How to Use Patient Feedback to Achieve Exceptional Care

You're listening to The Dr. Phil Klein Dental Podcast from Viva Learning.com. Welcome to the show. I'm Dr. Phil Klein. Before we get started, I would like to thank our sponsor, Pierrel Pharma, the maker of Oroblock, the only aseptically manufactured arcticane in the United States. They also offer Goccles, an innovative pair of glasses that uses the common curing light to perform a quick, and non-invasive examination of the autofluorescence of the oral cavity, helping to identify any precancerous and cancerous lesions. Thank you, Perel Farmer, for your support for this podcast. We've all heard the phrase exceptional dental care, but what does that really mean? And who's responsible to achieve this level of care? And what are the costs and benefits? Our guest is Dr. Dilip Dudhat, a diplomat of the International Congress of Oral Implantologists with nearly 25 years of dental service. to the Philadelphia metro and surrounding area. He is certified in advanced infection control and has facilitated thousands of dental implants in his career. Dr. Dudhat, it's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you, Phil. It's my pleasure. So we've heard this term exceptional care, and it's used rather loosely. A lot of dentists would think that they provide exceptional care. And it's just kind of an assumed thing. You actually lecture on this. So my first question is, how do we define exceptional care, in your mind, in a dental practice? Exceptional care is defined by entire team, support from the entire team. The team is on the same page with you, and you are delivering the utmost care to the patient. It will show up from the patient's body reaction. How is that done? Just by giving us the feedback in how that experience was. When the call comes in, from the time patient walks in, from the time that they leave from the dental chair, from the time they get checked out, the overall experience that patient goes through is what makes the exceptional care the best. Okay, so you're talking about from start to finish. From the time that patient calls the office, they may have a question about availability or whether they do certain procedures. That interaction, you're saying, is the beginning of exceptional care. Is that correct? Correct. And that's where it starts from the overall experience from the beginning to the end. That's why entire team is so important to provide the best care to the patients, to have that experience. Do you have a practice where you've developed a strategy to really optimize the practice interaction with the patient to get this exceptional care? Yes, I have. And we also monitor that on a regular basis as well. Could you talk about that a little bit, your protocol, and how do you monitor your practice of this? One of the ways we monitor is from Google reviews. Whether a patient is saying about front desk or the clinical side, so we can go back to the clinical side or the front desk side to make sure that the second patient does not have the same experience. Or if they had the best experience, we make sure that we respect them and we wow them or we give them positive feedback. And the second resource that we measure from is from the patient news. They give us the rating on how long it took to answer the call, how this customer service was. So based on the rating we get. And the third thing is what the patient says in person, especially the patient that you know well, will tell you how they feel about it or how they felt about the call that they made. Do you do surveys with these patients? Yes, I do. How do you manage the surveys to find out what the experience was from your patients? That's based on what company you're working with. Nine out of 10 companies already have the dashboard. You can go on and look at the dashboard. You can also get an email alert, what kind of response you got from your patient, just so you can be on top of your game. Okay, so when you talk about exceptional dental care, you're not really necessarily talking about clinical care, right? You're talking about more practice management. making sure the patient is satisfied with the operations of the practice. Is that right? The overall outcome, you know, the service, even though you can be best at providing the exceptional care at the front desk, when the dentist doesn't pay attention to clinical side of the dentistry, then that's part of the exceptional care. So patient did not receive prompt retention, patient sat in the chair too long, or patient was kept in the pain. So it's entire team that's responsible for the exceptional care experience. So when you get these surveys back from the patients, How do you make the changes within the practice with your team based on the responses from these surveys? There are about five questions being asked, and that covers entire experience from the beginning to the end. So this way it pertains to certain department on how they felt about the service that they received. And what software are you using that manages all this? I'm using Demandforce. Okay, so Demandforce. So this has all the bells and whistles that you need? And this is not an ad for Demandforce. They have nothing to do with this podcast. I'm talking to the audience now. I was just curious to know what you're using. But Demandforce is not a sponsor of this podcast, nor do they even know about it. What is it that specifically you're using in Demandforce that is important to get that feedback from the patients? They're getting the survey. Patients don't feel like they're being targeted so much. from the marketing standpoint that's right so we have a streamlined plan for the number of surveys goes out or number of times we market to the patient because we don't want them to get overwhelmed and then they turn off the notification so we make sure the patients receive notification only when they're supposed to receive notification okay so you don't overwhelm them with this with this kind of interaction with this communications and then when you get the feedback from the system What do you do, have a morning huddle and talk about it once a week, every day, once a month? No, we talk every day pretty much. So, you know, we will let them know next morning this is the review we received or this is the best review we got, blah, blah. So we just make sure the patient team knows the good and bad because not only bad, but it's important that they know the good side of the dentistry that we do. Now, if you got some feedback from... Some patients about a particular person at the front desk or a hygienist. Again, I don't know the infrastructure of your practice. I don't know how big it is. How many people do you have employed at your practice? Twelve. Twelve. And how many dentists? Two dentists. Twelve people total? Correct. Yeah. So when you get feedback and you find out a hygienist is consistently mentioned as maybe someone who's fantastic or the reverse, how do you handle that situation? I personally have a meeting with a hygienist one-on-one. And if I'm not at the office, I will make sure my manager talks to the hygienist, good or bad, because it's very important that each individual person is recognized for their best behavior or for their worst behavior. Have you found employees can transform from like a front desk person that may not be as friendly and accommodating as you would like into a star employee through the survey information? Yes, they can. Yes, absolutely. Because they want to see. Seeing is believing. And they have to trust your system. They have to love working for you. You don't have employees that become defensive at times. One out of 50 may become defensive because they're just jumping from Office A to B to C. Those who are hardworking will appreciate that you're giving them criticisms for better so they are improved. They continue to work hard to be the best they can be. And they also, they're being told, look at employee A or B or C. We're having outstanding reviews and you can get it done for us. Let's do it together. Let us help you. What can we do for you? When you say, what can we do for you? Are you talking to the employee? Correct. Employees that are not getting the best feedback. What do you do for them to get them to be at the level that you're looking for as far as exceptional dental care? the office patient experience? What do you do for them? Provide the support that they need. Let's just say a front desk person has too many calls coming in, unable to provide the best care to the patient. She needs another body there at the front desk. Let's hire another body just so she can provide the best attention to the patient during the time the patient is there. So this way, everyone is getting better care. So you just listen to concern. If it's a hygienist and she has... type of patients that are coming in with so much of tartar or they need more time, okay, then we want to block more time for them. If it's assistant and this doctor is too busy and planning some treatment without end in mind or just wants to do so much of dentistry without having the proper support for the assistant, then assistant needs another body to go along. So we just want to make sure that they're not overworked. Have you determined, based on the surveys you're getting back from the patients, which part of your office is typically the strongest and the weakest? Is there a disappointment among your patients in one area or is it kind of random? It is kind of random. And to be honest with you, everyone has gotten great reviews for their own department and everyone has gotten bad reviews as well. So sometimes patients make a comment about the co-payment because they were supposed to pay and they were told. So now they put blame on the front desk, right? Or front desk failed to give the proper copayment to the patient. So there's always two sides of the story, but it is random. How do you reward your employees when they're getting excellent feedback? By giving them bonuses. Besides giving them verbal positive support, giving them monthly bonuses. Yeah, it seems to me that this is a great way to build excellence. across the board among your employees, because if one employee continues to get outstanding results, the other employees want to step up. Is that what happens? Yeah, exactly. That's why we have a team meeting, making them aware who's doing what or why we have such employee that is getting outstanding reviews and what other person is to do. To reach exceptional dental care, for the purpose of this podcast, the most important thing are these surveys that you're using with your software system. Is that right? Correct. Otherwise, if you don't know what you're doing, you can't fix it, right? Or you cannot continue to excel. So you need to know how patients feel about your service. What are the costs and benefits involved in achieving this? Cost is that you have to employ good technology. You can be afraid to invest money to make the better experience for your patients and your team. That involves buying iTero, CBCT, or the CAD CAM technology. for patients to feel very comfortable buying air purification system and also having internal camera. So they just wanted to make sure that they don't have to go elsewhere. If you can provide the care within your own practice by doing extra continued education, making your practice exceptionally presented in the community, then you shouldn't have to worry about it. Now you're in advanced infection control. dentist. You're actually certified. What does that mean? That means that we continue to work with Hugh Pretty. We work closely with Hugh Pretty to make sure that we meet infection control criteria. Besides that, we have a yearly OSHA meeting. We also involve a lot of technology to keep the environment or the practice safe for my team and for my patients. Going back to the survey, when you get a survey and you get a bad response, unhappy patient about something, you deal with the employee about it, of course. What do you do with the actual patient? How do you respond to the patient directly? By saying, you know, we've failed to meet the point to keep you comfortable or to get to the best service. We have corrected our errors in our end. We will make sure that you have the best experience at your next visit. And even though it may not be your fault, we don't want to argue with the patient. Right. The patient's always right. The customer's always right. How do you make that communication? Is that by phone? by phone because that's the best way just so you can continue to hear patient's side of the story okay if they don't take your call then you can of course email it to them but definitely calling is number one option and when you have a dissatisfied patient occasionally what's the success rate of getting that patient to stay with your practice 95 or higher and what do you attribute that to is that because you're calling them very soon after they respond to the survey i assume it's going to be pretty soon right you want to get on that right away yeah exactly same day when you admit okay or you recognize you know their concerns you know patients feel comfortable and they know that everything else was great okay just one area we felt to meet that expectation so now we acknowledge that and they feel safe about it who makes that call do you do as the owner of the practice or you have someone on your team make that phone call depending upon, you know, where the dissatisfaction came from. If it's hygiene department, then hygiene will make a phone call. Then hygienist will call, okay, to let patient know that, you know, I'm sorry that, you know, I was not to the point where you would have held comfortable. But at the same time, I personally, as an owner, I will make the phone call too because I know certain patients, you know, and they've been to the practice for a number of years, they're loyal patients, so why not let them know that, okay, hygienist A was new to the practice. She was under training. And you're welcome to come back again for your next hygiene visit as soon as possible at no cost. And we also have corrected our set of errors. To me, this sounds like an amazing way to maintain patient retention. I mean, imagine not doing this. You don't have a survey system in place. A patient has overall experience pretty good. There was one area that they were dissatisfied about. and you don't know what that is, and you never see that patient again. So what has this done for patient retention for you? It has done an outstanding job for me. That's why, you know, in my last online webinar, I discussed about attrition, right? Because we all like to have new patients, but if you don't take care of your current patient, attrition can hurt your practice so much, okay? And that attrition can lead to losing family members, friends, and family who were referred by that particular patient. So it can be very harmful. You know, we kind of take it for granted that we kind of assume that all dentists are doing this, but I'm not sure that they are. I don't know what percentage of dentists are running surveys on a regular basis and following up with those responses. Because one thing is to have a survey. And if you don't reach out to the patient like you do in the same day, I'm not sure it's really going to help you to have a survey, right? So that has to be built into your operations plan of running a dental practice. Very true. Yeah. So my last question is, And I think you kind of answered this. Who should be responsible from the team to make all this happen? Entire team is responsible, but ultimately the owner of the practice. Right. So the owner of the practice must instill this in the daily operations of the practice. You know, we get so wrapped up with doing dental procedures and the clinical aspect of it. And I know you've done tons of implants. But you've also found the time to see the value in making sure that the relationship between that patient and the practice is maintained. And the way you seem to be doing it very successfully is through software surveys that you follow up on immediately, for the most part, the same day, to make sure that patient feels like they matter, right? Very well said. And I take a lot of pride in this. Yeah. No, it's very impressive. Very impressive. I'm glad you shared this with us. And we appreciate everything that you're doing in education. Thank you very much for doing the webinar. recently on VivaLearning.com. As you see more things that you do in your office that are beneficial to the success of your practice, I'd like to have you back on a podcast so we can talk about it. I'll be happy with you. It was very nice to be with you guys. Thank you very much. You take care.