16: Patient Experience

Welcome to DSO Secrets. I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur in the dental industry. I've had my ups and downs, just like you. There's so much opportunity to be excited about, but so few resources to get answers. From here on DSO Secrets, we get you those answers so you can change the lives you're meant to bless and achieve your personal success.

When I was working as an associate rat at a school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of support. So thank you.

You have helped build my marketing mind

to a whole new level. You have this natural talent, this unique ability.

Hello, everyone. This is your fearless host, Emmett Scott. And I'm so glad to have you here on another episode of DSO Secrets. Today we're talking about a term I'm hearing more and more, which is patient experience. I love that term. I believe that the term experience more captures what we're really trying to achieve than marketing or treatment acceptance or branding. At the end of the day, the principle we have to remember is how someone feels is more important than what is clinically necessary or actually completed to them. Not necessarily to us as clinicians, but to them as the customer, as the patient. It's interesting because in malpractice studies that they've done on different causes of malpractice lawsuits, the number one factor they found causes the malpractice suit to happen is bedside manner, not actually what the clinical outcome would be. So what the patient experience is, is critical, not just from a risk management perspective, but from a revenue practice perspective. I think one of the biggest lies we tell ourselves is that we are logical creatures, that we think in terms of logic that other people might be emotional, but that we're logical. And that is not ever true. Every decision we make is completely emotionally driven first. Now, it might be instantaneous, but it's always an emotional reaction first. I saw this when I ran financial planning businesses. I got to be intimately involved with people's finances, investment decisions they made, and expense decisions they made. And I found that they always had money for what they believed was important. Emotional decision. I see that myself and others can relate. When you walk into that store or jump online and you see that flat screen TV that you want to have, instantly you have this emotional reaction. You think, oh, I got to have that. And then the justifications come in, oh, we're going to sit around as a family. This will be so much better for entertaining friends. Watching documentaries is going to be great. Our educational level, our iq, look at the savings that we're going to make off of buying this now. It's a Black Friday deal, whatever it is. Oh, it's got the right connections and cords to give us an enhanced experience. And again, we'll always come back. Oh, and that price point, look at what we're going to save. You know, I jokingly tell my wife that we're going to be able to retire off of all of the savings that we've had on our purchases. So we have these ways that we logically justify our purchase, but it's actually emotionally based. Right. And so remembering that, that all humans act that way gets our mindset different about patient experience versus just kind of this logical process within our practice or practice efficiencies. Those are important for the back end systems and processes and can be very helpful for the emotion of the staff. But one of the critical things we want to be focused on is, is how are the patients feeling as they go through our practice? Now, where do you start with patient experience? Well, you can start a lot of different places, so let's hit on a few. One, design matters. When I walk into a practice, what do I feel immediately? What does the white walls tell me or the color on the wall tell me? What are the pictures, things, the coffee table with the magazines on it, all of that design. Is there a blockade between me and the staff? Are they sitting? Are they standing? Culture matters. I can have a beautiful design. And if I walk in and the staff interaction is poor, it immediately takes away from that. Let me talk through a practice that we support and give you an example. So we have some pediatric practices that we support, beautifully designed. You walk in and the entire practice is built as if it was a storybook around a mascot, a chipmunk and all of his friends. You've got movie theater, you've got a play gym. Kids are called back as prince or princess. They are part of the experience. You go into the X ray room and it says, once upon a time there was a chipmunk named Charlie. Kids get gold coins along the way as they finish their treatment, they get to sit on a throne and they're crowned for their bravery and dentistry. They get to spend their gold coins, they get a balloon, they get a sticker, mom gets a sticker, dad gets a sticker, pictures are taken. So all of that experience based is incredible. But if someone walked in and the staff said, hey, welcome and started the experience culturally off on the wrong foot, it would take a lot of investment. In fact, I think it's impossible to create a design that could Overcome a bad culture. So culture matters, how you're starting the day, how they're thinking about the patient, the phone interactions and that communication matters. I remember when we first moved to Texas or back to Texas, and my wife was looking for a doctor and she was calling around to different ob GYN offices and trying to just find that perfect doctor, ask friends, et cetera. I remember she said to me, oh man, I found the best doctor. I can tell she really knows her stuff. She's going to be perfect for what my needs are. And she goes through this long list. Some of it more emotional based, some of it very clinically based. I said, wow, so you got to go in and meet with her and ask her all of these questions. And she said, no, no, no. But just calling around, I could tell from how the staff answered the phone and a couple of the questions I asked that front desk person that that doctor is. And I thought to myself, here's a woman, my wife, who is well educated, very logical, actually math educated, that was her major. And here she is making a completely emotional decision based on an interaction. And I think the reality is we are all so prone to that. The human component cannot be ignored. Sometimes we say, well, we just need better marketing material or, you know, get our brand out there. Got to get onto that Facebook thing. And I'm not downplaying any of that because I think they're all important, but they have to be rooted in your patient experience. Marketing is really a magnification of your overall patient experience. Too many dental practices I see use the marketing medium simply for like coupon clipping. All right? And I think even that says something about what the patient experience is. Now, again, this isn't binary. I'm not saying never run a discount. But overall, what is your patient experience? What does that look like from your website? If that's all I knew about you or your flyer or what does this all tell somebody about you? You know, in any industry, all things are racing towards either commoditization, low price leader or towards customer experience. Think of different brands that, that you love or hate each one of them. The largest ones are running towards trying to create a better experience. Think Target. Or trying to figure out how to optimize their systems to be the low cost leader. Think Walmart. And anyone who's in between, who hasn't figured out which of those experiences they're racing towards absolutely gets crushed. Think Kmart. Right? Or if they're not the best in that as industries fully consolidate, they're not the best at Commoditization, which Walmart is definitely feeling pressure from, from Amazon, being able to be better, faster, commoditizing, lower cost. If you're not the best at that, then it's absolutely possible to get crushed. Treatment acceptance should be a natural part of your patient experience. It shouldn't be this clunky thing that you do at the end. It should start from the beginning and be all about the value offering you're trying to bring to your patients. I think too often we ask questions about where our price should be and how can we manipulate that through different discounts, etc. Financing plans. Not that those are bad discussions, I just think they're secondary. The first discussion should always be, how can we bring more value or perceived value to the patient, to the customer? What could we be doing from the beginning to help them understand what we're trying to do, to support them in their life, to help them with their oral health and even beyond just their oral health? What does good oral health end up helping in their life? I had a friend recently who went into a dental office, has been there for a while, been going to there for a while, and the hygienist tried to do treatment that she had just gotten training on and it was an $80 product. And she said to him, hey, we have this new product and I think it could help you. We just got trained on it and we're told that we should share this with everyone. And so I wanted to know, do you want that or not? Obviously that's not the treatment acceptance that's really grounded in a patient experience that says, here's the value that this could bring to you in your life, right? So there's so much opportunity, all of us have so much opportunity to start enhancing our patient experience. You have to constantly ask, what is the next step in bringing more value? And you can enhance value by thinking through your practice from an emotional perspective, from the patient experience perspective, from that customer service perspective. So here's a few questions as you walk through your different practices that you could start asking yourself. This is away from just systems and processes and operations, which all of those are important, but shadow shopping your own practices and asking, how does it feel to be in our practice? Walk in and just check your emotions. How does it feel? How does it feel to fill out our paperwork? Or that front desk interaction? How does that feel? How does it feel to interact with our staff, both at the front, getting my X rays, each interaction, hygienist, etc. How does that feel? How does it feel to interact with our dentist. What am I perceiving as he or she is speaking and do I believe that they have my best interest in mind or do I not? How does it feel as I'm leaving the practice and how does it feel in between appointments? Do I feel like this is transactional? Do I feel this is relationship based? You know, this isn't something that you read a business book and they say, oh, you got to systemize this part or think through this strategy. This is back to the basic element that we are a service healthcare business and we are bringing value to someone who perceives things through the eyes of emotion, through how they feel when they walk out. They are not going to say, man, their prepping of that tooth was incredible. The margins were just beautiful. No one is going to say that they're not going to understand fully the impact of fluoride or sealants or any other clinical service. We can help there and we can give that, and I think that's important. But how they feel is going to be what resonates and how they're going to speak about your brand, about your services and how they're going to say, oh man, they're. This was this clinician is incredible. I bet he was top in his class. It'll have nothing to do with your actual clinical outcomes as much as it will be about how the patient feels. So hopefully this gives you some ideas. I think if you feel like you've reached the max of how to grow your DSO or your individual practices and you're looking for what's the next place that that I need to go to improve revenue to increase my patient flow. I think starting with how does it feel? What is the patient experience will open up a laundry list of opportunities that all of us have to take value to the next level. Hope you enjoyed this episode. If you'd like more, come to our Facebook page, our private Facebook group, DSO Secrets. And until next time, keep smiling. Thank you for listening to DSO Secrets. Join our community on Facebook @DSO Secrets and get answers and resources to some of your most challenging questions. If you want to get a copy of the seven secrets of any DSO, go to our website at dsosecrets.com and we will get that emailed to you. Remember, don't go at this alone. Let us be your team while you build your team.