THE STORY:

Random coffee shop, 12pm July 2023

I was half way through my iced caramel latte when the dentist sitting across from me casually dropped an absolute bomb of info.

“When you first start working as a dentist, none of the patients at the practice know you yet -so they won’t trust you until you get a few more years of experience. Eventually you’ll get to a point where people innately trust whatever you recommend because you’ve built that bond.”

I thought 2 things immediately upon hearing that:

1. “whoa, I could get to a point where people just innately trust what I say?”

and 2: “a few more YEARS?!!”

Up until this point, I only knew progress in increments of 4 years lol - 4 years for this degree, 4 years for the next. But I quickly realized the real world didn’t work that way. In fact most people say you start to hit your stride around year 5 or so?! That’s like, being a super senior in school!!

More so, the thing that blew my mind was learning that people aren’t buying into treatment, they’re buying into you.

Cut to present day: I decided while I couldn’t accelerate the speed of time (that’ll be a side project to tinker on at home…), I could focus on things I could control, which were my communication skills and specifically how I pitched treatment to patients.

One of the key things I used to make sure I was headed in the right direction was case acceptances.

No matter the profession, case acceptance is a very important thing for you to understand in the world of healthcare. A “V.I.T” if you will. (Other V.I.T’s include keeping up to date with the newest TikTok Viral recipes and knowing if Mercury is currently in retrograde or not ((*at authors time of writing, it is currently not))

In dental terms, we might think of this as “did they book the filling or not?”. In the medical world you can think of it as “did they start taking the medication or pick up the prescriptions?”. You can customize this metric to be whatever your version of case acceptance is. 

So we calculate these metrics in terms of %s every week and every month - some months these percentages go up and sometimes they go down.

Now I want to mention, how we communicate is not the only thing influencing these #s, there are a lot of reasons why someone won’t book something, sure. But it’s at least the part we can control.

And I thought it would be a fun series on this podcast/newsletter if I document my road to increasing my case acceptances for you all to learn from!

I’m going to share my percentages, and as the weeks and months go by, I’ll be able to analyze and share with you what types of things helped my %s go up and which things may have contributed to them going down. Because we learn from our flops around here as well.

THE DATA: what my #s show

So todays newsletter is the first installment of this series! Disclaimer, I’m not good at math (I’m sure my dad reading this remembers our high school geometry at the dinner table).

so I promise if I can understand this, you can too.

The first metric I wanted to discuss is something called Patient Acceptance %. It is binary meaning yes or no - did the patient follow through on scheduling at least 1 treatment that you recommended? Let’s say you recommend they do 5 things, and they book 1. That is 100%, because yes, they booked something.

A good goal for patient acceptance % is 75-80%. For reference, these are my September 2023 #s:

Office 1 (1 day a week): 72%

Office 2 (3 days a week): 68%

The second metric I wanted to discuss is something called TREATMENT acceptance %. This is different because it is taking how much the patient booked in $ / the total amount recommended to patient in $

So if we recommended $1,000 of treatment to a patient, and they accept or book $200, that would be $200/$1,000 which is 20% (*sweating as I put this into my phone calculator over and over to make sure*)

A good goal for treatment $ acceptance % is >35%. For reference, these are my September 2023 #s:

Office 1 (1 day a week): 32%

Office 2 (3 days a week): 31%

BEFORE I BORE YOU I promise that’s it for the math!!!

When I reflect on why my numbers may have been below goal, the first thing that comes to mind is that I was getting in my own way.

Have you ever felt bad about telling someone that they have a cavity and need a filling? On top of that lets say there’s multiple treatment options - have you ever assumed you knew which option the patient would pick? 

I ask because these are very common experiences I had, and I noticed overcoming this came down to 2 things:

1. Becoming more curious

2. Remaining open minded - not assuming you know what patients want. 

Check out this week’s podcast episode here to hear more about ways that prioritizing curiosity and open mindedness have transformed my conversations.

NEXT VISIT: it’s your turn to try!

If this email has resonated with you, ask your workplace about what ways you could track your version of case acceptances.

In addition, there’s a couple things I keep in mind that help me remain not only curious and open minded, but confident and grounded in my recommendations. Give these tactics a try, and let me know if they work for you!

1. Ask yourself: “If this were my own mom, dad, sister - what would I want for them to do? What would I want their doc to tell them?”

2. Although no one wants to hear this news, remember the treatment you are recommending is supposed to HELP them. You shouldn’t feel guilty for a condition that you didn’t cause them to have, you didn’t put that disease there, so do not feel responsible.  

3. It takes a person to hear a recommendation on average 7 times before they actually go ahead with it - keep trying because you never know when you can be that 7th time, or how many times you’re adding up to that 7th time.

And now, onto the last segment of this newsletter: your BUZZY BITES, the pop culture news stories of the week to make small talk with - so you can talk to anyone about anything.

BUZZY BITES:

1. Did you know? Cruise vacations are on the rise, especially in younger people! Why is everyone you know going on a cruise all of the sudden? Read more here 

   

2. The picture perfect suburban home from movie, Home Alone is officially on the market for 5.25 million! Newly renovated in 2018, check out what the iconic home has become today here 

   

3. 3D is so 2000 and late, the newest trend is 4DX. Think smells, sounds and textures - ex. for the Warner Bros movie, Wonka, theaters pumped in the smell of chocolate during screenings. A recently released film with lots of hype for it’s 4DX effects is Furiosa. Read about how this is changing the movie industry as we know it here!

   

That’s all for this week’s newsletter, tune into next week’s for more fun! Reply if you are dental, pharmacy, medical or anything else! Would love to hear from you!!

Thanks for reading - if you liked what you read please share this with a friend! The more friends we can have in class the better! One of these days I’ll even bring in munchkins…

xoxo, Connie