The Fastest Way to Know What Actually Works in Your Practice

Tired of strong opinions and weak evidence running your schedule? We put everyday practice debates under the microscope and share simple experiments that turn gut feelings into clear decisions. From no-shows to network choices, we break down quick tests you can run this month to cut waste, improve flow, and protect production.

If you want a practice that improves by design, not by accident, this is your playbook for fast, low-lift experiments that build a culture of curiosity and measurable results. Subscribe, share with a colleague who loves data, and leave a review telling us the first test you’ll run.

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Transcript

Arguing Without Data

Paul Etchison 0:02

Have you ever argued with someone on your team about something and then realize halfway through the argument that nobody actually knows what the hell they're talking about? Like someone says, unconfirmed patients never show up. And then someone else says, Yes, they do. I mean, just the other day, Mrs. Jones was unconfirmed, and look, she showed up here. And then you're all standing there with your strong opinions and you have no data. And you wish you had data on this. Because the fact of the matter is, is if we want clear decisions, we need clear experiments. And that's what we're talking about today. A lot of things in your practice, they don't require a massive overhaul. They just need a quick little test to see where you're going to go. And today, I'm going to give you a few examples of a few experiments that we've run at our practice that you can run at your practice to get better answers so that you can make better decisions without guessing. Now you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we teach dental practice owners how to cut clinical days without cutting the profit. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Edgeson, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach, and owner of a large five-doctor practice collecting nearly$6 million in the south suburbs of Chicago. And if you want a practice that makes money even when you're not there, you have come to the right place. All right, let's dive in. Now, we all graduated dental school, right? We are scientists to some certain extent, but sometimes we make decisions on just outliers, or we have something that happens at the practice and we react with a system. And when the reality is we may not need a system at all, or we should be trying something different. We need to get more information. One of the biggest things that I always teach if you listen to this podcast is I love curiosity. I say, you know, if something's not working in your practice, let's get curious. Let's ask questions, talk to your team, communicate. But sometimes we need to get curious about data. We're talking about KPIs that we should be watching as practice owners. But sometimes there's some things that just don't have a KPI. And this has come up a few times in my practice journey. So I want to share a few ideas with you today of some things that we have done at my practice. And I think it would be cool if you do these at yours because you can use this data to make better decisions. All right. So we all know that we can't stand it when patients don't show up for their appointments. And sometimes we're looking at our schedule. You know, we use open dental at the practice. And when a patient is confirmed, they're green. When a patient is yellow, that means that they have not confirmed, right? So sometimes we're looking at the day of and we go, oh, this patient is unconfirmed. We called them, we texted them, and wouldn't you know it? They didn't show up for their appointment. Why did we let them hold space on our schedule? We should have removed them off and tried to fill it with someone else. Have you ever had this conversation at your office? But fact of the matter is, is should you or shouldn't you remove those people off of your schedule? We've done both at my practice. We've tried it both different ways, but we actually ran this experiment a really long time ago. So if you want to know if unconfirmed patients show up on your schedule, run an experiment. You know, just pick 30 days and keep a tally. Just do it manually, do it on paper. Every single unconfirmed appointment, keep track of whether they showed up or if they didn't. And then at the end of 30 days, you can decide. Now we did this at our practice, and I want to say we found it was like something like maybe 15 or 16%. So if somebody was unconfirmed, their odds of showing up were roughly about one in six. So we decided at that time in our practice is that we're just gonna wipe those people off the schedule. We're just gonna move them off to the side. And if they showed up, we would figure something out. In the times that they did show up, we did. We scrambled a little bit, but we got them in. Or if we couldn't get them in, we let them know that they were unconfirmed. So we did this for a while. We don't do this currently in my practice right now because we're not at capacity. But when we did do this at my practice, we were at capacity. And we might actually go back to doing this. So who knows? But my point is is run this experiment at your practice and see if this is something you want to do. If you have a lot of unconfirmed patients and you know, an unconfirmed patient is is near 100% thing that they're not gonna show up. You may consider, if you're at capacity, to just wipe them off the schedule. Let's talk about another experiment that you should run. You know, I had this one coaching client and he was only in Delta Premier. That was the only network that he was in. Now he was in growth mode. He wanted an associate and he wanted to grow, but he wasn't seeing enough new patients to keep the associate busy. So we discussed maybe we should go in a network. Maybe perhaps we could go into an umbrella network, one of those Zealous or Connection Dental, and that would give us exposure to a lot of different networks on a pretty good fee schedule. And he was very uncomfortable with this, but this is what we decided to do. We ran an experiment. We kept track on a piece of paper the reason every single possible new patient that called didn't schedule. And this gave us a few things. This gave us our new patient conversion rate, but it also gave us an idea of why are people not scheduling. And we were able to look at that. We were able to say, was there a number of people that called that didn't schedule because we were out of their network? So we were able to make an educated decision on this. But the thing is, is you'll get some other information from running this experiment as well. You'll get to see who answered the phone. Maybe some people on your front desk team have better new patient conversion than other ones. So when you run this experiment, you'll get to see all sorts of data and you can look at that and say, what can I optimize here? What can I do to make this better? I remember when we kept track of how many new patients came from online scheduling and how many of them showed up. They had a higher no-show rate than our new patients did who've called us on the phone and scheduled that way. So what did we do? Well, we used that information and we decided that when we have a new patient schedule online, that we are going to immediately reach out to them and try to get them on the phone to welcome them to the practice. And wouldn't you know we had a better show up rate with those new patients that scheduled online? So just another example there. All right, let me give you another one. We often track case acceptance between doctors and between hygienists, but have you ever done this with your front desk team to actually say, what is the case acceptance? Who has better case acceptance? So this is something I highly suggest you do because you're going to see there is a big difference on your front desk team based on who presents the treatment. And this is a reason why you should be training your front desk team on case acceptance, which is one of the modules and master classes that we have at Dental Practice Heroes. So you can do this one of two ways. The first way is the easy way. You know, you're just gonna keep track of every single patient that doesn't schedule. You're gonna write down who presented the treatment, and you're gonna write down the reason they didn't schedule. Now, this is gonna give you some good information. It's gonna let you see what is the different case acceptance between your front desk team members, but you're also gonna get to see what are the reasons that patients aren't scheduling. Now, they don't always tell the truth, but you might see something like perhaps we need to sell the case more in the back. Perhaps we need to offer financing. Maybe a lot of people aren't scheduling. They're saying it's because of money. Who knows? But you're going to get some data that you get to make a decision with, and that's what's most important. Now, there's another way of doing this, which is you can make every single person on your front desk, you can make them a provider in your practice management system. And then you create a dummy code for presented a treatment plan. So it's it's treated like a procedure. So when that procedure is completed, now that person it becomes a provider who will now then get a case acceptance score in these metric reporting software such as practice by numbers, dental intel, divergent dental. So you'll get to see that there's different case acceptances between your front desk team members. And you can use that to see who needs training and who can improve. And you can also track it to see as they improve. So you actually have a metric to show, hey, good job. You've done much better since we did the training. Keep it up. All right, next idea. This was something that happened in our practice. We were struggling to get certain patients to fill out their online paperwork before they came to the office. Now we hate it when they don't do this because then they come to the office and it takes us longer to get them back in the chair, which runs our schedule behind. So we started, we did an experiment. We came up with a few different ideas of what we were going to text these people to see, to say, hey, we need you to fill out your paperwork. And we were able to show that certain things that we texted gave us a better response rate. Now I don't remember exactly what it said, but I believe it was all caps. The beginning of the text said urgent response required. That was the magic text that made them actually read that text and say, Hey, I need to do something for this dental office for my appointment coming up. So those are just some few examples. But what I want to show you is that you, as the leader of the practice, you can create your own experiments and figure out different ways to do things. This sort of discussion and setting these things up with your team shows your team that you are trying to do things the best way possible. And it also shows them that we are never done. We can always become more efficient, we can always do things better. So if you've got an experiment that you ran in your practice, shoot me an email at dentalpracticeheroes at gmail.com. I would love to hear about it and I would love to share it with the listeners. So if you've got something like this that you've done that you've got some valuable information from, let's all learn from each other. And if you are looking for some help systematizing your practice and coming up with things like this on your own, we would be happy to show you how to do that at Dental Practice Heroes. Please reach out to us, dentalpracticeheroes.com slash strategy. Set up a free call with me. I'll sit down with you. I will have a phone call. We'll discuss your practice and your goals. And if dental practice heroes can help you, I will let you know what coaching options we have. All right. Thank you so much for listening, and we will talk to you next time.