talked about this before, we've talked about it quite a few times, and we like to reiterate it because we know, Dana and I both, we consult a lot of practices, and I know, and Dana, you may or may not agree, I know a lot of my practices, I have to go over this every six months or so as a reminder because we stopped doing it, and Dana, Do you see that on your side as well with your clients? You've got actually a ton of practices to start visiting this year. That ramped up a ton for you. But you have a lot of virtual clients, a lot more than the rest of the consultants on the team do. So do you see that also with the virtual clients that you've got to come back around to it every six months or so? Dana (05:50.004) Yeah, it's I mean, teams humans, right? We're cyclical, we can be really great about something for so long. And then we start to kind of taper down and just need that little like, nudge back to the thing that we know is really important. And oftentimes, we're still doing a piece of something, right? But some of the details have fallen off or parts and pieces of it have fallen off. So it's definitely something that I feel like is cyclical and a practice and we just have to revisit because it is so important. Tiffanie (06:18.983) Yeah, I agree. I agree. That's a good point. Everything is cyclical. And that is why we, you know, go back to things, but why we like to expand on things that we've implemented, because I think when we layer on top of things you've already implemented, then it helps solidify all of those pieces. So this one is just really passing off the information. And this is super huge. Passing off the information we talked about on another podcast, go back and listen to it if you haven't listened yet about co -diagnosing and really passing that information from the hygienist or dental assistant to the doctor. One thing that I didn't make super clear or we didn't make super clear in that podcast was really the idea of passing that information off to the doctor in front of the patient as well. So this kind of information needs to be passed off in front of the patient in order to help build that relationship, build the trust and increase. the patient's case acceptance because your patient, we're not doing all of this, you guys, from like the front side of our brain. We're not like evaluating and thinking, are they communicating? Did she listen to me? Is he listening? Are they on the same page? We're not thinking those things, but subconsciously, these are things that we are like ticketing, right? We're like, I'm gonna save that. I'm gonna save that. We don't even know what's happening. So when we're doing these things in front of the patient and we're like, hey, this is what we saw and what patient... A here has told me this is what we've discussed throughout the appointment so far. And doctor hears it and listens, the patient's like, yeah, that's cool, we did do that. now he knows and I'm a part of this conversation. I'm a part of everything. When we do it out in the hallway and I'm all for both, I used to do both when I was chair side and I was in office, I am all for both because sometimes there's sensitive information that can't be said in front of the patient as well, totally fine. Prep your patient or prep your doctor. behind your patient, behind the wall, and then prep your doctor in front of the patient. When you don't do the in front of the patient, it breaks that trust just a little bit and it creates, it just creates a gap in the patient communication and the patient being a part of this conversation. Doctor comes barreling in and he or she is like, my gosh, so Tiff's told me, she's like, okay, cool. Like she told you. Tiffanie (08:30.407) right or it looks like you've got this or I see doctors come in Dana all the time and they're like tell me what's going on and the hygienist is staring at me like I just told him what's going on in the hallway now this exam is going to take so long so Dana do you see that and do you have I think I think people I'm gonna like side tangent for a second we're gonna stay on the same track but also plug a little bit information here people shy away. from virtual coaching or consulting often because they don't think they're gonna get the same value or they don't feel maybe not even value, but they don't feel like they're gonna get the same time, right? So sometimes teams when I'm in person will pull me and they're like, I have to tell you everything. But I do have, and Dana, tell me if you're seeing this and if your hygienists do this for you, I do have virtual clients too who a lot of the team is like, hey, When we do our team call, I have these things to talk about. So when you're doing your virtual clients, is this something not being chair side or not being in practice, this passing of information, is this something that you're able to train the teams on virtually as well? Dana (09:39.612) yeah, absolutely. And I think it's just like asking questions and digging in and say, hey, tell me how you do it, right? What does your hand up look like to your doctor? Do you do it behind the scenes? Do you do it in front of the patient? And then I think I always, when I train this virtually, right? Like sit in the patient seat and you're exactly right. Like we don't automatically tick it, like tick those things through as a patient, but it's blaringly obvious when it doesn't happen. right? So I don't think we're checking the box of Yep, they did this. Yes, they did this. Yes, they did this. But when it doesn't happen, there's a little bit of like, and it's not on purpose, right? But there's a little bit of ningle like, are they even talking, right? So doctors that come in and are like, Hey, tell me as the hygienist, like I'm like, well, because I but I did tell you when I want the patient to know that I told you because I want the patient to feel like we're on the same page and that this is important enough that I said it to you. And so I always say virtually right, put your piece, put yourself in the patient chair, put your patient hat on for just a second. And what does that feel like? Tiffanie (10:32.583) Yup. Tiffanie (10:40.711) Yeah, I love that. I love that. Okay. I love that. Put your patient hat on. I wrote that down. That's going to be an action item later on. I love that. So making sure passing off the information, you guys, this doesn't just need to come from doctor. We talked about this earlier or not earlier, but in another podcast, right? Of like, he doesn't, she doesn't. My exam is this because of she or he, right? Well, what, where can we control? So if we're trying to take back control, take back time within our appointment, this helps that because it helps get the conversation started. This is another time saving space for teens and for doctors. This is another way to get increase your case acceptance. Really talking to the patients about what we're seeing over the patient is huge. So passing off information there. And then I think that leads us straight into also passing off information from diagnosis, right? So doctor diagnosing. team member, right, our support team is putting everything in the computer, diagnosing over the patient to the team member, but then sitting a patient up and explaining it to them, giving our team member what we like to call NDTR. And you guys have probably heard this, if you're clients of ours, we work on it constantly. There's a million podcasts dedicated to NDTR. But this is huge because what we try to do is think of the things that a patient needs to have happen. before they leave our practice? What are the four things that makes it super simple that no matter what, our patients are always leaving with an appointment, they're always leaving with clarity, and the team knows how to schedule them. Remember we said we were going to save you time, we were gonna fix patient flow and fix communication, right, and fix that schedule. So this helps wrap that up. So NDTR is next visit, that's your urgency piece. What are patients coming back for? That is not your entire treatment plan. That is what is my team need to schedule next for this patient? Then we have our date. Dana, as soon as we're done, I want to hear what you say for this space. I think we're probably pretty aligned, but I usually say, I'd really love to see you back in my chair within the next couple of weeks if our schedules can align on that. And then time, caveat, date, doctors, do not say next Wednesday. Okay, your team will kill us. Tiffanie (12:56.839) It is not next Wednesday. It's when my team can find time for this, right? Time is how long will this appointment take? So if we're scheduling for a crown on number 18, how long does a crown on number 18 typically take you? Not just my doctor 20 to 40 minute prep time, but how long is that appointment that the patient's going to be in the chair and then re -care, making sure we always have our re -care scheduled. If we have those four things, we've got treatment and we've got re -care handled and taken care of. Now, Dana. Verbiage wise, how do you handle, and I think teams revolt when this happens and in person is probably, I think on our side, a little easier to calm everything down, but virtually, you do this virtually on a daily, I feel like. What's your verbiage look like for the date piece and how do you help teams kind of be okay with it? Dana (13:45.3) Yeah, so usually what I say is the date one is t…
Full show notes at the publisherThere's always that one patient… Kiera talks about the professional way to go about communicating with a rude patient, even when it includes dismissing them (listen up for dismissal letter verbiage!). Remember: There's always a lesson to be learned in these situations.
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Transcript:
Kiera Dent (00:00.91)
Hello Dental A Team listeners, this is Kiera and welcome to the Dental A Team podcast. I hope you guys are having the best day of your entire lives. I really do mean that. Today is, there's a really cool quote that I read and I want you guys to have it. It says, no matter how many mistakes you make or how slow your progress, you are still way ahead of everyone who isn't trying. That's from Tony Robbins. And I just, I read that the other day and I thought, gosh, our podcast family and our clients need to just realize like,
We really are doing so much more than we think we are. We're doing so much better than we give ourselves credit for. So I hope you just like give yourself a nice pat on the back. I'll do it for you. Uh, but really you are doing a great job and I think it's so easy to criticize and it's so hard to compliment. And I think we build momentum in either one of those ways. And so look to see which way you're building momentum consistently. So today guys, I am on a quick tactical podcast. Are you guys ready for this? I hope you are. Um, one of these is going to be just really fun.
I want you guys to have a quick tactical on how to handle difficult or rude patients. Don't worry, I go from like, it's amazing and we're so happy to like, how do you deal with those rude patients and what do we do with them? So if you're loving our podcast, please do me a favor and help us get into the hands of every dental practice out there by sharing this, by sending it to somebody who could use it, by someone who needs that boost, even if it's not this one, but send our podcast to somebody and leave us those reviews.
That's how you guys are going to help us beat the tough dental podcast that is shared with all of the practices, because if we can help them be better, we help more patients, we serve more people, and we're able to all rise together. So with that, how do we handle these rude patients? Number one, I think about, let's define difficult or rude patients. Are they a good patient or do they just like, when we see their name on the schedule, do we all just like, because I have two people, one is the assistant dean from Midwestern.
He told me that every year at Christmas time, he gave his team a gift and they were all able to go through and they actually dismissed like the top patients that really just made all of them cringe. And that was the gift he gave his team. And I've thought about that so much because we oftentimes think like we need every patient. No, we don't. We actually need those kind patients and we want the patients who are great patients that we don't look at. With that said though, there are some that will challenge us and I don't want you dismissing people that challenge. Now difficult or rude ones that we just literally like, oh my gosh.
Kiera Dent (02:27.406)
Give yourself the freedom and the luxury of realizing it's okay to dismiss them. And the way we can do that in a professional manner is you can just write them a letter and just say like, hey, Kie
ra, at this point, we don't feel that we are serving and meeting your dental needs the way that we want to. And we're so committed to always being able to serve our patients at the highest level. We never ever, ever want to leave you empty handed or without a plan and a path.
So as of now, we are having you removed as a patient within our practice due to the fact we don't feel like we're serving you at the highest level. And we're actually going to be recommending you to, and you list off two or three different dentists that are amazing in the area that could take great care of them. Now check with your legal team, just make sure. But really it's just, we're dismissing them in a professional manner. We don't feel like we're serving them at the highest level. And so we're going to actually dismiss them, but we're going to give them a place to go.
And so we actually do have a sample one. It is not legal, and I will put stamps all over it. But it's one that you can say, after careful consideration and thought, we found that it will be in all of our best interests to sever the practice patient relationship here that we have with you. We found that we may not be the best fit for your dental needs and are unable to carry out the services you may require for your specific case. At this time, we're recommending that using dental care through a new dental care provider.
And from there, like that was a little more direct. I do like it. I also think though, like, let's give them a few other options of where they can go. So we can like, we're going to make sure that they're informed, that they're guided, that we make sure that they're going to be given some help. And I really think that it's fine. I'm like, we just don't feel like we're serving you at the highest level. And due to that, we are severing the relationship where we are.
ending our relationship with you. And here are a few other practices that we think would be incredible that are going to take great care of you, because we really do want you to be taken care of. I don't care how much you dislike these people. You all know that you want these people to be taken care of. You know that you want to love them and serve them at the highest level. And you know that you want them to be taken care of. We don't want to want to just like kick someone off onto the street. We do want them to be taken care of. But at the same time, you don't need to have every patient in your practice.
Kiera Dent (04:43.566)
And if they literally do make you're like, Oh, it's the groan. It's the, I just would rather not see this patient ever again. Do yourself a favor. Um, I have a reminder that pops up on my, on my tasks every so often. And I said, only work with clients who light my soul on fire. And, uh, that was something I had to realize. And that doesn't mean that if you don't light my soul on fire, that there's no other consultant in our company. Um, but for me to really realize that.
the soul sucking energy was actually taking a lot more from me with working with clients that maybe I wasn't best suited for, or maybe we just didn't jive as much. Like I love my clients that when I get on a call, my soul is filled. It doesn't matter if it's a hard thing or not. Like that's who I want to work with. And so for you in practicing, there will be some patients that you want to dismiss. And so I really, really, really would just say, we send them a letter. We say, as of this day, as of this time, we are no longer seeing you as a patient. And here are the people that are going to be great.
make sure that their balances are all taken care of. We want to make sure that we have that taken care of for you because there's also a space like if we do have collections, we also need to dismiss them with the collection. So like if it's someone who has a collections balance that we can dismiss them from the practice as well. So we've contacted for a dismissal because of collections, we can say we've contacted you several occasions with monthly statements, telephone messages and personal letters.
regarding your outstanding balances with our practice. We have determined that due to the noncompliance with our practice's financial policy that we must terminate our dentist -patient relationship. In order to allow you adequate time to find another dentist, we will be available during regular business hours for the same safety visits time permitting should an emergency arise in the next 30 days. You may contact the local dental society or find somebody else, and we're happy to forward your x -rays to your new dentist. And that's how we can dismiss them.
I really do love if I have dentists that you can recommend or again, like here's a few that we know do take your insurance because we really do want to make sure that you're taking care of. I do like that version of it as well. If you do want to offer the 30 days for them just to make sure that they're taking care of because there's so many ways that we can handle these patients. But again, I don't want you dismissing somebody or I wouldn't recommend that you just somebody who challenges you or who.
Kiera Dent (07:04.398)
who forces you to be better, right? There's, I know I have some clients that, well, they might not quote unquote light my soul on fire. They're probably really good for me because their questions and the things they do, and they're not disrespectful to me. They just challenge me and they make me have to be a better version of myself. Now, the ones who are rude or difficult or never keep their appointments or they don't pay their balances or it's just, it's so much headache. My thoughts are, why are we doing this? We're a service industry.
And if they're not meeting our expectations, let's dismiss them. Do yourself and your team the favor. Dismiss them. You can do it in a professional manner. You can send them a letter. You can have it where you work with them for 30 days. There's a way for you to be able to work with them and send them to another provider. Please don't pass your bad patients to your friends. But remember, just because they're a difficult, rude patient for you might mean that they would, doesn't mean that they'd be a bad fit for someone else.
I also want you to really look at it as to why are they so difficult and what have we done to not have those clear expectations? So if they're always missing appointments, did we not have a clear policy on that? If they're constantly running late, did we not have a clear policy on that? If they're not paying their balances, did we not have a clear policy and protocol on that? So this way we do everything on our side too to make it to where it's there. So instead of.
blaming them. Let's also take some ownership doesn't mean we don't dismiss them. I'm totally fine because it should light your soul on fire. And I hate when there's a patient like I know exactly who it was. It Dr. Calls office we had a patient named Betty. I was like, I hate seeing Betty. Like she's just so mean and she takes so much time and she never is paying and there's always a problem with everything that we ever do. Like, I just don't enjoy this.
But again, let's look to see, did we not have a policy in place of like warranty work of we will do one visit for you. And then after that, each additional visit will be a normal limited exam fee. That's a simple way to actually fix this difficult, rude patient with a simple protocol to let them know the rules of the game. And so that's something else I would do is with these difficult, rude patients, how can you change the rules of the game and make it stronger and better to where you can serve them? Do we just need to change the rules of the game and help them out? And then they become these amazing patients.
Kiera Dent (09:17.39)
that could also be the shift. So one, before I dismiss, let's look to see what is truly the root cause and is there something we can change in our protocols or our policies to not have them be a difficult or a rude patient? Number two, dismiss them. It's okay. Give yourself the freedom and the gift and make space for these incredible patients to come in that value, value your team, value your time, because you're going to be happier and you'll be in a better state of flow. And that doesn't mean that we have to do it in a rude way.
We send them a letter, we take care of them, we give them the recommendations, but we are very clear that we are severing the relationship. They will no longer be seen in our practice and that they do need to find another practice and we're here to support them on that path. Whatever your verbiage is, again, that's gonna be a path for you to talk with your CPA and your lawyers and just make sure it is compliant and that you can send it off. And so just get that approved. Those are some samples I gave you, but do do your due diligence on that. So with that, I think that this is awesome training for your team as well.
to let them know how we handle it, how we look for it. And this is something I really love because in the Dental A Team, we don't just work with dentists, but we work with your teams as well. And so we're able to give them those tools and those resources and that help. And so if we can help your team and empower them of how to handle these difficult patients, because sometimes it's our protocols that create the difficulty, not necessarily the patient. We weren't clear with our expectations. Therefore, we need to actually have them reset. So with that reach out, if we can help, hello@thedentalateam.com. Here's your quick tactical.
how to handle those difficult, rude patients. Remember, you deserve to have patients who light your soul on fire, who make you so excited to come to work, not dreading to come to work. And those ones that you do dread, let's move them along, serve them at the highest level, always end in the most professional, compassionate way, and do yourself a favor. So, and if we can ever help and serve, reach out hello@thedentalateam.com.. Click on the link if you guys want some help with these dismissal letters, be sure to reach out hello@thedentalateam.com.. And as always, thanks for listening, and I'll catch you next time on The Dental A Team Podcast.
What Would Doctor Do? Tiff and Dana educate about how to set up doctor's diagnosis with some pre-gaming strategies. It's as easy as 1-2-3: Calibrate the language and focus Set clear expectations Doctors, empower your team The consultants give examples of how to go about this, plus insight on why this will improve how your practice functions. Episode resources: Reach out to Tiff and Dana Watch DAT Podcasts on YouTube Virtual Consulting Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Become Dental A-Team Platinum! Review the podcast Transcript: Tiffanie (00:01.732) my goodness. Hello, dental A team listeners. We are so excited to be here with you today. I have Dana, my, my fave podcast gal with me today. You guys know that Dana, thank you so much for being here with me. we've got some fun things in this one today. I cherry picked you for sure for this way back in the day when we created these newsletter topics because we're going to talk hygiene. So, Doctors, teams know we're going to talk dental assistance and hygiene. But first of all, Dana, how are you today? How's life? Dana (00:34.165) Doing good. Life is, you know, it's winding into summertime. So things are starting to, like sports are slowing down, school stuff is slowing down. So it's a good space to be in. How about you? Tiffanie (00:41.412) Yah! Tiffanie (00:45.764) I agree. Lacrosse, like banquet was last week and that was our last lacrosse thing until fall. And I was like, my gosh, I don't know how Dana does it. I had one kid, one kid in one sport. And I was like bananas this spring. So you are super mom, you are super consultant, super everything. So thank you from us and from your family for everything you do Dana, cause I think it's wild. Dana (01:11.604) Bye. Tiffanie (01:14.468) When my life gets chaotic, I'm like, I think about you. I don't know what you're doing over there with the kids. And you're just always, always being the best mom ever. So kudos to you. And that honestly, like, I think that's just how you personify yourself in general. You're just constantly like, on the next thing with a smile on your face and like, this is what has to happen. So this is what's going to happen. And you just get it done. And I think I can probably. accurately guess that that was you in hygiene as well. So I think it's kind of cool to pick your brain on these. You guys know that Dana is my go -to systems lady. Like systems are her jam. She does see freaking fantastic at them. And one thing I wanted to look at today were some systems that we could put into place in practices or that we actually do work with a lot of practices on to help doctors get more diagnosis from their dental assistants and hygienists. And I think - I think we do our team a disservice by not allowing them to play a bigger part and a bigger piece in that aspect and really feeling like they are giving more to our patients than we ever realized we could. And I think this is a good area, Dana, where we can take some of those simple systems and implement them so that anyone can use them. But first, how did that go for you? Chair side, when you were a hygienist and you've got a doctor coming in, like how did you do that? And then how do you take that and implement it into your consulting now? Dana (02:40.084) Yeah, sure. I think that as a hygienist for me, the biggest thing was working for a doctor who like, he gave me the open space and actually said like, I honestly I know you're coming from hygiene school where like, you can't diagnose you can't do the things like you're not the doctor and he's like, I want to set the expectation that you have that space. And no matter. what you say, right? I will always have your back when it comes to patients and patient care. And so I think the biggest thing is knowing that he truly wanted me to do that, right? Gave me the confidence to go in and have the conversations with patients. And his biggest push was you spend so much time with them. And then I have so little time with them. And there's so much that you can do to make my little bit of time that I have with them, be more efficient, be more effective. And you know me to I think this is something we share like I don't want to waste one minute. So if I can pre -do all of these things and just kind of be like here it is, right? That's a wing for me. And so I think the first thing is and doctors this is for you. Let your hygienist know that you want them. Tiffanie (03:35.144) Yes. Yes, yes. Tiffanie (03:46.724) Yeah. Dana (03:53.844) to do these things and give them the space to do it and set clear expectations that I want you to take the photos before I come in and I want you to talk about those photos and I want you to take scans before I come in and I want you to talk about them. I want the patient to see them. So I think one is giving the space and the next is truly creating a flow of what do you want your hygienist to do. Tiffanie (04:03.204) Mm -hmm. Dana (04:16.34) before you come into the room so that they have very clear expectations of what conversations they should be having and when they should be having them. Tiffanie (04:25.636) I love that. I'm always taking so many notes. Thank you. I hope everybody's taking notes unless you're driving, then stop replay and take notes. So I love that. I think that's great. Like that your doctor said that you're with your patients way longer, right? Than the doctor is. And I think that's just the way of life. I think our dental assistants are there longer than our doctor is. Our doctors are in and out and our doctors, we've got them in a lot of different rooms. So to expect them to do all of those pieces every single time they're walking into a room. feels absurd to me. So I love that you said that. And some key parts that I pulled out that I think is huge for everyone to understand is that this isn't something that you can go in on Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday or whatever day is tomorrow in your practice and say, okay, guys, we're going to do this thing called co -diagnosing now. Like we're going to do this thing where you're going to tell me what you think the patients should need, because that's like a giant, I think of like clouds, right? I've said this before, like clouds, and you're trying to pull raindrops out of the cloud. And it doesn't work like that. Like you've got to have, you've got to start small. You've got to start with clarity. So I think what you said was beautiful where you're calibrating. We like to call it, what would doctor do? Right? So what would doctor do if they saw this piece? Right? So we're calibrating on what that might look like, what doctor may say, because you guys, they're the support team, the dental assistants and the hygienist, you guys are preheating the patient to what may be diagnosed. I'm gonna make a huge caveat here on co -diagnosis. Okay, I know the word diagnosis is in there. That's what it's called, co -diagnosing, but you're not actually diagnosing treatment. You're not saying you will need a crown here because you're not licensed or educated right in the laws of you to do that. Do you know what the doctor's probably gonna do? Absolutely, because you've worked with the doctor, you can see it. You see what's on the x -ray, but you've not actually been trained, quote unquote, to read the x -rays. So you can't legally diagnose, but what you can do is you can say, hey, what I've seen happen before when I see something like this is. So you're prepping the patient. I always like to say prep for worst case scenario because anything is better than that. So if you see a fractured filling and... Tiffanie (06:46.276) you're like, gosh, you know, this, this is pretty big. Usually what I see when something like this happens is we might need to put a crown on there. And have you ever had your have you ever heard of a crown before, right? If they don't have a crown. So you're preheating them to something that the doctor may say. The idea there is that doctor, I don't believe and Dana, I think you probably agree with me here. I don't believe that the doctor should be the first person to tell a patient if we can avoid it, that something is wrong. that shock value, like Dana said, you have more time with the patient, you have a better relationship, but time, you have more time with the patient. So you shock them with the information, have the conversations, kind of get them used to the idea that something is wrong. And then when doctor comes in and confirms it, they're like, okay, got it. Now, you guys, my dental assistants and mostly my hygienists, this is huge for your exams because... I think the biggest complaint I get from my clients, from my hygienists and my clients practices, and Dana, I think you probably see this too, is my doctor's always running late. His exams are too long. She doesn't get to me quick enough and then I'm into my next patient because her exams are too long. Exams are too long, exams are too long. We're spending too much time talking. My exams are too long. That's all I ever hear and I'm like, great. So then I think... I always train on, okay, awesome, his or her exams are too long, that's passing the blame. That's saying that's out of my hands, it's their problem, they're issued, they need to fix it. But if we took ownership in this situation and we said, what can I do to help this situation for me? This is my appointment, like I'm stressed out that my next patient's ready, I'm not done here, how can I take that control? of this situation and I think co diagnosing is one of those spaces. What information can I give the patient to preheat them to make the exam shorter? You guys, when the doctor comes in and is like, my gosh, you're getting a new crown and they're like, what? What is a crown? How does this work? And doctors like, awesome, let me tell you. How much time Dana do you think could we even be safe there? Like I just, it blows my mind that that's not something I think that we think of in the chair, right? That's like that bird's eye perspective we get to see it. But when you're in, Tiffanie (09:05.7) in it, you don't see it. But Dana, how much time? I mean, you don't have to quantify it. But like, in general, did that save a lot of time for you, Chairside, when you started operating that way with your doctor? Dana (09:16.884) absolutely. I mean, I remember when I first started and yeah, I took some calibration, right? I kind of had to learn through through listening to him do exams, like really what he would treatment plan. But I do feel like it made 15 minute exams into five minute exams. And that is huge when it comes to a 60 minute appointment. And it's always funny because we always hear, you know, well, when doctor says it, like patients believe it and that's for sure true, right? Like we can, as a hygienist, we can talk about fluoride. So we're blue in the face, but when the doctor backs that fluoride up, like all of a sudden it's like, wait, is it too late for me to get that fluoride? I turned down. But I think understand that the relationship there also is a flip side. And I think every hygienist myself included has had that patient where the doctor leaves and they turn and they whisper like, do I really need that? Right. And so. Tiffanie (09:50.82) Yeah. Dana (10:07.238) So that it's there for hygiene too. And I feel like the more that we can take those barriers away of yeah, absolutely. Right? Like we talked about it, Dr. talked about it. Now it should be super important and you should trust as a patient that you truly need it because we're aligned and we both said round about the same things. Tiffanie (10:28.612) Yeah, no, I totally agree. I think that's huge. I think that's huge. So I think what would doctor do, right? Calibrate on what that looks like. And Dana said it exactly how it goes, right? You calibrate by seeing the exams, by seeing the diagnosis, but you guys can also calibrate by setting aside time to review x -rays together, review case studies, review treatment plans, and allow people to ask you the questions of, well, why did you diagnose that? Or doctors, you're not gonna love me for this. Be super consistent with your diagnosis too, because I've had a lot of hygienists come to me and say, Tip, I would love to co -diagnose, but I honestly have no idea what he or she is gonna diagnose in the moment, because sometimes this similar or same situation is a crown versus a filling on another patient. And I do understand doctors, I'm not saying that it's black and white, it is a very gray situation and I totally get that, but there has to be some sort of consistency so that they're comfortable preheating, even if you're not, going to do the crown every single time, what do you want them to talk about if they see that situation? What do you want their conversation to look like? Calibrate, make sure your diagnosis is as calibrated as possible so that it's super simple for everyone, including your patient. If your hygienist is confused, your patient's probably confused, put that caveat in there. Calibrate that, get that super in line, but then calibrate what would doctor do? What do you want your hygienist to say to your patient? when a certain situation comes around, do you want them to say, hey, this might be a crown, let me walk you through that. And when you come in, it's either a crown or a filling, but what did you want he or she to say in that moment? Dana also, you talked about photos, x -rays, scans, making sure that those are all up. I love intraoral photos. I have been a huge advocate for that since, I don't know, they started like 20 years ago, right? And I remember trying that first camera and it was so big. It's so ridiculous. But they're huge. And I love doing a good tooth and a bad tooth, a good filling and a bad filling and really just looking for staining, looking for anything that might be an issue today or later. And I think your scans, those are freaking fantastic. The scans, the internal scans of the whole mouth are going to show. Tiffanie (12:42.276) Movement it's gonna show all of those pieces as well and making sure that you're reviewing those with your patients before doctor comes in and that you're like wow, that's kind of that looks like a crack right there I'm gonna have them double check that because if that's the case We want to make sure we tackle that really quickly so that it doesn't fully break Those are the conversations that you're having you're not saying I see I got some stick here from my Explorer Looks like you have decay may or may not could just be staining How many times have we gone through that right like my gosh doctors like I think it's just staining Got it. Okay. Fantastic. Worst case scenario is, wow, you've got some staining here. You've got some discoloration on your teeth. I'm hopeful it's just staining, but in the event that it is decay, it could look like this. Because when doctor comes in and even if it's just staining, doctor comes in and is like, no, it's fine. It's just staining. We're like, thank goodness. I was really worried it was something different. we need to probably ramp up our hygiene care at home to ensure that this doesn't happen again, because the staining can lead to decay. You've just now bundled up a simple diagnosis and your hygiene care. Like y…
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