The Extraordinary New Patient Experience

You're listening to The Dr. Phil Klein Dental Podcast from Viva Learning.com. Welcome to the show. I'm Dr. Phil Klein. So today's question is, what makes your office different? If your answer is friendly, caring, excellent clinical skills, well, that's all great, but pretty much every dental office is saying the same thing. So let's switch gears a bit and ask, what are specific services that we can offer that will make our practice different? In this podcast, we're going to answer that question by learning more about services that any office can employ, which will truly make you unique and stand out, and at the same time, leave your patients completely amazed. Our guest is Dr. Ankur Gupta, who has a private practice in a suburb west of Cleveland. He lectures extensively for several dental society clubs, annual sessions, post-doctorate residency programs, and CE programs. He does this throughout the country, and he typically ends all of his presentations with practical, realistic, implementable ways to be better. Before we get started, I would like to thank our sponsor, Shofu, a world-renowned dental materials and equipment manufacturer providing high-quality products to dental professionals around the world. Shofu is a great company, and I would like to personally thank the folks at Shofu for their ongoing support for dental continuing education. Dr. Gupta, it's a pleasure to have you on Dental Talk. Thank you, Dr. Klein, for having me. So let me begin with this question. Many dental practices don't have unique differentiators. What sets you apart from the dental practices in your area, and how do you create an extraordinary new patient experience? So actually, I'm going to answer that as if it was two questions. Number one is what sets our office different, and number two is what creates an extraordinary new patient experience. I was leaving work one day at the same time that one of my patients was leaving. And it was dark already. It was 5 o'clock up here in Cleveland in the winter. And she was standing next to her car looking frustrated. And it was because she had a flat tire. And so I kind of walk up to her. I ask her what's going on. And she's like, oh, I'm just frustrated, blah, blah, blah. I need to call AAA. And I said, wait a second, I can, I can help you. And so I, and it was, it was a somewhat nice thing to do. It didn't take all night. It wasn't like some heroics. It was just a nice thing to do. And what I thought was interesting was after that happened, all of a sudden her family decided to start coming to me and they talked about how great we were and they put Google reviews about us. You didn't change your tire though. Oh, I did. I changed her. Oh, you did. Okay. I missed that part. Okay. I apologize. So I changed her tire. I spent a couple extra minutes and I, and I removed, I jacked up the tire and I felt kind of like a cool guy because, you know, I felt like I was, I was tough and macho and, and I changed her tire and it was like everything, my relationship with her and her family completely changed. They all thought I was the greatest guy ever. And it had nothing to do with the dentistry. And it got me thinking a lot about how much emphasis and how much energy I was putting towards trying to be the best possible dentist and the CE courses and the dental materials, etc. Whereas this lady and her family, they thought I was great because of something that had nothing to do with dentistry. And so my team and I, we got together and we kind of came up with like, OK, what are the differentiators? What are the little we're not going to go out and change people's tires all the time. But what are the things that we can do? One of the ideas that came up was whenever it's raining, we'll walk a patient out to their car. And I'm telling you, that sounded like a big, difficult thing to implement. Like, oh, how are we going? We're already busy. How are we going to walk everybody to their car? But the fact is. Most people declined the offer. So we bought a bunch of umbrellas. And when it's raining outside, we say, oh, hey, let me walk you out to the car. And most patients are like, no, no, no, I got it. But a handful of patients, especially elderly patients, they really appreciate it. And they're like, this is so nice. Nobody's ever done this before. And we said, oh, this is something. You know, we got something going here. And so we came up with a bunch of ideas. One of them is the fresh flowers that are sitting at our front desk every morning. By the end of the day, we give them to a patient and we wrap them in this nice looking wax paper. And we say, hey, listen, you're our patient of the week this week or whatever. And we give them the flowers. And it's usually elderly patients. It's usually females. And they really appreciate it. And so I can give you a bunch of ideas. Actually, Dr. Klein, if you have show notes. I can give you my whole list of all of the little things that we did. But they were differentiators. And all of them sound like a lot. They all sound like, oh, man, I don't know. We're busy. I don't know how we're going to possibly do this. And I realized that when you get a system created, it actually fits pretty seamlessly. It doesn't make one person carry too much of an extra burden. And it's kind of nice. And so we've added about 15 little things. to our normal office operations that we know are immediate differentiators, different, unique. So what I'm hearing is, and I think I agree with you 100%, actually, the personal touches that you've integrated into your practice, you think, and have proven this over time with your practice success, impacts the patient's perception of your practice in a greater way than actually focusing and emphasizing the dental services themselves and to some extent. Actually, I truly believe it. Even though I want to be as good a dentist as I possibly can, I know that I'm limited by my own hand skills. You know, I've been doing this for almost 20 years, and there's still clinical situations that I find myself really struggling with, you know, whether it's isolation or just, you know, the patient has cheeks are so thick that I can't get back behind an upper molar. There's still things that I'm limited by clinically. But in terms of effort, creativity, and systems, it's kind of like we have infinite possibilities. We can constantly add these differentiators to our office. This is something that you transition to in a practice, right? You don't just one day have flowers there, buy some umbrellas, right? You're not recommending that to a dental practice to just, okay, here's the list. Let's go to Walmart, and we're going to do a facelift to our whole practice and offer all these incredible services. Tell us about the transition. that took place in your practice where you develop this set of processes where you're doing this personal care on steroids? So I'm glad you asked, actually. So what we decided to do at a team meeting was everybody was given a homework assignment to come up with what are just these completely off the wall and potentially impossible to implement ideas that would make a patient's experience amazing. And they had a month between one team meeting and the next. And at that second team meeting, we just shared our ideas and we listed them all. And some people got really excited. Some people, some ideas just got shot down. And we had a list of quite a few, maybe 35. And here's the rule that I think every dentist, when they're trying to make any major change in their office, should apply. Here it is. Ready? Whatever list you have. Pick one, preferably one that's easy. And if it's not fun, don't do it. That's the rule. Pick one, pick one that's going to be easy to implement. And if it's not fun, don't do it. And what we ended up doing was we picked the one that seemed like the lowest lying fruit and we decided to attack it. Now, it was an easy one. You know how, I don't know about you, Dr. Klein, but when you sit, when I sit in a dental chair for too long, my neck gets tired. So we bought these little memory foam little things and we put them behind that garbage bag that goes over the back. And we just. When the patient sits down, we kind of squeeze that little memory foam thing so it's really supportive behind the neck. That was so easy. It was just like a trip to Amazon.com to buy some of those. And it was very easy to implement. And that was probably our first one. And what you get then is this psychological boost of successfully implementing something. And then you can attack number two. Yeah, that's a great idea. That's a really super idea. I mean, that's doing so much for the patient. You're comforting them. You're showing them that you care about them before they even start the procedure. You're aware that they're laying down and it may not be the most comfortable position. So you're connecting with the patient. You just say, Mrs. Jones, just raise your head a little bit. I'm just going to make you a little bit more comfortable. And then all of a sudden you've won that patient over. Yeah. Yeah. Just so I know, do you have show notes for your podcast where I can actually send you a PDF of basically all of our ideas? A lot of our podcasts are listened to on Spotify and Google Podcasts. So I don't know if those platforms support that, but I'm sure we could post it on VivaLearning.com. I owe you a PDF. Yeah, no, that's fantastic. This is a great way to build your practice. And this is something that seems like it doesn't cost a ton of money. It's more of a way of practicing, right? It's a culture in the practice. How do your team members embrace this? I think the responsibility for every dentist is to gain a certain level of leadership in terms of long-term implementation. I'm not a natural leader. It's very easy for me to be pushed over. That's just my nature. It was very easy early on in my career when I was younger and less confident for me to be bullied by my team and for them to convince me, oh, this isn't going to work. But there was something that was really important for me and for my wife. My wife is also a dentist. We practice together was we wanted to be an extraordinary practice. We really want it. That was very important to us. And so team members are going to do one of two things. change that's associated with long-term improvement, or they are going to defend the status quo. They're going to defend the old ways. And what we did was when we decided we were going to embark on lots of homework activities that would make our office better, we always start that with a brief spiel about how embracing the old way is not something we're going to tolerate. And I'm telling you, I'm not the type. to get in people's faces and, you know, be like a football coach type of leader. And that's just not my style at all. But what we have found is certain people, if they just can't get over that hump, if they are so programmed to always defend the old way, then maybe they're not the best fit for our office. So did you have some turnover in your staff when you made this change? Over time, yeah, absolutely. But it's usually not, remember, Dr. Klein, we never came up and said, hey, we're going to make 50 changes all in the next two months. It's always, it's very gradual. But some of these changes are more difficult. I'll give you an example. Once a year, we do this program called Veterans Day. So on Veterans Day, or at least on a working day close to Veterans Day, we close our office to all of our regular patients. only see veterans and we just do free work. So free extractions, fillings, trophies, whatever. It's a really busy day. We might see 75 to 100 veterans that day. And we brought it up to everyone. And we said that it was going to be an unpaid day. And there were people who said, no, I'm not going to do it. And I realized that they don't, that's not a bad person. That's not a person who's like, listen, I'm not going to go to work, but I'm going to get paid. That's not a bad person. But that's not a person that represents the culture that we were trying to create. And so we had to have an uncomfortable and, in my opinion, unpleasant conversation with these team members. And so I just kind of feel like if you know that you're trying to create a culture and you have a good, clear vision of that culture, it's kind of easy then to see who doesn't fit that culture. Yeah, absolutely. So we talked a little bit offline about. that first interaction with the patient. Tell us about that interaction and what you do from the time you first have the conversation, examine the patient, et cetera. Yeah, so let's back up just a second to right when they come in. So again, we wanted to be extraordinary. And I know that when I go into like a doctor's office or when I take the kids to the pediatrician's office, it's like. as un -extraordinary as possible. Like we go in and we fill out some clipboard and then we sit in a waiting room. And I thought, okay, what can we do different? And so here's the rules at North Ridgeville Family Dentistry. Here's the rules. When a new patient walks in, the people behind the front desk have to stand up, make eye contact, call them by name, and prior to COVID, shake their hand. And then they have to compliment them somehow. so that's the rules everybody who works at the front desk in my office they know a new patient walks in they have to stand up make eye contact call them by name and compliment them and then they have to not hand them over paperwork or hand them over an ipad with all the with all their new patient stuff they have to leave their domain behind the front counter and go around and sit next to the patient A dentist that you probably heard of, Peter Dawson, who passed away last year, he coined a phrase called, when you are interacting with your patient, you should be eye to eye, knee to knee, and heart to heart. And so our front desk team, when they are interacting, that first interaction, when they're just going over paperwork and insurance and all that stuff. It has to be eye to eye, knee to knee and heart to heart sitting next to each other. There can't be a countertop or, you know, a domain that separates them. So let me ask you this. I think this is great. I didn't mean to interrupt you, but is a compliment, would a compliment, would a statement like Mrs. Jones, thanks for coming on time to your appointment. We really appreciate the fact that, well, I mean, I don't know if that's a typical compliment, but I could imagine, I'm just trying to be devil's advocate here. I'm sitting there. I'm very busy. New patient comes in. I'm ready to do. just what you're discussing, but I, I don't know what to say for, I mean, you're asking me to compliment the patient and I have nothing to say. Could I say thanks for showing up on time? I mean, what's the lowest level compliment? So let me tell you, okay, women are actually great. They're so easy. You know, I love your boots. I love your purse. I love your earrings. Easy. Then there's just like, there's just dudes like me and you who just, we don't have like anything. I just walk in, you know, looking with a t-shirt on. And that's actually the, that's the one that actually most of the time, oh, it looks like you found the, it looks like you found our office. Great job. What great job? It's something. And actually it's part of their job description. They have to compliment these new patients. And so usually it's exactly what you said. If it's some dude just like, oh, it looks like you got here right on time. We really. appreciate that we really appreciate that you respected our time right um or something right okay so because the way i dress when i go to the dentist nobody's going to tell me i'm wearing nice clothes that's for sure no no no so i don't know what they're going to tell sometimes i don't shave so i'm difficult to come up with something for me but i was just i was just curious um i thought i thought i know what they would because they're good now they've they've been they have all this practice i know what they would say to you they would say i like your glasses oh there you go and i have no idea I have no idea if they would like your glasses. Yeah, I may not be wearing these. I've also heard them enough times. That's funny. No, that'll work. Then they get brought to the clinical domain. Okay, so now they've been wowed. Okay, so the whole point of that interaction is to wow the patient. When they're brought into the clinical domain, two things are done that are different from the way I was trained. I was trained to sit down, go over the medical history, ask for a chief complaint. And then take radiographs. And I think that's probably, I'm assuming you were trained the same way, correct? Sure. So we decided the first thing that's going to happen is we have to get to know the patient in some way, which is actually very difficult to do. And so the patient sits down and we might say something like, so how did you hear about our office? And the patient says, oh, a person at work told me about it. And instead of immediately moving to step two, we say, oh, where do you work? I work at American Greetings. Oh, really? How long have you been working for American Greetings? And so there's a series of what we call open-ended questions that start with things like how and what and tell me, which allow the patient to tell you more about themselves and their situation. And that's actually very hard to do. I think as humans, we're all programmed to be a little bit self-centered and we want to talk about ourselves. And when I first started trying this and practicing it, It was so easy for me to talk about myself. I'd say, so what did you do this weekend? And the patient would say, well, it was my daughter's birthday this weekend. I said, oh, well, I have a daughter. Well, the patient doesn't care. They don't want to care about my daughter. They want me to ask them more questions about their, and that's actually something that was hard for me to do, and it took a lot of practice. So now, okay, clinical domain, we get to know them, and the very next step is we take photos. And I'm not an aesthetic dentist. I'm not a cosmetic office. And so we don't take 50 photos. We take a photo of them smiling, and then we take a photo of their teeth with their lips retracted. So sometimes if we're feeling super ambitious, we take an occlusal shot of the lower and the upper. But I don't put a lot of burden on my team to take a million photos. But what we like to do is have a nice, clear photo of the majority of their teeth. And you can see that a lot with a nice camera and retractors. You can see that. It looks good. And our first question to the patient normally is, so tell me, how would you rate your teeth on a scale of 1 to 10? This has taken all of the control out of my hands and put it into the patient's hands. And that was a big paradigm shift for me. look at radiographs, do a clinical exam, do a perio exam, and then tell the patient everything they need. And instead now, with photos in front of the patient, we're asking the patient to tell us how they feel about their teeth. And that is a total game changer. I wasn't doing major full mouth, really complicated cases back when I was just jamming information down people's throats. But now I do them quite regularly. And it's because of this interaction, letting a patient talk about their hopes and dreams rather than me cramming as much dental diagnoses down their throat. Yeah, yeah. It's a totally different way of doing things. And the patient is obviously going to be much more apt to accept a bigger treatment plan if they're presenting it to you rather than you presenting it to them. Very, very interesting approach. I know that from experience, some... members do not like taking photos. There's ring flashes and there's complications. And we talked a bit offline about this. Do you want to tell us real briefly about the camera that you use in your practice? I bought like six cameras in my life and plenty of them just collected dust. And that's because a lot of cameras are complex. I mean, like even me, the guy who invested in the camera, I couldn't get it to focus. so that it would get the entire mouth. It would only get the front teeth and the back teeth were blurry. And then I would get my gross hands all over this camera and we didn't want to wipe it because we didn't want to get like chemicals into the parts. That changed three years ago when we bought the eye special camera from Shofu. That is, it's the best. I mean, literally my, my 10 year old son could take a beautiful set of intraoral photo. I mean, of photos of your mouth with that camera. because it's it's it's as easy as a point and shoot it focuses very automatically and it focuses on the entire arch front to back i don't know how it does it but it does this camera actually was i think this camera was actually designed for dental photography there are presets correct on this camera that allows you to do really top-notch photography just by pushing a few buttons it does but i'll tell you we don't we use the presets less than 10% of the time. We could hire an assistant on Monday and say, go take a bunch of photos on that patient because it literally is, you point it and you shoot it and you get these incredible photos, like cosmetic dentist worthy photos. You know, if you have a great before and after, it looks incredible. And so that camera is indispensable. And it's kind of weird because I only, I mean, I've been doing dentistry for 17 years. I've only had this one for three. I don't know how I was practicing before. And the infection control part of it is also really advantageous, especially today more than ever. Everything about it is completely cleansable in a way where we know that it's safe to use patient. Wipe down as if it's just another piece of equipment. So that's really helpful. Getting back to your whole strategy and how you operate in your office, as your office grows, you have to delegate more. So you want to develop, to some extent, a hands-off approach, a hands-off strategy. And how do you ensure that the complex patient situations don't fall through the cracks? So actually, so that's a great question. You know, these, okay, so first of all, all of these examples of patient experience, they're not like, oh, if you have time, make sure to do this nice thing. Oh, if you can make sure to, it's a part of their job description. It is literally written as part of the job description. So the front test team knows 100%. that standing up, complimenting, doing all that kind of stuff, that's as much as an important part of the job as showing up on time in the right attire. It's part of the job description. Same thing for the assistants, getting to know a patient before you start taking radiographs or photos, it's part of the job description. And so that's hard to do when you already have a fully trained staff who already has their routine. But over the years, as more training occurs and over the years, as more new team members show up, that cultural change actually occurs. But I want to talk about the complex cases, the stuff slipping through the cracks. This is very frustrating for me because we do all of this extra nice stuff. And then a patient comes in and they want very comprehensive dental work done. And it's going to cost a ton of money. $25,000, let's say. okay and we treat them like vip and we do our routine and we show them these beautiful photos and we give them a plan exactly the right way. And then the patient says, you know, this is just a lot of money. I really have to think about it. I really have to talk to my spouse about this. And they leave. And I think for a lot of us, we believe that the reason they left was because they're not interested. But the truth is they're probably interested, but there's some barrier. Whether it's, I just don't want to make a decision like this without talking to my wife. I think it's going to hurt. I think it's going to take a long time and I don't know if I can get off work. All of those barriers. Those are what's floating around in that patient's brain when they say, hey, I need to go home. I need to think about this. And so actually we've come up with a really simple solution. We actually put that patient's name on our schedule one week later. We don't schedule them. But we put the patient's name on the schedule as an event one week later. And then when that week later comes by, it reminds our front desk team to call the patient and follow up with them. It's not invasive. It's not offensive. It's just an opportunity for our front desk team to follow up with the patient and not let it slip through the cracks. And I can't believe how many times it's worked. I mean, it works more than 50% of the time. What is that discussion that occurs between the front desk staff and the patient that left with that treatment plan not committed to? Sure. So what she, what right now I have two people at the front who make those phone calls and the way they call is they say, we know that we spoke to you about quite a lot of dental work and that there was a lot to digest. I was just calling to see if you had any questions. So it's not, I was calling to see if you want to commit. I want to see if I can apply for patient financing or anything like that. It was just, I just wanted to call to see if you had any questions. And I think some people who are listening to this, who are more business savvy, they might be like, yo, you got to push harder. And that's fine. I'm not saying you're wrong, but my personality, I don't want my team to be pushy. When you ask a question like that, that you're actually willing to help somebody through the process and you're not. putting them against the wall saying, we haven't heard back from you. Do you plan on doing all this work? That softer approach encourages the person to actually say to the front desk person what the issues are. You know, by the way, I did have a chance to talk to my wife and we are going to move forward monetarily. We can't do it right now, but if we could spread it out and maybe that person will even say, if I can get financing for it, we could start it right away. Is that sometimes happen? They actually are contributing this information without even being asked just because you asked them. Is there anything I can help you with? That happens more than 50% of the time. More than 50%, that's when they open up. And, you know, the other 50% of the time, we just take it as a loss. You know, when a patient's like, you know, we talk, we're just not really interested at this time. And we take a very understanding approach. There's a phrase that I learned from Paul Homily. I don't know if you've heard of him. He said, whenever a patient is not interested, And it's about something that really affects their health. Tell them, you know, I just want you to know that I totally respect and understand that you're not concerned, but I just want you to know that I am concerned. And I do that sometimes, you know, especially with periodontal disease, because I don't know why. Some patients are just, they're such poo-poo heads about periodontal disease. And I really love that phrase saying, listen, I don't want to put pressure on you. I totally respect and understand. I just want you to know I'm really concerned. And there's something, there's some psychological voodoo that happens there where a patient's like, oh man, now the monkey's on my back. And that's actually worked quite a bit. We've never really pushed a patient and said, well, if you act now, we'll give you a 5% off. So when you say that to the patient that you're concerned about their health, even though They're not showing the same concern for themselves. What's their typical response or half the time? What do people say? It's again, it's half and half. It's not a magic bullet. Some patients are like, all right, cool. You're concerned. I'm not. That's fine. But every so often a patient will sit there and they'll pause and then they'll say, well, OK, maybe we should maybe we should do some of this. And and it's like. All of us are behind the patient, like giving each other silent high fives and stuff like that, pumping our fists like, oh, my God, it worked. You know, that's a cool feeling. But it's probably only about half the time. Yeah. So we're going to wrap up this podcast. And it's been very, very interesting, Dr. Gupta. We appreciate your insight. It's really interesting to hear that, you know, the typical methodology for a dentist would be to think along the lines of focusing on dental services or something dental. you know, quote unquote dental. But everything you're implementing in your practice that actually is a great practice builder drives new patients coming through the door through recommendations and family members is the personal care that you give. What you're saying to start looking at what could we do that doesn't cost a ton of money. And this list that you're going to send us, we're going to post on VivaLearning.com. And we really appreciate the permission from Dr. Gupta to do that. We'll have a list of things you can implement that could be a game changer, especially as these services get implemented or these extra steps of care get implemented over a period of years, right? It could be hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue besides having higher patient satisfaction rating. I really believe that it has. I believe that it's been a life changer for me. And it's made coming to work more fun. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing all that, Dr. Gupta. It's great to talk to people like you. That's what makes my life interesting doing these podcasts is I get to talk to inspiring dentists who really are thinking out of the box, doing things that are, like you said, making their practice in their life so much more fulfilling. It's great that you work with your wife and you can keep your marriage going. That's impressive right there. Again, thank you, Dr. Gupta, and I hope to have you on another webinar and a podcast soon. Of course. Thanks so much. It was a pleasure talking to you.