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Do You Want to Grow Your Dental Practice Production?

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High-performance teams have the mindset and the culture that good ideas are not the sole responsibility of the dentist, but rather of all team members. It takes a wise and strong dentist to defer to his staff for ideas on how the practice could improve production. Read on to find out how one dentist made powerful use of his staff’s insight …

I have a client who wanted to expand his marketing efforts to attract more patients and thus improve his daily production. However, at a meeting of his high-performance staff, the office manager spoke up and suggested that each staff member needed training on case presentation. Sure enough, when the dentist examined his own beliefs and behaviors, he realized that the roadblock to increased production was his own reluctance to emphasize to patients the importance of their committing to a treatment plan. The dentist was coming from an attitude of “the patient cannot afford it” rather than “if the patient does not get proper treatment then his/her oral and overall health will suffer.” So the team reviewed roles, practiced scripts and developed the “elegant handoff.” Case acceptance jumped markedly in the following weeks.

There is another message in this story: Give better service to your existing patients before you spend the money to go looking for new ones.

For brainstorming good ideas about practice improvement, who better to ask than the people who are involved in the ‘doing’ of the practice each day? Oftentimes you don’t need to look to an outside expert to improve what you are doing. If you have hired smart people who care about the practice and who feel that their ideas will be valued, let them tell you what the practice could be doing better and look to them for specific ideas on how to improve that area.