Kiera shares the most common problems dental practices face — scheduling inefficiencies, high overhead costs, and patient retention — and how to fix them.

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Transcript:

Kiera Dent (00:00.93)

Hello, Dental A Team listeners, this is Kiera. And today, I just wanna come in here. I've been kind of doing a little bit of research out there and I wanted to help you see that every practice is facing challenges. And really the key is knowing how to turn those problems into opportunities. I love just thinking about, we've got to find ways to turn these problems into opportunities because it can be a problem or an opportunity, depending upon how you choose to view it.

And so today I wanted to just kind of dive into the most common problems that dentists face and actionable solutions for you to actually overcome them. Because reality is if you can know what they are, you can game plan with it. You then are gonna be able to help serve more patients, help your practice, help your team, which is what Dental A Team is all about. Dental A Team was founded to help dentists and teams truly bridge the gap to have more fun, less stress, more profitability, serve patients on a higher level.

and to be able to do it with ease and fun. I love to think about it as like popping confetti when we're coming in to help you with systems. We are not your traditional consulting company. So many offices have told me, Kiera, you guys literally have revolutionized how consulting works. My team loves you. My team's excited for you to come in and you don't just help us with dentistry, but you actually help make us better people. And so that's what we're all about. And I believe honestly that while problems are common with the right systems and the right mindsets, you can actually solve them pretty quickly and effectively. You don't actually have to struggle with it. So,

super fast, actionable episode three of the top problems and how to solve them. So problem number one that I see consistently are scheduling inefficiencies. This is, think, one of the biggest bulk, the biggest beast of all of dentistry is that people really truly don't know how to schedule and schedule effectively and scheduling is an art. It's not a science, but why do we wanna have like unicorns out there when we can just schedule it effectively and efficiently? And what we actually found are...

A lot of offices, when we did deep dives, they missed their financial goals. They missed their production goals, not because they actually weren't able to, but because of open time within their schedule. True. So we've started tracking open time and schedules and realize if we would have just filled those effectively, you would have hit your goals with ease. And so how do we actually get our practices to look at the unproductive gaps, last minute cancellations, overbooking, not scheduling strategically. And the simple solution is block scheduling, also confirming appointments 48 hours in advance.

Kiera Dent (02:18.338)

And then also what's our cancellation policy within our practice? A lot of offices we have changed our model to when we call a patient, we want them to confirm their appointment. And if they haven't confirmed within 48 hours, we literally have a voicemail and let them know we will be moving your appointment. Now we actually pull it off the schedule. We can still see them when we come in. Fantastic. If not, we have solutions for that. But literally we start to retrain our patients. And then also our cancellation policy is if they call me to cancel today and it's less than 48 hours, they get moved out six weeks.

and then we move them forward. But everybody following this policy starts to retrain your patients so we stop having these gaps. I want you to think about your practice as are people so committed to coming to your office just like they do their hair appointments, their nail appointments, any of those like their doctor appointments where they know it takes months and months to get into. Do we have that high level of customer service, high level of customer care? Now, of course, if they call us within 48 hours, fantastic, they're an incredible patient.

But otherwise we are going to make sure that we start to train them. And we also do this with our new patients when they call us. So we're training our new patients at the beginning. They have to send their paperwork in 48 hours before their appointment to make sure their appointment's confirmed. These little things will actually fix the problem. Now cancellations, I don't allow cancellations via voicemail. I change voicemails. I also don't allow cancellations via text message. So we train our teams that these are things that we can't have happen. This is how we respond to the patient.

The reason being is if I can get them on the phone, I can usually find a solution to their problem, keep them on the schedule, figure out what the problem is. Maybe they think it's gonna be too much time. Maybe they just need to scooch down 20 or 30 minutes and I have that availability. But getting them on the phone rather than just the simple text for them to cancel can actually fill your schedule. So when I have practices implement, whether it's the new patient policy of having them confirm their appointment by giving paperwork back, whether it's that we...

have patients they have to call you back to confirm their appointment. Otherwise we scooch them off. We utilize the model of not allowing cancellations via voicemail or text message. Practices literally boost their production by at least 15 to 20 % because now we've got all these holes filled and we're actually able to fix the problem. Some other offices implement deposits or different pieces to that. So right now I would recommend review your current scheduling system and figure out where are the gaps.

Kiera Dent (04:35.828)

what's happening, what's happening consistently, not what we think, but what we actually know. A practice told me we were getting tons of cancellations and I said, fantastic, I want you to track it for 30 days and I want you to let me know what type of cancellations are coming through. And turns out they actually are only having about six. Now, just so you know, a common thing is you will actually have like one to 2 % of your total practice will cancel and that's okay. Like that's normal. We need to not hope and pray every single person.

actually shows up for it, let's add a one or two percent cancellation per day. That way our goals are not having to be perfect, but we can actually have that that ro...