Oral DNA Guest Interview with Diane Larson, Director of Clinical Education

Oral DNA Director of Clinical Education, Diane Larson, RDH, BSDH joins our podcast in today's guest interview episode where we discuss salivary testing, Integrated Care Summit from ADHA's recent event in Colorado and much more.

Listen in as we discuss the Medical to Dental connection for Oral Systemic health, how to bridge the education gap between the two industries and what has worked to faciliate change in whole body care. 

You won't want to miss Diane's insights as she bring her clinical experience to the show. 

If you would like to learn more about Oral DNA Salivary Diagnostic test kits, please check out their website at: OralDNA.com

As Diane shared:

Orange button: Create Account - no charge to begin

Client Success team available at 855-672-5362

Collection Kits are sent to you at no charge to begin. Only fee involved when specimen is returned for processing test results.

Let's bridge the Oral Systemic gap together between medical and dental! Salivary testing can be your tool to provide medical providers the data they speak.

The Future of Dentistry is Bright.

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• Referral Network Growth: Auditing and scaling your active referral marketing systems.
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• High-Impact Events: Planning and executing educational or local clinical networking events.
• SEO & AI Visibility: Optimizing your digital footprint so your practice is the top recommendation on modern search platforms.

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Thanks for Listening! 

See you in the next weekly episode, posted Monday mornings at 8am est. time. "Referral Marketing made simple for Dental teams who want to grow!"

Michelle Hougland

Host - Dental Referral Marketing Podcast

CEO/Founder - Referral Conduit Software

michelle@referralconduit.com

https://stan.store/dentalreferralmarketingpodcast

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Most specialty practices lose thousands of dollars in production each month, not from a lack of referrals, but from leaky tracking systems that let existing patients' leads slip through the cracks. In today's episode, we're diving deep into referral tracking 101. While most endodontists, peridontists, oral surgeons, and orthodontists believe they have a handle on where their patients come from, the vast majority are missing critical data points. Today we'll uncover three massive tracking blind spots that cause specialty practices growth and efficiency, and share a step-by-step framework to clean up your data, capture lost revenue, and protect your practices' livelihood. A warm welcome to all of the new listeners joining our community. It's been incredible getting out into my local community and meeting so many of you at your specialty practices recently. Welcome to the show, everyone. Before we dive in, make sure you follow the show, download your episodes, and if you're getting value from this podcast so far, leave a review. I'd love to hear from you. If you'd like direct support for your dental practices referral marketing needs, check out my link in the show notes below. Okay, now let's get into today's episode. We're going to go over the three core points for referral tracking 101. One, digital referral pads, streamlining the intake pipeline. Two, practice management software cleanup, eradicating that ghost data. And three, the paperwork gatekeeper, hard coding, quote unquote, referred by. Let's begin. Point number one, digital referral pads, streamlining the intake pipeline. Most specialty practices that I work with rely on antiquated paper referral pads. This is not good because patients lose them, forget them. Some specialty practices do not ever receive the ones from their general dentist, or they just get lost in the mix. Let's transition your network entirely to a digital referral option to eliminate this friction with your general dentist. This isn't something that necessarily happens overnight. I do understand that. You do need to work with your referral sources to be able to navigate them over from paper referrals to your digital online website options, but it's something that should be done, especially at the time of listening to this podcast. We are living in a digital dental industry besides old antiquated paper referral pads only. The general practice does not always send over a copy. You're having to be the friction point for your front team calling over and over, trying to get a copy of that referral pad that was handwritten. In this day and age, not only do we have offices that have digital scanners, 3D printers, but we need to also offer a digital referral option to keep up with our industry. Many of our general dentists and referral sources are choosing to work with dental specialists that are up to date on their technology, and that includes this portion. Not to mention, this is going to make it so much easier on your team once it's implemented to be able to receive all of the referrals in one place from your website. You should apply. I recommend a HIPAA compliant digital form on your website. Put at the top of your home page a dashboard that says referring providers at the top right. You want it to be front and center. So when referring providers go to your website, they can easily find your digital form to send a patient over to you. If you do not already have a digital secure solution on your website to receive referral forms, contact your IT provider. They will want to apply a widget to your website for a HIPAA compliant digital form. And this captures that information or that patient demographic. Our referral conduit software has a widget of this type that you could apply to your website that will feed the clinical information directly into the tracking system. But there are some other tools that you can use. The main thing is offer a digital solution to your referral source providers so you can be seen as cutting edge and staying up with technology. Point number two, your practice management software, or otherwise called PMS, we need to clean it up, eradicate the ghost data. So many specialty practices that I work with allow their PMS systems, their referral software reports to get filled up with duplicate entries, misentries, or incorrect provider locations. For example, if Dr. John Smith at Main Street location is entered three different ways or lumped into as a duplicate provider, your end-of-the-month reports are completely corrupted. You cannot market effectively to doctors when your data is not telling you the truth. The solution? Conduct an internal data audit. Pull a detailed referral report to analyze how different team members are putting data into your software and clear out duplicate profiles. This can happen often when you have multiple locations or you've had changes in your front non-clinical team members and they maybe have to jump in and roll up their sleeves and haven't been fully trained yet. Point number three, the paperwork gatekeeper. We need to hard code who have you been referred by. The mistake I see so often is offices not requiring that the referred by field is made mandatory on their online paperwork forms. And or if you're not quite set up yet fully for online forms, ensuring that your front team know that this is a hard stop, that you have to collect or find out who may we thank for referring you to your forms to make sure before you bring that patient back to see them for an exam, that you are also upholding and sending them back to confirm this information if they have not already. If you are not fully digital yet on your paperwork, then just do a team training or at your next meeting, your morning huddle. Make sure your whole team knows that this is a required field for your practice going forward. The solution: create a required field on all digital new patient intake paperwork for referred by. This will force the patient to answer this question before they can submit their forms. This ensures you capture the origin data at the absolute earliest touch point. If your office is not yet digital for your new patient paperwork, that's fine. At your next staff meeting or morning huddle, just make sure that the whole team knows that this is a requirement going forward. Each and every patient that comes into your specialty practice, they're going to ask, who may we thank for referring you? And if the patient said, Oh, well, I saw you online or my insurance or I saw your sign or my neighbor referred me, all of those should be recorded in your referral software or in your practice management software as a referral source as well. Once you've set up your online website to receive referrals digitally, you've gone through your practice management software and cleaned up any duplicate entries or Ghost data, and you've implemented a required referred by field on your new patient paperwork. And if you're not digital yet, you've trained your team that this is something that's required whenever they're entering paper information into the computer. Now that you have that in place, I would recommend training your administrative team to consistently categorize other non-professional referral sources such as Google, social media, and insurance networks in your referral system. I would set up a team member to be your practice liaison or your marketing team member or PRC is another term used in our industry. That should be the person that probably did the audit on your duplicate profiles and went in and cleaned up your referral sources on your PMS system. But now this person should be assigned for the end of the month every month to pool a referral report. They should check to make sure that new duplicate entries have not been entered. Also, if you have any new referral sources or aka referring providers that may be referring from a different practice location or a new associate has joined their practice, make sure that the practice management software that you're using has that new information in there so you can properly track it. Now, there is an issue that I've discussed in previous episodes where practice management software systems don't always track all referrals. This is a big deal when you're specialty. Most specialty practices are running over a million dollars a year. This is major business, and we need to make sure that we're capturing that what we like to call pipeline or referral sources coming into your business. Any type of referral that has been sent to your practice that has not scheduled yet, I have found most practice management softwares do not count that as a referred patient until they've completed their first appointment. This provides a major flaw in our practice management softwares because they will not fully attribute a referral to a referral source until that first appointment. This leaves you completely blind to patients who were referred but never scheduled or did not show up. So, to solve this problem in the meantime, I would set up a practice-wide accessible spreadsheet that they can track that what we like to call early stage pipeline referrals. Whenever they receive a referral in that has not scheduled their appointment, I would go in and put them in this spreadsheet. They should put not only the date the referral was received, the patient's name and contact information, the referring provider in office location, what the patient was referred for, the date that they had scheduled, if they do schedule in the future, which hopefully they will, and leave a column that you can dedicate for recording notes such as attempts to schedule, maybe they've scheduled an appointment and they've canceled, need to reschedule, and an area where your team member can make a note as to who was the one that made the calls and the contacts. I would recommend follow-up at least three times for any referred patient unless they say that they're out of network and they're not going to come or they've already had treatment done elsewhere. This will be for auditing purposes later that I'll share with you. And then leave a column where they can leave notes as far as their attempted scheduling request and if a patient scheduled and had to break an appointment or reschedule. Then your practice liaison at the end of every month should go through and audit these spreadsheets to ensure if a patient has completed the referral process by scheduling their appointment. Then that next information will be captured by your practice management software. This might sound tedious, but specialty practices, this is a major business. A majority of all specialty practices with one full-time provider are typically producing over a million to two million a year. This is something that requires this type of level of accounting as far as your pipeline goes, and this is how you can directly influence the growth of your practice. Now, if you don't want to do spreadsheets and you think that there has to be a better way, there is. That's why I built referral conduit for my exact same reason because I was using an elaborate spreadsheet to try to keep track of all the referral sources. And I'll never forget when I had a front team member that I had hired and she was not working out, and I had to let her go. In the meantime, I was doing all of this marketing and outreach, trying to grow the referral sources. I was doing all this detailed tracking, and then unfortunately, after she was not working in her position, I went through the drawers of the paperwork there and I saw there were about 30 uncalled referrals. I about died. I could not believe it. I had no idea that we had received so many referrals that this team member who was not working out never followed up on. There was no way to see it in my practice management software. There was no spreadsheet that was keeping track of it at that time, and there was no referral tracking software in place. So that started my journey of a decade long trying to find software that can meet this need. I guarantee you I have looked and demoed every single referral software in our industry and looked at almost every dental practice management software and their referral tracking systems. And I can tell you, there's nothing on the market like referral conduit. I built it not because I wanted to go out and build a new software because I didn't have anything else to do. I built it out of necessity. I was a regional operations director for a large DSO. I was brought on to grow a specialty division, started at two practices and grew it to over 30 locations before I stepped out. And at that time, I can tell you that there is not anything on the market that keeps track of referrals in the ease that referral conduit does. There's so many things that are out there that are very manual, they're very tedious, and you have so much more to do in a day-to-day office, answering phones, scheduling patients, taking care of clinical emergencies, that you need to have this part working smarter and not harder. So if doing the spreadsheet is not a good fit for you, make sure you reach out. I am accepting beta offices for referral conduit. It can make your life so much easier. I promise, from someone who's boots on the ground, who's been in the in the ditches in our industry trying to grow referral-based practices, I feel your pain and I've built the solution. I would recommend at the end of every month to pull a detailed referral report from your practice management software. You're going to then want to note the total number of active referring providers at the end of that month, the total number of referred patients for that month, and the total production dollar amount attributed to those referrals for that month. This is something at the end of each and every month, these metrics should be looked at and accounted for. These baseline numbers are going to serve as a starting point and they feed into a broader quarterly, biannually, and annual referral deep dive reports that'll track the patients all the way through to their complete clinical and financial journey. Most practice management softwares offer rudimentary tracking tools that fall short of supporting a fast-growing specialty practice. By deploying this supplemental spreadsheet and standardizing your team's entry habits, you'll be able to gain visibility into your true referral ecosystem. You'll then clearly understand your current status, analyze hidden referral trends, and spot oncoming drops in your doctor's engagement before they wreak havoc on your production and your livelihood. If you're ready to audit your tracking systems, find where your practice is bleeding patient leads, and build a predictable growth engine, let's connect. Go to our link today to book a strategy call with our team and let's optimize your specialty practice pipeline. Stay tuned for upcoming episodes where we're going to feature Diane Larson, Director of Clinical Education at Oral DNA. We'll dive deep into bridging the oral systemic gap by encouraging medical providers to refer directly to dental specialty practices using salivary diagnostics. I'll also be pulling back the curtain on an educational marketing pilot from my time in the executive leadership with a leading DSO specialty division. I'm going to share exactly how we used oral DNA kits to foster a referral bridge across healthcare silos, so make sure you tune in. This is Michelle, founder and CEO of Referral Conduit Software and host of the Dental Referral Marketing Podcast, where we make referral marketing simple for dental teams who want to grow. I post episodes every Monday morning at 8 a.m. Eastern, so make sure you follow, subscribe, share with a friend, and I'll see you in the next episode. Have a great day, everyone. Bye bye.