In 1980, when I was a freshman at Creighton University, one of our professors told us we’d earn 10 extra credit points if we went to see Warren Buffett speak when he visited our campus. One of the clearest things I remember Buffett say to the crowd was when someone pitches him an idea for something in which they wanted him to invest, he would hand that person a 4×6 recipe card and a No. 2 pencil and ask them to explain their entire idea on the card. He said 90 percent of those people couldn’t do it.
This doesn’t just apply to investing, gang – this applies to dentistry! Dental manufacturers will call my practice and try to sell their products to us. We’ll tell them, “For a product to be successful, it has to meet four criteria; it has to be faster, easier, higher in quality and lower in cost.” Many of them can’t explain their products to me with those four simple criteria in mind. In fact a few weeks ago, just out of morbid curiosity, I listened to someone pitch an idea for one hour and 45 minutes. Even after all the time my team and I spent with the salesman we still had no idea what the value proposition was. It blew my mind! It doesn’t just stop at dental manufacturers, though – this also applies to treatment plans. If you can’t explain to your patients what they need on a 4×6 index card, you fail at presenting treatments. Period.
Effectively presenting a treatment plan to your patients is one of the most serious aspects of dentistry. It can be the difference between a dentist who treats one-third of the caries in his or her practice to a dentist who treats twothirds or better. In the best dental practices, treatment plan presentations are typically done by a staff member; someone who can speak your patients’ language and sell the necessary dentistry. In other practices, what you often see are dentists rambling on, trying to explain what’s going on in their patients’ mouths. The patient has a toothache and the dentist says, “You have irreversible pulpitis. You’ll need endodontic therapy, post build-up and a fullcoverage restoration.” And then the dentist opens up a computer program and jumps into a giant, in-depth, scientific lecture about what a root canal is, what it does, what can go wrong, etc. Forty-five minutes later, the dentist asks, “Any questions?” and the patient looks like she got run over by a truck with no real comprehension of what just occurred.
The best treatment plans are simple and explained in ways patients can understand them. The reason Christianity thrived was because the religion was recited in short, simple, understandable parables – and there was a point to each one of them! Stop complicating things and get someone on your team to explain treatment plans to your patients in the simplest terms.
Your treatment plan also needs to be interactive. You need to follow your patients’ cues. When you talk to someone and they break eye contact with you, it means their mind is processing. When they do this, you need to stop what you’re saying and let them process. More often than not, they’ll respond with one of the following: “How much is it?” “Will my insurance pay for it?” “When would you do it?” “How long will it take?” “Will it hurt?” or “Will I need antibiotics?” What matters is you listen to their concerns, explain it in plain English and cut to the chase. I have had several patients come to my practice after they visited other offices to address their loose-fitting denture. In literally two minutes, I present the choices by saying, “Well you’ve got just a few options here. One, we can do nothing. Two, we can re-line it. With a reline, you drop it off at eight in the morning and you come back and pick it up at the end of the day. Three, we can make you a new denture. The fourth option, which would be a lot better, involves implants. We can put two of these little titanium screws into your jaw where the denture snaps on and stays in place. Better yet, we can put four implants in there and then the denture would really snap-on nicely. Or we can put six implants in there and that denture wouldn’t even come out of your mouth. Which one of those options sounds best for you? Let’s have Dawn, our treatment coordinator, go over the fees for these different options and assist you with reserving a time to get started.” What I just wrote would literally take you two minutes to recite. It was simple, explanatory and to the point. Why can’t we all do this?!
We continually see data that suggests dentists treat only 38 cavities for every 100 cavities diagnosed. That’s a terrible statistic. You might be earning your FAGD or your MAGD and think you’re on your way to total dental enlightenment, but I’ll let you in on a little secret – you’re not. Why? Because two of every three kids come into your office with caries and you don’t remove them. I don’t care if you’re using composite or amalgam – you need to treat as many cavities as you can. It’s your sacred and sovereign duty! Easiest way to do this is to get your staff involved in the treatment plans. It’s one thing for a patient to try to trust the guy who’s presenting a treatment plan in Latin (that’s rare), but it’s another thing for the patient to implicitly trust the entire staff standing behind the dentist nodding their heads in agreement and better explaining the treatment plan.
When you and/or your staff can explain a treatment plan in plain English and combine it with some great visuals from your digital X-ray system, every single one of your patients is going to fully understand what’s going on in their mouths and will want you to do something about it. It’s impossible for your patients to grasp what you’re trying to explain to them on a one-inch by one-inch X-ray film. I still can’t believe there are dental practices that do not employ digital X-rays in 2013. You want to explain something to your patient? Blow up the image on screen and do some teaching. Better yet, print off their X-ray on a piece of paper and circle the trouble spots, then give them the printout to take home as a reminder of what they need to have fixed.
Every single dental practice consultant I’ve ever met has told me when they walk into an office and pull up the report generator on the practice management software, 80 percent of all of the reports have never been run once. So, maybe you are only treating a third of the diagnosed dentistry, or maybe you’re doing a better job than that… or maybe you aren’t. You’d never know because you don’t know what the score is. You don’t know what your close rate is. You don’t track it. When you start tracking the dentistry you’re doing against the dentistry you’re diagnosing, you start to become a much better dentist. You start to realize you might not be the best person in the practice to sell dentistry to your patients. Your close rate will improve and your patients will be much happier with healthy mouths. You owe it to yourself, your practice and your patients to start running your treatment plan reports and actively reviewing them to help identify your monthly close rate. It’s time you start taking the selling process more seriously. Taking 500 hours of CE and earning your MAGD is completely useless if you’re not going to treat two-thirds of the people who come through your doors.
