The real power in these patient commitments come from the fact that they are all interconnected, and the better you do at one, the easier it is for that next.

Here’s the circle that you make…

As you create stronger relationships by building more rapport with your patients, you then increase trust with them, leading to more personal connections.

Now that you have rapport, it’s much easier to have authentic conversations about their health, their goals, and their treatment as you go through your steps to engage them within your patient experience.

When you have rapport, it’s easier to ask about their goals and elaborate on what they want and what motivates them. Additionally, it’s easier for you to lay out firmly and clearly what your standards of care are and the pillars of health you believe.

It does get even better because the more you create that connection on the front end, the more you can engage them during the clinical case building and tie it back to their personal lives and objectives.

So many people get stuck on the primary area of concern or whatever “brought the patient in today.” That’s fine because it got them in the door. Still, with fundamental listening skills and the most basic question-asking, you can easily show them how this issue is actually linked to so many other factors of complete health.

One of the most overlooked parts of the patient experience is taking the patient to the end. As I said last week, the “crystal ball” approach I use for the vision of the future and (literally) beginning with the end in mind for the patients’ health.

All we have to do is ask and to extrapolate about the health of their teeth or their bite or their grinding and worn dentition and all the other things no different than we can do with ortho and then cosmetics on their rehabilitated occlusion and everything else.

This could be – “here’s where you are, let’s talk about where you want to end up…” or “now that we’ve established your current baseline for where your health is at, let’s talk about where you’re headed….”

You pick your approach based on the situation, the patient, and your practice’s clinical philosophy but just don’t overthink it – by pre-judging your patients. Just be honest, ask, engage, and have a complete conversation every single time.

In fact, every single visit should be complete with past, present, future as well as a beginning, middle, and end. I often talk about the before, during, and after stages of the patient experience, but it gets even more detailed than that – every single part of the patient experience has a before, during, after.

If you have rapport, you are more prepared and apt to engage entirely in case building. If you execute proper case building and engagement, you are in a position to have authority and bring the patient to complete case acceptance.

You see, they all link together. Your challenge and the part that requires discipline is found in three things that I ask you to commit to; not just in concept but most importantly, in practical execution and daily practice…

• • Complete Conversations
  • Comprehensive Diagnosis
  • Consistent Experience

There, it’s that easy.

So, your work today and every day is to remember to keep the main thing the main thing to accomplish the most important objective. That means preventing distractions, lower priorities, poor time management, rushing, being “busy,” miscommunications, or ineffective scheduling getting in the way – because you’ll be doing the very opposite of working smarter, not harder.

However, when you link these three principles together and commit to execution, patients will follow your lead, accept, invest, and go all-in on treatment acceptance.

Author: Scott J Manning, MBA

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Here at Content Maximiser, we have a program designed to help dental practices create lifelong relationships with their patients through digital marketing. It’s called the Practice Growth Program.

 

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