Why Chasing New Patients Is Keeping Your Practice Stuck

Here's a hard truth that most dentists never hear. New patients aren't actually always a win. In fact, they're often your biggest strain on your time, on your energy, and even team morale, especially when they come in with high expectations and low trust. That can be a recipe for a lot of inefficiency in your practice. If you ever had a new patient hijack your schedule, fight every fee, or leave your team feeling emotionally fried, then you're really not alone. But here's the good news. With the right protocol, new patients can become your biggest advocates instead of your biggest headaches. Let's talk about how to flip that switch. Welcome back to the Next Level Practice podcast, where we don't just talk about the business of dentistry, we fix it. I'm your host, CEO of Next Level Practice, Kelly Dahmer, and today we're going to do a deep dive on a deceptively simple topic, which is new patients. You want them, you think you need them, but without the right systems in place, they can eat up your schedule and exhaust your team and even kill off case acceptance before it even begins. When I first meet a lot of doctors, one of the things that we spend a lot of time talking about is actually new patients. This concept or conception that in order to grow a practice, you need more new patients. What I found is that 99% of the time, that's actually not the case. Yeah, maybe adding new patients is going to help you grow, but you're not fixing the root cause of some inefficiencies in your practice, which is called converting and maintaining your current active patient base. What happens a lot of times is you have a lot of unscheduled active patients, or you might have low diagnostics or even low case acceptance. When that happens and you're adding new patients in instead of trying to fix some systems to make your case acceptance more efficient. It's what we like to call the new patient treadmill. We find that some practices have maybe 20, 30, even 40 new patients per month, but they're losing equal to, if not more active patients that haven't been in in the last 18 months for an appointment. And. And then they're spending money on marketing to get those new patients, sometimes $4,000, $5,000 per month. When we actually even dig deeper, their new patients are converting less effectively as their existing patients. So I want to talk to you about a doctor, Dr. T. That he started working with not that long ago, and he was actually spending 4,500 per month on his marketing. He was on a new patient treadmill where he actually had a negative net patient growth per month. But his existing patient case acceptance was 60%, which is good. His new patient case acceptance was at 45%. Trust level was low. The conversion of treatment was actually lower than the existing patients. Meanwhile, he had a lot of unscheduled active patients sitting there that if we spent more time and energy getting those patients back in, we would have converted them at a higher rate. Would have been a more effective use of our time. Right. Here's the other kicker that we tend to see is our benchmark for hygiene reappoint is actually 90%. 90% of your patients should be leaving with their next scheduled hygiene appointment. And what we saw for Dr. T was his existing patients were reappointing and hygiene at 80%, which is good again. But his new patients were reappointing and hygiene, hygiene at 50%. Yeah, maybe. You know, you might see this if you have referrals and you're sending the patients back to the referring doctor. But that wasn't the case for Dr. T. So not only was he was spending time and money on his new patients that he didn't need to be because he had the active patients that were just sitting there unscheduled, but his new patients were accepting lower than his existing patients, and they weren't dropping into his reappoint recare system as they should be. That would be what we would call a destructive expense. So I want to talk to you about the three types of expenses for any business. There's destructive, consumptive, and productive. If you don't need new patients, but you're spending time and energy on them, you're on a new patient treadmill with net negative patients. And your conversion of these new patients is less than of your existing patients. That is a destructive expense and not a good use of time. That is not a smart business decision. I'll let that soak in here because it is a complex, layered concept where it could be just easier to say, hey, I need more new patients because I got a lot of healthy mouths, or whatever the reasoning might be behind that. Okay, here's what we're going to be breaking down on today's episode. The first thing is why new patients aren't always the asset that they appear to be. And we just talked about when you really look into the metrics, how you can decipher, determine. Is this the best use of my time and resources for my particular practice? If you do need new patients, the second thing we're going to be talking about is making sure that the new patients that we're attracting are ideal. What does an ideal patient look like for your practice? If you've never thought about that before, it's a great exercise to go ahead and journal, write down some attributes that you want to see for a new patient that's ideal for your practice. But what we do want to talk about is how to set emotional boundaries and stop absorbing patient stress, specifically when it comes to these new patients. The third thing that we're going to talk about today is how to install a new patient protocol that your whole team can follow. This is going to be really important in establishing positive habits with your new patients from the get go. Because you might be thinking, oh wow, I have some existing patients that aren't ideal either, right? So. So instead of having to retrain and have them relearn the new habits that you want your patients to have, train your new patients right from the get go. Because guess what? If you've ever felt drained by the people you're trying to help, this episode is exactly for you. So let's come back to that big myth. The more new patients, the better, right? I hear it all day long. Wrong. New patients cost you more time, more energy, and more resources than most dentists realize. It's not the answer. It's not the thing that's gonna solve all of your problems to increasing production. It really isn't. Here's what Dr. T learned. One is that his practice actually didn't need new patients in order to grow. Two is that there were some inefficiencies inside of his practice currently that needed to be enhanced. Patient education, standard of care for patient diagnostics, and case acceptance needed to be closed. Also, the patient reappoint gap needed to be closed. Knowing that his practice didn't need more new patients to grow was one part of it. But the second thing that Dr. T really learned is that not all new patients are a fit. The next thing that we really uncovered is that you can't fix people who don't want solutions. We have a quote or a mantra. We like to say he or she convinced against their will is of the same opinion. Still, that would be what selling would be, right? We're not selling anything. Our goal is to educate people so that they can make informed decisions for their health and wellbeing. The third piece of this, the last piece of this that's really important is to actually listen to what patients are saying. This is what's called a personal motivator and it's not just a generic blanket statement of health or looking good. It's really getting specific. You know, this is Mike and he's a new patient. This is what the trust transfer might look like between your team. Hey Sally, this is Mike. He's a new patient here and he's recently single. Unfortunately he just got out of long term relationship. You know, it's, it's for the best. He's okay, but he is going to be getting out there and start dating again. And we want to make sure that his smile looks good so that he can have confidence externally that really radiates within as well. That's his. That would be an example of a specific personal motivator that is tied to that patient's emotional component. And listen, you didn't hear me talk about the doctor once in that, right? That was the trust transfer from the front to the back. Back to the front. Yes, the doctor is involved in the trust transfer. This is the team approach. That's really important. Personal motivator is the first step in the team approach. Here are three actionable takeaways today. The first thing that you should be doing is identifying if new patients should actually be a part of your strategy. As we discussed earlier, most of the time practices don't actually need new patients to grow. They need to look at improving efficiencies in their current structures order to grow the practice. That's called working smarter, not harder. We have a tool, it's called our practice capacity calculator. I'm actually going to drop it into our show notes and that is the calculation that you can do to determine if you actually do need more new patients, which might be so. Or if there's some opportunity inside of your practice that you're not maximizing and really leaving some money on the table and patient care undone as well. So click the link below a practice capacity tool, download it. If you need support or help on that, just let us know. That will tell you if you do need to have marketing as part of your strategy. If you do need marketing, the second thing that you should be figuring out is how to screen for fit, not just need. So make sure that you have ideal new patient avatar that everyone's agreeing to so that you can attract more of the right new patients. The last thing is to listen between the lines. Really make sure that you have a team approach in place that includes personal motivators and tying patients specific needs to the why. Otherwise they're just going to be convinced to do something that they don't want to do. Your close ratio and your case acceptance is going to reflect that. It's not going to be where we want it to be at 67%. So let's recap. New patients are an investment, so treat them like one. That means see a return on investment, right? We don't want it to just be a dollar for dollar consumptive expense or even worse, a destructive expense where we don't need them. The second thing we covered today is you don't need to absorb patient stress to deliver great care. Really identify what is your ideal patient and make sure you hold the line and be the buyer in the situation. When it comes to allowing that type of patient into the practice, your team will thank you too. The last thing that we discussed is that new patient protocol to create consistency, trust and make sure you have a team approach in place so that you are all educating the patient and it's not just something falling on one or even two people inside of the practice. And if this episode gave you back a little bit of your sanity, especially when it comes to those new patients, share it with your team. They'll need this too. I'm Kelly Damer and this is the Next Level Practice Podcast. I'll see you next time.