Insurance Anonymous 2022

everybody what's up everybody coming in we're just getting set up so wait for a few minutes but as you're coming in tell us what's up in the chat and tell us where you're from what's up i'm going to start the chat so people can see where it's at where's the chat wow i can't type today so what what's up more people where are you from and how much are you paying for gas right now yeah and how much yeah that's a great question how much are

you paying for gas how much did you pay for gas this weekend yeah you just went to the gas station this morning uh we had to wait 10 minutes and pay 443 a gallon four uh 443 gallon okay last night i filled up my motor home because i'm going to motor homing after this and i think i paid four dollars and fifty cents five fifty eight a gallon holy cow where are you at matthew where are you actually 5.85 i guess yeah so those of you

just coming in say what's up in the chat tell us where you're from and how much you're paying for gas let's start with some mutual pain right yeah yeah let's do it oh that's right you're just at the gas station yes five bucks for your diesel truck ben yeah it's ridiculous i'm glad i worked from home now i only work 10 minutes from the office so it's not bad either yeah but i'm sure filling up a motorhome was a bit pricey yeah it was it's pretty

big it'll be a couple hundred bucks melissa's same in illinois same as genevieve tara working for colorado a lot yup connecticut ooh can i let's go to connecticut it's not too bad there 437. it's so much more affordable oh i hate 99. orange county ouch 4.90 yeah for those of you that are uh having people come to the office are you guys uh providing some benefits of helping out employees that's what i'm thinking about doing where are you yeah providing some uh benefits for just for

gas because i do enjoy there's uh oh 6 49 in setup holy smokes that's crazy um yeah i'm thinking about um justin and i we're thinking about uh doing some benefit benefits for our employees yes or something yeah because i think that's really important um um i'm a big thing she just got that from her boss yesterday oh awesome that's so awesome yeah that's that's what we've been thinking about doing here at boom cloud um because i really enjoy seeing people in the office and i

think i'm a big culture geek so i like i for some reason i'm a people person too so i think it's really important hey john i was just in your neighborhood two weeks ago where does he live in utah or were you out so in pa uh right next to scranton you know where the office was uh well the theme of the office was based out of isn't that where president biden's from too from wilkes-barre i don't know from scranton from scranton oh i think he

was like born there yeah i don't think he grew up there but yeah nice cool town there a nice nice nice small airport i like that airport i like that airport too a lot i used to have like two clients that i would visit at the same time when i would go there and uh yeah that's such an easy airport to get in and out of quick trip for you from chicago who is the most here okay we had was it santa barb santa barbara was

the most 649 wow hopefully you drive a uh official car [Laughter] that or a giant truck a diesel uh cool i think we'll uh get started here as people rolling in i see a few few more people rolling in say what's up in the chat and tell us how much gas prices you're paying where you're at but we'll get started here so uh really pumped to be on this webinar today with ben and genevieve uh two of my really good friends in the industry we've been

working together for some time ben i've known you for a while um since i started my company and now we are neighbors ben literally lives like five houses down for me and that was not planned that was just kind of happening it's so fun i love seeing ben in the neighborhood and uh if you have anybody doorbell ditching you or toilet papering you it's not me yeah right well jordan gave me some nice steaks it was really nice you know the really prime new york strip

and cooked it in his uh traeger that was actually really good i've never had the steak cooked that way oh yeah and it was uh it was awesome yeah it was quite an expensive that's all i how i cook it so i'm at steak snob so you like them and genevieve i've i've i've known you forever i think just shortly after i started boom cloud um we met each other and i'm just i'm happy that we're able to reconnect on a webinar again because we've all

been so busy and help practices reduce dependence on ppos and and uh combat the challenges of today's market so today this is how we're going to structure it ben is gonna go first ben what's your title of your topic i've spaced it i'm sorry bro we're gonna be doing breaking out of ppos how to drop an insurance plan or at least some suggestions on how to prepare to do that sweet so ben's gonna be talking about that awesome content i've done a lot of webinars and

speaking with ben and i always learn something new i'm going to be talking about dental membership growth hacks i think everyone at this day and age knows what a dental membership program is so i'll briefly talk about that but i'm going to talk about what is working in terms of growing a membership program because that seems to be the biggest challenge that practices have and then genevieve talk a little bit about what you'll be uh sharing with everybody i'm gonna bring us home with some verbal

skills so how we can help our patients accept our treatment regardless of what your insurance mix is so whether you're planning to drop some or you're working with insurance uh just creating opportunity and skills in your practice to reframe the role of dental insurance in the way our patients accept treatment yeah what is your nickname in the dental issue are you like the patient whisperer new patient listeners [Laughter] no i don't want to break but if you call the wrong number i'm going to die i'm

going to make you a dental appointment okay that's funny um no genevieve has lots of good content we i've been on lots of webinars podcasts and podcasts and i've seen genevieve speak live as well as with ben um genevieve you were the keynote speaker at adam last year i believe right yeah i thought it was actually really cool and really nerve-racking you nailed it so um i'm excited to hear from you again today so ben let's get this thing started bro um i allowed it so

you guys can share this screens with every with your your screen um let's see i'm not seeing your screen ben i just see black and it says ben tooney has started sharing screen now let me know when it pops up you should there we go there you go there is a prison that looks like it's like what prison is that do you know uh gosh i don't know this is uh this is the dental economics theme on this particular article yeah totally i borrowed it from

them [Laughter] sweet all right cool well welcome everybody it's great to be with you just some brief background about myself i think it's always fun for for individuals to go through their background how we got started in dentistry so i'll do that for here just a minute my background is relevant to what i do for a living and what i teach in dentistry as well so i'm from the south pacific i'm from a tiny tiny tiny island nation called american samoa you can see there on

the middle right section of that map uh this is this map is called oceania and i had no idea that this was oceania until i think uh when my son started fifth grade he said dad did you know that you grew up in oceania oceania i grew up in american samoa what's ocean he's a fifth grader so i guess uh if i were to play that game smarter than fifth grade i'd probably lose um you feel better my boyfriend's from australia and he asked me if

i'd been to oceania and i said i've never even heard of it what the hell is that i grew up there is that like a lost city or something [Laughter] yeah being american samoa it's a u.s territory it's one of the five years territories but it's actually considered um an unincorporated territory of the united states because we have our chief government that is run by the high chiefs and then we have the u.s government which is the governor and and then the house of representatives and

so we have one congressional congressional i'm sounding like someone right now we have one congressional delegate a member of congress that's a non-voting delegate so we have representation in congress but we're considered united states nationals which is a version of citizenship but not full citizenship simply because of the um government component we still own our own land which is cool um where my family lands uh my property our family land it's kind of in the middle section where you see that's not they made a mistake

on this it says leona on the bottom that should say leone so just just above that is several thousand acres that are tribe owns and so part of the government set up there is american samoans can still the families can still own their land it's not federal property which is great for us uh simply because for generations and generations and generations kids get to go back home right where they can build a house and not necessarily incur a mortgage um you know this is uh when

you look at the entire south pacific i guarantee well i bet you won't be able to find the psalm 1 island chains immediately you see hawaii there in the center samoa is south if you just go down to where the cook islands in tonga is samoa is right above that um on the right of fiji um i grew up in an environment where it was literally third world in fact i still have family members there this is a a picture of a a collection board at

one of the more popular grocery stores in samoa and you know you see here david telling the middle heels that store 140 uh there's a there's a legal group here that owes quite a bit of money it's kind of funny this is like a public shaming publicly the 1980s version of wow sunday school 1 260 bucks yeah and they do this because it's so embarrassing like law connection agency 86 it's so embarrassing for people to be uh posted uh you know on a public forum there

where everybody can see but um for people that don't pay their speeding tickets the the police department posts their names in the newspaper in a long place now and but this is the environment that i grew up in that's hilarious here's uh so when are we gonna start shaming the insurance execs yeah we'll get to that here in a minute so check out this one here you guys i mean right yeah read this you know that's what i thought first time i saw is of course

you probably don't understand what i mean i don't know what i said you know basically what this says is that if you don't have a t-shirt you're not permitted into the store because it is not pleasing to the site and this was the grocery store of um the kim's their korean and uh they've been renting our family um building for many for 30 40 years and i walk in this day and i i go up to miss kim and said so mrs kim if i if

i come in and i don't wear a t-shirt are you you're not going to let me say no no you ugly you get out of here you go you know you wet t-shirt she starts just yelling at me and so the the very next day you know i'm thinking about how to give her a hard time because i have to go back in and buy more groceries the next day i go in and i say hey mrs kim so if this guy walked into your store

like this would you let him into all the rock you know she kind of had a little out of body experience everybody wants to rock back home because he's from samoa i said what about this dude will you let him in it's just all roman reigns oh yeah wwe 11. what about this dude you know junior seau football player well known and he's like oh yeah absolutely let these guys in so the next day i come back and i come back without sure [Laughter] sure enough

she kicks me out so i sent her a letter and i raised her rent because of that just kidding but that's the environment that i live in you know it's a very third world environment in fact this is a typical house we call them fales wow this is actually a very current home that a family lives in you know you can see that there's sand on the bottom there so i don't think you don't have to feel sorry for people like this because uh these this

is paradise um when you live like this totally off the grid you don't have a whole lot in terms of worry um you know kids like myself grew up in environments like this where we thrive we come to the united states we learn how to speak english we go to college and universities and we find our way right um knowing that where we came from this well what a lot of people would perceive as a struggle um i i sometimes wish i would go back to

this environment to escape all this entrance bs right but that's a little bit about me where i came from who i am um and and the purpose of this particular segment of this course um is how to deal with insurance companies from the perspective of firing them right without your patients firing you and genevieve is probably one of the foremost experts on the communication component that's why she's last you know even before beast before beauty in this case where jordan and i are going to go

first but the real content in terms of how to how to navigate this retention patient retention is all about the communication right and the experience that the patients have with you but i want to talk briefly about my why i talked a little bit about my background but you know what's the why why why do you come to these courses and i guess it's obvious right why why are you even in dentistry you know sadly over the last couple of years a point of pain with

most businesses in most industries is that people leave right they're not coming back to these industries and you ask yourself why um interestingly people that have left dentistry a couple of years ago are coming back right because when they really think about their why like dentistry is what i know and it's what i love right it may seem tough uh at the time but from a career perspective we tend to we tend to navigate to things that we know best in terms of my why you

know why i do what i do why i teach what i teach there's a lot of things that i teach that are against a lot of what of uh some of the well-known dental professionals believe or what they teach as it pertains to how we're dealing with insurance mine is completely different because of how i well my experience right um i'm going to share a few set of slides for you and invite you into my home for just a minute but i want to forewarn you

that the next set of images that will explain my why they include images of a premature child a 24 week or to be exact and i recognize that we might have some parents on this webinar that have experienced a premature child in the past and that can bring up some pain i apologize about that in advance if you want to shut your screen off and just listen to this for a second please do so but bear with me because this is really the foundation of my

presentation the foundation of what i teach in dentistry and you know as you get to know me you'll you'll learn that this is really what started my thought process on how to fight insurance plans um i'd like for you to meet my son welton there's a video here i hope it doesn't play and forgive me i'm starting to experience some allergies here so this is welton as i mentioned delivered at 24 weeks gestation so some background of this as as many of you may have guessed

polynesian it's like you know you ask a polynesian have you played football or any kind of sport in college or professionally i did i played uh football for the university of arizona back when it was the pac-10 in the 1990s and my wife played softball for uh a university out in virginia so athletes right we're we're very active and getting into our late 30s i got married when i was 28 and had a kid when i was 30. and naturally um you know the older you

get especially for um a person like my wife who's a type 1 diabetic the more risks and complications there are to a pregnancy right so in this case at 19 weeks gestation she started to show signs of kidney failure and at that point the doctors ordered her to be on bed rest at home which we followed to a t uh by 22 weeks gestation at that point we took her in because you could see her her eyes um her skin everything was starting to change in

color her demeanor her mental capacity to remember and talk was starting to decline so at that point the perinetologist recommended emergency let's put her into an in-hospital setting admitting her into the hospital put her on um i uh you know you have the ivs and and all that other stuff and monitoring and so forth the goal was to get her to week 24 of the pregnancy and the reason why is because um 20 22 weekers don't survive there's like a less than a one percent chance

of survival 23 weekers there's a five percent chance of survival 24 weeks that's above a 90 chance of survival because that's when the organs are are almost viable enough to be able to operate on their own with a little assistance so we got to week 24 24 weeks and one day um at that point they ran some tests and they the the the labs came back and you know all the all the um diagnostics came back to show that my wife was experiencing heart failure so

in that moment the obs came in in scrubs and they said look we have to save mom we have to save the baby and the best treatment plan is a c-section and that's what you're seeing here the result of that this is literally five minutes after deceased well after my son was removed from my wife's body um that's me that's my left hand draped over his body this kid was one pound 10 ounces and 13 inches in height at 24 weeks quite an amazing feat for

the medical community to be able to serve children born this early you know with all the technologies and the advances that they know now in the realm of uh sciences to help these children at this young age you know after this photo was snapped i went back to the room the the or where they were closing my wife um and then we wheeled her back to her recovery room by you know she's sedated um heavily sedated at that point so she is knocked out and i

sit there in the room just thinking and pondering and praying you know i'm i come from the background of being a um a jock right i you know excuse me playing football and going to vegas and doing naughty things which you kind of talked about before the webinar but at this point you know 30 years old first time having a child and in my community that's odd right usually kids here have children as early as age age 19 and i'm not mocking that but we were

old folks right we were old farts having kids later in our 20s and early 30s which was unusual but for me i kind of felt you know what it's time to grow up this it's time to put put the toys and the games aside and really focus on what to do next right be a man so i so i pondered and i prayed and i've tried to figure out family of now three the only one that's not in a hospital bed how can i be the

best for my wife and my son and into this experience in this quiet room 11 30 p.m dark i hear this faint knock on the door a gentleman opens the door and he's wearing business attire he has a stack of documents and i thought okay you know a clergy person is coming in to say a prayer maybe so he opens the door and he whispers to me and says mr twinkie said no no it's mr tuning oh man uh congratulations on being a first-time father my

name is so-and-so and i'm i'm the billing manager of this hospital i'm here to give you informed consent about the next phase in your sense treatment that kind of shocked me because uh leading up to this particular event informed consent always came from a doctor right or a nurse or a technician right somebody that was in a lab coat coming in that was involved in the treatment um i immediately knew that this person came in to talk about either insurance right or money which is the

same thing when it comes to medical services medical treatment so we stepped out of the door and i started asking how can i help you well mr two and i'm here because your son needs um an urgent open heart surgery and the short and skinny about it because it's so urgent is that um if he doesn't get this surgery within the next hour his he'll suffocate his lungs will flood with blood his heart will stop and he'll be no more so what the hospital is currently

doing is they're sterilizing and the space around your son's incubator right where you left him uh and they're creating an operating room in that section those doctors are scrubbing in the nurses are scrubbing in all we need for you to do is sign this document this consent documents approach so that we can proceed with this treatment he then handed me i don't have a room of paper in my office but anyway it was about that thick right and i looked at the last page and was

603 pages and he said yeah just sign this form and and we'll do our very best to me that was a huge concern because i've never in my career at this point this is in 2010 never in my life or in my dealings with physicians oral surgeons dentists specialists have dealt with a consent form an informed consent document that was longer than three pages right and was written in in confusing legal language a lot of informed consent is very clear on paper so that you understand

that as an individual what's really going on right it's the law so he he handed me the stack and i i turned to him and i said hold on um what am i signing for five minutes we have this really foolish debate here's me trying to get in information right understand what the risks are what exactly is going on what the alternatives are and this guy is just pressuring me and saying look if if you don't sign this document you are you're guaranteeing that your son

will die if you sign it you'll at least give him a fighting chance and at that point i turned to him and i said well here's where i'm coming from is that even if i do sign this document not being fully informed do you realize that the hospital is still on the hook for liability if my son dies because i don't really know what i'm agreeing to at that point he finally he uh caved i guess and gave in through the towel and he says well

then um essentially what's going on here is that the neonatal cardiothoracic surgeons that normally deal in this type of surgery they are considered non-participating with your plan in other words they're out of network so therefore they cannot be made available under your plan terms to be able to provide the surgery however we do have in the hospital that doctors that are here tonight other doctors that have experience with this surgery that are scrubbing in and by authorizing them to perform the surgery um you're essentially you

know giving the hospital permission to use those those doctors and i thought that was kind of odd that kind of led me to the next question what's what's the success rate what's the survival rate difference right so starting with the cardiothesis surgeons any guesses anybody want to throw in the chat uh what you think what percentage do you think and i know we don't have all the information but just guess 40 50 80 90 100 so cardiothoracic surgeons in this particular hospital it was a 95

success rate pretty good right the general surgeons and this is the part that well i'll just i'll just say it before i get into that essentially when he got to the general surgeon's success rate in this hospital their batting average it was 15 one five and at that point the whole idea of becoming a man just went out the window the uh the warrior and me started to come out and i had to be very patient because in my mind i was thinking and i won't

use profanity i i recognize that that's not always professional but sometimes we're tempted to say right like i am right now creation warrants it i think yeah i in my head i was like what the f is this about why is an insurance company or why is the the insurance plan dictating my choices why are they eliminating options how do they get to decide what a child gets in terms of quality care and i conveyed some of that to the billing manager but because of the

urgency of the surgery that needed to be done immediately i said look i'm going to turn this piece of paper over blank page i'm going to write high-tech insurance waiver and i'm sure you're aware of the high-tech act that passed last year right federal law applicable in all 50 states i have a legal right to put insurance aside and pay for this treatment directly you understand that yes sir i do so i signed that document i said i want the i want the cardiothoracic surgeons i

want the best surgeons possible i want the best batting average period i want the best quality care that's the end of the story can you help me with that absolutely gave him a credit card for collateral and they proceeded with that treatment that day so this is uh a picture of my son several years later and forgive me my computer is deciding not to be very cooperative so i'll get to that here in just a minute but naturally yeah the question of survival yes he did

survive so this is him uh three years old tybee beach where my wife is from i mean look at those beautiful teeth right those are nice arches it no longer exists because he's 11 years old with adult teeth now two years old the incredible hulk with beautiful abs now i'm not a dentist i've never served up as a clinician in my life at any extent but this is my first ever extraction i hope you're impressed and this is him thinking he was in vegas this night

you know who knows but you know the point of the story is is that when it comes to treatment and don't worry the screen is blank on purpose when it comes to medical services no matter what it is dental services medical services it is my belief that the best care should be the first and only option other than the informed consent part about what if i do nothing discussion right i think we get too hung up a lot of times i'm giving way too many options

i mean for crown treatment restorations oftentimes i mean jordan's seen this in his lab at his father's lab where you know the because of the insurance reimbursements are so low oftentimes we're tempted to use the cheapest materials right oh yeah jordan saw any lab many lab slips with that instruction yeah what what happened tell us what happened jordan oh a lab slip came in with a with a case and it basically it said please use the cheapest materials available and this particular office uh was signed

with pretty much every ppo under the sun and that was their mentality of just just give us the cheapest and i thought to myself i'm like man if i were this patient and i read this i would be really angry that nobody was focused on quality uh of even just my my tooth right um but that's that's kind of the the gist of the story that we got many lab slips like that coming in that just said just use the cheapest uh materials possible it's kind

of sad right it's sad that irritated me big time yeah where we're at so this this presentation is not meant to be a doom and gloom there's hope simply because at the end of the day we're forced into position when we're dealing with insurance as patients right and guardian of patients as doctors on your end to deal with insurance and it's almost inescapable from that perspective because either you're going to deal with them as an in-network provider under an enormous amount of restrictions or you can

deal with them as an unrestricted provider with no restrictions which is what we're going to talk about but i want to go through something as it pertains to trust you know there's this real cool story about a guy by the name of derek hamilton who was uh falsely imprisoned in 1996 derek was convicted of a murder that he didn't commit during his two-year decades stay or 20-year uh stay in a heavily gated barred hotel or in other words a prison hamilton became a jailhouse lawyer he

helped many of his fellow inmates appeal their convictions on his own account and during his 23rd year of prison confinement he was successful in convincing prosecutors that he was wrongfully convicted recently hamilton took on a new role in his calling to fight just excuse me to fight injustice as a successful plaintiff the legal experience he learned in lock-up molded him into one of the greatest advocates for those who are charged for crimes he did not commit hamilton was awarded a 7 million settlement for imprisonment that

was based upon false and fabricated evidence from a legal system to design to protect its citizens think about that for a second when dental insurance was first started and we know the history of that right california dental association was started by the excuse me delta dental california started by california dental association oregon started its version of delta washington state started its version of delta and we created these programs based upon trust right where we were going to serve the community doctors at that time received um

adequate compensation or at least fair compensation uh back then and this was in the 1950s right that whole fair compensation model started to disappear in the 1980s and 1990s simply because the the people that were running the delta dentals of the world changed right where they were insurance brokers or you know ceos that were non-clinical you know you look in this day and age and this is something that jordan will share to you know inflation is seven to eight percent we talked about gas prices and

this is another slide that i ripped off from you jordan so thank you very much kind sir any time brother yeah we share we share a lot of content you know the ada and agd is is basically asking the interest companies to help you know help with ppe costs do something you know the practices are suffering which is true and then what happens after all this inflation happens after the agd all the association is trying to plead with the insurance industry cigna comes back and says

f you mother effort i'm gonna give you a 15 and 36 percent cut right yeah delta dental comes in some states and they say you know what we're going to follow what sickness says screw you 10 and 20 to cut for you sir and ma'am dana max 7 to 18 you know the initial feeling that you have is you know this emoji right which kind of follows the whole trend of okay well now we're going to be very sad we're going to start by being a

little shocked that's the oh emoji that's what we call it yankee one of the dentists in the back said ah you know the f word he just he just blotted out really because that the emotions are real right washington state a friend of mine who practices there said i had no idea that some of my team members were standing in the food bank applying right um and so he started to give back he started to recognize the need knowing that the insurance companies are not going

to help his practice so he started to help his team right and we're kind of all in that position in terms of this whole realm of inflation how do we address that from an interest participation perspective and that's that's what we're going to talk about here briefly right i keep in mind this is going to be um a very short discussion on some steps that i recommend to go out of network with insurance plans and by having this discussion in a webinar format just know that

this is not in violation of any antitrust regulations because we're just talking about and giving suggestions not necessarily advocating or colluding for you to drop insurance you can make those decisions on their own we all know the realities actually we looked up the realities of dental insurance only six percent so this is 2019 data 2019 and before as you probably are aware uh dentistry utilization um has declined in a lot of states but 2019 pre pre-2019 only six percent of people within a deal plan reached

their annual max 22 percent uh received the benefit for a restorative procedure or paid a deductible only 36 percent of adults were considered active the interesting thing is that children um for medicaid only 52 and every that's the average of every state on utilization for ppo it's 51 one of the more alarming uh things that we learned about insurance is what they call a loss ratio right the money that they collect in terms of premiums what do they lose in the form of a benefit that

they pay out to provide to doctors they call that a loss ratio so stupid right we as an insurance company lost 50 because we had to pay the dentist half of the dollar you know that was paid in premiums that's bs only 50 cents on the dollar for a ppo is actually used towards ppo benefits so the question becomes do these institutions have a budget to pay more and it's a stupid question because we all know the answers that absolutely they do so i want to

talk about a couple of things first this whole idea behind why do employers and patients alike flock to the dental plans that have the most in-network participation well that's because um the insurance industry when they sell like the brokers that sell dental insurance when they go to an employer they'll say well delta dental is the most endorsed dental plan by the doctors so therefore you should be buying a dental plan that is endorsed by the doctors why does why do the brokers do that well that's

because the number one most trusted professional are nurses and in that category are hygienists and dental assistants and then number two are doctors in the category of doctors dentists are number five right you're consistently in the top five to ten most trusted professionals according to the gallup polling and you talk about where the insurance industry is holy smokes they don't even rank right in congress [Laughter] anyway that's why they say that go with the plan that's most endorsed is simply because that's a that's a that's

a way for the entrance industry to lease your credibility to lease the trust that the public already has in you um i'm gonna skip that video um so here's a case study behind dental plans that are most popular in most states that coincide with the largest number of in-network providers of course we all know delta blue cross united concordia especially in military communities metlife and aetna sometimes cigna if you're in texas where a lot of the school districts use cigna and everybody and every doctor in

those communities are in network with cigna the point is is that we are the ones that tend to mistakenly give the insurance companies the authority to make these fee cuts simply because whenever they do these fee cuts there's not enough protest right there's not enough uh of a protest to take away that quote-unquote endorsement by the way who endorses insurance plans as on the clinical side of dentistry i don't know anybody that really does you know this whole relationship between doctors and insurance carriers was initially

founded on the basis of trust and teamwork but you know it's no secret that the insurance industry is the one that's really benefiting here's an executive list delta dental of washington this is your public shaming board now from yeah you know and and and this is actually public information why sure delta dental of washington is a not-for-profit organization so you're entitled to know this stuff if you're in the state of washington or any state where delta dental is filed as a not-for-profit but this is the

pattern right where you have people that work or a person that gets two and a half million dollars doesn't do any work here's a list of ceos what uh what do you think when you see something like this by the way these are base salaries these are not the bonuses when you add bonuses you know aetna ceo makes towards 50 million 60 million dollars you know on some years but the point of this is that uh there's a lot of money that's not being used the

loss ratios as an example right there's a lot of money that's not used by the insurance plans on actual benefits which were if i were paying for dental benefits knowing that half of my contributions for my employees is half of it's not going towards benefits i'd be pissed right you know what uh ben this uh matt just even commented in uh it wasn't publix i don't want everybody to see it but he's pointing out that a lot of people who are listed as endorsing dentists are

retired and dead and that exactly what you're saying it provides them credibility that they have all of these participating doctors that might not even be true interesting that is another trick that the insurance company uses is they will retain doctors they'll choose to not re-credential a doctor that's retired or where the license expires they're like oh well we'll just overlook it and clean it up maybe 20 years down the road we'll remove that even on that list yeah yeah but that's that's another trick that they

use so my suggestion was let's cut out these insurance plans right they're toxic they're poisoned but i get it i get that when we have discussions about dropping insurance we get nervous right we're always afraid of patient attrition so here's a few steps that i recommend before you even drop an insurance plan these are things that i recommend that you do step one entrance profile um i recommend now when i'm using the fair health database if you want to google fairhealth you can check it out

i recommend the 80th percentile for fair health and the reason why is because most insurance plans like aetna metlife guardian cigna they all have an agreement with me with fair health to use either the 70th or 80th percentile what you'll find on the fair health website is that their 80th percentile comes out to so the ndas database um about their 65th percentile and the 88s percentiles are pretty close to that around the 65th so you're not necessarily overpriced when it comes to setting your fees up

at the fair health 80th percentile my pick for a paid fee analysis is is benco but what they put together for their clients is phenomenal in terms of helping you assess not just where to set your fees but what impact it can have on a long term basis you can buy a fee assessment from fee estimator dot org and by the way i'm not a paid spokesperson for any of the organizations that i recommend i just recommend them based upon my experience on what works best

for even clients that we serve fiestimator.org if you buy something from them it's just a straight percentile right i recommend contacting uh if you want to have a more in-depth analysis benko is a perfect perfect partner to to ask for that type of fee analysis unfair health this is what ha this is what you see we'll just quickly go through this for the sake of time now the out of network instant pricing in the middle right section there um the out of network uh uninsured price

that's that's the 80th percentile if you read through the website you'll find that for a personal ceramic crown 1512 in this particular community in seattle washington is considered the 80th percentile as i mentioned the banker reporting is far more in-depth you get something like this and there's like 10 other pages that come with this in terms of an analysis and this is this is against the ndas which is very very effective as well in terms of fees the point folks is that it's so important for

you to assess your fees now right especially with inflation and if you go out of network with certain plans where they're willing to compensate you as at the 80th percentile out of network and you're at the 40th percentile you're gonna be losing out on a lot of potential income there part two is how you are contracted with insurance sometimes you might find that the denim acts contract governs me life aetna emeritus and a bunch of others it's important for you to sort that out right and

that way when you terminate these plans you know exactly where to go and you're not wasting a lot of time trying to cancel aetna by talking to aetna directly when you're adding a contract is actually through dynamaxx right so get with your team members and put together that assessment on hey who are we in network with i have to tell you it's amazing how many offices literally don't even know who exactly they're in network with and yeah what they have posting eobs have no sense of

whether or not what they're looking at is correct or incorrect or hey this should have been processed under this different like there they've no awareness of it at all and there's no master list and there's no nobody in the entire office knows somebody who was an office manager 10 years ago set it all up kind of crazy the crazy thing is too like with this umbrella these umbrella you call them umbrella policies or leasing agreements ben is that what this is yeah that's that's what it

also makes it so complicated complicated running practices and kind of seems scammy yeah yeah you have to you have to have your ongoing list right who has met life really paying under if there be paying under dynamax or mavericks or carrington platinum you have to straighten that out just for the sake of like what genevieve and jordan said you just have to know how to how to manage these things and if they underpay you which is happening quite a bit you'll know right but for the

purpose of dropping insurance putting together this assessment is very important the reason why is when you read further on the fair health website you'll find that aetna has agreed to follow fair health's 80th percentile so on and so forth with sigma guardian and midlife and so that kind of begs the question you know when you uh when you assess and research how these insurance companies pay out of network which one should you start with for me in most communities that's meant life in many in many

other communities it's aetna but the four top out of network paying plans in the country are metlife aetna guardian and cigna and i start with one of those simply because if you were to drop let's say a united concordia right where out of network benefits really suck meaning patients now have to pay 50 of their preventative care visit whereas a lot of aetna metlife guardian and sigma plan still cover 100 out of network for preventative care and at the fair health 80th percentile if you charge

the 80th percentile so when you start with a plan that has friendly out of network benefits it builds confidence in your team so that they hurt they sort of build this um uh courage right so that the next plans that you drop they're not afraid they know somewhat what to expect so it's a teaching platform for those particular patients um so so in terms of this initial analysis you know where to start i i would look at one of those four plans as a teaching platform

to drop insurance if you're on any of them now this part about uh membership plans i'm gonna skip that because that is my buddy jordan's section here and i'm just gonna wrap up here real quick with uh the team training membership plans are a critical component to dropping insurance and once you put that in place you know training your team and getting them ready to maximize your membership plan but also to retain patients is going to be very very important now some tips as it pertains

to the communication well uh just in general as it pertains to going out of network is that you always have to maintain control of the conversation with your patients right this is just true in any facet of of being you know at the front office in dental you're in charge right patients shouldn't be dictating conversations and treatment there are a lot of bullies uh a lot of patients that no matter what they give you a hard time and dropping insurance is a perfect way to weave

them out right not and not necessarily have to deal with them on a long-term basis and then the other part is i like to spice up the language which genevieve is going to talk about here in in about an hour so i use unrestricted but i also clarify why tell patients that unrestricted is out of network right but our focus is quality care i've talked to so many doctors in the last couple of weeks that have been through this journey of going out of network and

they've all agreed that the quality care discussion with patients matter now of course this is being recorded where you can reaccess this later but what i want to get to here are just a couple of recommendations on verbiage when i talk to patients you know during the the part where we're not out of networking we're in the process of terminating well i'll say something like this hey i just want to give you a quick heads-up we're in the process of making a change with our status

our participation status with your dental plan we are actually shifting to an unrestricted status that does mean out of network but the reason why we're going unrestricted is because the current in-network restrictions threatens your quality of care and we just you know for us quality of care is non-negotiable and we would never do that to our patients so as a result within the next couple of months you will you'll get a letter from us and that'll kind of explain things in further detail about our journey

to go to the status to protect you as our patient we just want you to have the very best you know you talk about something like that you can even add a few things that you know that that doesn't mean you have to switch dental offices we're still going to help file benefits for you and accept assignment of benefit and things of that nature but at the end of the day i always close with this is designed to make sure that you get the very best

care possible keep in mind patients already have some level of distrust with their insurance plan right or with the insurance industry in general and some of you may be thinking well that's not true because when when susie q calls delta dental and then delta dental calls me and says i shouldn't charge that to the patient now this patient gets upset calling me a fraud well the reason why that conversation with susie q started in the first place with delta dental is because her hr department said

delta is endorsed by the majority of the deaths so therefore you know delta is the best way to go in terms of dental treatment delta robbed you of that credibility right for these these are for patients unfortunately it's not all of them it's a small share of them that are just dead set on this insurance dependent uh part right where you will never escape patients being insurance dependent and frankly from what i've seen and genevieve and threatening to talk to this a little bit more is

that when we go through this journey of dropping insurance especially with metlife cigna aetna as the first insurance plans to drop the patient attrition is usually less than 10 when you implement good communication policies which makes all the difference in the world of retaining 90 to 95 of patients versus retaining only 70 you know 50 to 70 of patients the communication component is the difference now on all these of course you're welcome to email me for the this obvious my recommendations on the scripting for a

small fee of five thousand dollars i will share any of this [Laughter] the price of admission is as free as it pertains to me sure i have some of the same stuff too so we can and i can send it off as well so absolutely it is critical to drop it here's a question for you ben real quick from melissa hi how you doing um do you do you recommend when dealing with a dso with multiple offices that we would drop an insurance plan at all

locations at once or would you recommend keeping one or two offices that maybe need more patience and funnel patients to those offices good question um yeah for dsos it's a little bit tougher to institute a global policy in that state to drop insurances all at once my first rule of thumb with dsos as it pertains to insurance participation is that it i recommend it's always handled on a per state basis right because every state is different alabama blue cross blue shield is your number one um

in terms of patience and then pennsylvania it's delta and united concordia so it's different right in a state i recommend that you assess things based upon the individual practice needs if many practices are booked out which is a good indication that you probably shouldn't be on any as many in network participation agreements those had those practices when i was running a dso i handled them differently than practices that were in growth mode right um so the decision on dropping insurance because everybody works in that office

right sometimes you might have team members that are working in a couple of offices but at the end of the day we looked at each of the individual offices to see what they need in terms of a boost to go either out of network or retain in network participation so that was a good question very good so i'm going to wrap up here and then by the way i'll be on the chat to help answer questions you can chat me directly or just on the general

form i'll get you your questions answered and that way we keep moving along so the kodak study good friend of ours gary takas who runs every driving dentist podcast so he he was a genius and looked at the kodak study and basically what the kodak study says on the bottom the very last line there where a 20 increase means the same profit on 55.5 percent of sales volume let me convert that to dental language if you raised your fees or your reimbursements or income revenue from

a particular dental plan by only 20 which by the way going out of networking you typically raise it goes up by almost 40 but if all you get is 20 more that means you can lose 45 and a half percent of your patients and your profit margins are the same from a revenue perspective and we see this consistent with almost every dental practice when you drop a plan like metlife um you could lose 33 to 37 percent of your met like patients and you're you're at

a break-even point in terms of your revenue you're making the same revenue compared to seeing 100 of the patients under the big steep in-network discounts um but the profits change at that level simply because you're not incurring the same overhead on the patients that left even though your revenue is the same with 35 of those patients gone your profit margin still goes up by roughly about seven to ten percent so all in all what that means is that you have a lot of room for mistakes

when it drops when it comes to dropping insurance i recommend not tolerating too many mistakes the goal is to retain at least 85 percent or more of these patients as you walk out of network and really the best way to do that is i'll talk to genevieve and myself don't do it this guy but he's like ah these sons this is about me they all take delta i'm going to bring their practices down that way their patients will come to me let's be kind to each

other life is hard enough now i'm so that's it folks i'm going to be on chat the next two hours jordan is going to talk about membership plans and genevieve is going to talk about the communication component and this all ties together to give you at least some idea on a transition to a fee for service or out of network practice with as many ppos as you feel is necessary jordan i yield both the screen and mike back to you my friend thanks dog you like

that oh that's my contacts by the way snap a picture of that let me i'm switching screens here hopefully i can choose the right one zoom always changes things on me but we'll figure it out here we are all right real quick oh let me enable the chat this always turns my chat off when i present it here okay just real quick in the chat everybody tell me who has a membership plan who doesn't if you have a membership plan put yes if you don't put

no in the chat real quick finding the chat here okay yes yeah just so i can engage the audience and um take care of people who need to understand what it is and understand cool that gives me a good enough uh good mix awesome okay well i'll explain what a membership program is in a little bit here my definition of it um but my course is titled membership growth hacks i am obsessed with helping grow predictable recurring revenue for practices it's been my passion for a

long time now and i'm excited to be on this webinar with you guys uh educating it this is uh this is a little bit about me um i do like to play the guitar as you can see in that gif running or running in loops um i've been in the dental industry for over 15 years i used to manage a dental lab in fact a lot of our clients and friends of the dental lab would vent to us about the problems of dental insurance and it

would trickle down to the dental lab and it would just bother me so much in addition to that my mother is an office manager and growing up we worked she worked from home so i heard every conversation she had with an insurance company plus a few little swear words here and there about them um ben and i you know yeah yeah she's she's awesome um ben and i wrote a podcast called uh the navigating dental insurance uh podcast say no to ppos.com i'm the founder and

ceo of boom cloud which is a software company that helps uh manage membership plans and i hate dental insurance that's a little bit about me um so i'd like to chat a little bit about how insurance companies are attacking the your practice and your business so i i tend to focus on three things um why i think and know how insurance companies are attacking your practice number one they attack your cash flow they make it really challenging to have steady cash flow streams and it takes

a lot of work and admin work to get the revenue needed from insurance patients number two the profit margins ben talked a lot about that in his presentation your profit margins are being attacked uh and then number three the patient experience often patients blame your practice for insurance issues or maybe the patient doesn't understand how the insurance plan works but you're you're blamed uh because that's just how it works um these are three vital things in any type of business that are being attacked um i'm

gonna be talking a lot of the cat well all three of these things cash flow profit margins and patient experience in in in the lens of how membership programs can help elevate your practice in these three things and start moving away from insurance and being a little bit more confident ben mentioned a story earlier today about my experience at the dental lab where we would see lab slips all the time uh that you know say give us please give us the cheapest material possible um and

i just don't think it's possible to give quality dentistry and and be a part of all the ppos ben and i are here in utah where it seems like every practice ben is is signed with every ppo under the sun it's so it's i mean i saw it on the on the dental lab side with a lot of their clients but i'm i'm just amazed now running running boom cloud and seeing a lot of the utah practices how they're just uh attacked in so many ways

with these ppos so my my solution is cut those suckers out right uh ben ben mentioned this as well um we'll repeat it just uh very briefly but we are at a time where you know the ada and other organizations are warning us of inflation and encouraging well in bold we've got wage inflation hitting i even seen wage inflation in my own company which has been very interesting to manage but um in bold here then at the end it says it's extremely important to have this

conversation with dental insurance payers and ask them to be fair in discussing fee issues with dental offices now ben showed multiple slides where uh basically they said uh what was it ben f you mother efforts from your uh slide something like that something like that and start started uh cutting or what uh ppo started cutting more is that what it seemed you you gave a whole list i don't memorize all the numbers yeah yeah delta guard well all those plans started cutting fees by 10 to

30 percent sure as a response to this yeah i'm sure yeah sounds like great business partners if i uh back to my slide with the three cash flow issues profit margin issues and patient experience issues if i had an employee or even a business partner that did those that hurt my business in those three ways i'd fire their ass so i think it's time we we uh we do that with insurance companies i've been talking about how we can do that and how membership program can

uh aid with that uh effort in your practice ben mentioned also inflation rate 7.9 percent i'm going to talk about how when this next slide i'm going to talk about how membership programs in subscription revenue can help your practice with that and then we'll go into what a membership program is and then growth tactics uh those that's my favorite thing is talking about how to grow these things it's a it's definitely a volume game uh when you're using membership when you have a membership program so

subscription revenue i've been talking a lot about this lately with inflation on the rise the reason why subscription revenue from membership programs is so important especially whether it's a a recession or inflation challenges we're dealing with in the industry uh recurring revenue is really easy to manage and to increase where you can get revenue control we're seeing this across the nation when practices have healthy membership programs with thousands of members that they're easy they're as inflation rises they're able to increase their subscription costs like that

and have revenue control um across a platform of patients membership patient patients be specific um another cool thing that we see is happening is members buy more so in a time where inflation is rising some of the best strategies are to get recurring revenue and then to figure out how to expand revenue from your existing patients and naturally membership programs patients buy three times more with your practice or say yes to treatment three times more is probably another better way to say it improves the patient

loyalty in the relationship um i'll do a poll here in a minute um with some of the subscriptions that we're part of as consumers and we'll we'll discover what that does to us but also membership programs allow you to reduce dependence on ppos which is a profit increaser as ben mentioned in his presentation helps you increase profits and then automating tasks and um using automation in this day of age reducing the human element of tasks is going to help during times of inflation so there's lots

of really cool things that we can do to combat this and to increase profits so i'm going to skip a couple slides and go right to membership 101. so for those of you that don't have membership programs this segment is for you for those of you that do have membership programs and maybe doing it a little bit off from my definition this is for you as well so my definition of a membership program it's an alternative dental insurance managed and designed by your practice where patients

pay an automated subscription monthly or yearly subscription fee to get access to certain benefits and discounts or savings to your office that you design and you manage right a good example outside of dentistry is amazon prime membership so if you have amazon prime in the chat put an a in the chat or prime whatever you want to do so a or prime so if you have amazon prime put a or prime in the chat we'll see this go yeah it seems like does anybody not have

amazon yeah they would be in the dark ages yeah yeah i think i have two i have three subscriptions one for the business my my wife has one and i have one um okay for those of you for yeah yeah for those of you that uh that have uh amazon prime did you realize after you joined that you started spending more with amazon if that's the case put dollar signs in the chat if you started spending more after you joined amazon prime with amazon put dollar

signs in the chat oh who was that with the thousand dollar signs that was a lot i think brittany and i might be missing brittany what's up we're tot we're friends we're total friends ah that's awesome i sometimes forget what's in my packages so do i and you're at my door like what would i bought yeah it doesn't matter your package is jordan i bet you wouldn't even notice if i stole your packages i'm sure you wouldn't so enjoy enjoy the painting yeah so this is

what i call the membership effect um people spend money when they're subscribers right and they they they enjoy doing it obviously we just witnessed that um they we can say the same thing with costco memberships we can say the same thing literally with every membership program in any category that we buy from when you subscribe you buy more and we've found the same thing in in dentistry and this is a wonderful way to increase profit margins and provide value to your patients it's a win-win situation

and at the same time with when we're battling inflation it's a great way to combat the the inflation problem that we're seeing because subscribers or members spend more they say yes more to treatment they feel like they're getting great deals and they're getting taken care of right so my amazon driver knows me by name that is awesome brittany i feel like it's so rad about humans that walk out of costco with like one thing do you ever see a person in costco where like they go

in and they buy one thing it's rare but i feel like you're looking at i'm like what are you doing here kick them out [Laughter] you don't go into costco to buy one thing that's just weird hey did my microphone turn off can you guys hear me i gotta alert you okay just check in here okay cool so this is an example of what a membership program typically looks like um now every every uh demographic every city is gonna be slightly different but this is typically

what we're seeing um in the industry right now where practices are offering a yearly subscription and a monthly subscription and i'm gonna be focused on the word subscription a lot of practices think they have a membership program but they're not the patients aren't subscribed it's not auto renewing or there's no recurring revenue component to their membership program a good example is a prac a patient comes in and they pay 300 bucks up front for the year to get their discounts and then they uh only renew

when they come back a year and a half later uh which i don't classify that as a membership plan that is a cash discount program which is cool but you're missing so many amazing benefits from recurring revenue and i'll show you examples of what that looks like here in a little bit but recurring revenue is uh one of the holy grails of business revenue um and you're missing out on that if you're not doing it this way with subscriptions so take a snapshot of this i

think this is a good example to see what people are offering people do get practices do get creative as well um yeah but this is so just personal two cents the simpler they are the easier they are for your team to sell and then the easier it is to grow your membership yeah i exactly i remember when i kickball i watch people get way way over complicated with what they offer in their plan i have seen i have seen i have seen a lot of that

i remember when i first started doing this in the early 2016 a practice came to me they're like i've got 10 membership plans that i wanted from whoa i'm like don't do ten just start with one and then let's go there and then scale up if you need to um but you know i get how exciting it is for some people so this is a good example take a snack snapshot of this what we're finding though uh recently that a lot of practices obviously are in

different demographics and have different situations so we're finding that um a practice can't just be like yeah just charge 300 bucks and with all these benefits and savings and it'll be good for our practice and for the patient we're finding that um practice needs to they need to be really smart and uh look at the data of the the location they're in the demographic data right so in in this example here we're finding we've looked at the top 10 growing practices in the nation and we

found that there are some trends out of these uh here here at boom cloud where um a lot of the pricing for membership programs are are being based off of the median income of the counties or cities that you're targeting so if you can see here i've got palm beach gardens florida you know i've got some demographic data here but this is the number i want to focus on where the median income of that location is you know close to 88k 88 000 a year and

you can look at the poverty rate too that's also really important to look at as well as the population size the bigger the population size the higher you can charge a membership program so this is what we're finding though the top 10 successful growing dental membership practices out there are looking at the median income of their location and this is the range they're pricing at it's point three zero two point five six percent of the median income so in this example with palm beach gardens florida

the range would be around 263 dollars a year to 492 dollars a year the bigger the population so uh populations with i believe like 800 1 000 uh people or more can be closer to 1 of the median income is what we're finding um out with all the all the practices that we're seeing um growing membership programs so you want to be really strategic the cool thing about this uh we have a my team understands what to look at and they help a lot of our

practices be strategic looking at their pricing a lot of people a lot of membership plans out there just just kind of use a box uh like a plan in the box and they don't really look at the demographics the reason why i started talking about this is because we had a a practice that was in a in a low population and a high poverty low-income state and city and they were having a hard time growing their membership program we looked at the demographics helped the practice

tweak their their numbers and boom they started growing like crazy in their area so it's really important to understand your demographics and who you're targeting so that's my suggestion there with uh pricing so the cool thing is the opportunity continues to grow from membership programs when i started doing this back in 2016 in in consulting with practices you know just under half of the united states didn't have dental insurance it's now over over half of the population of the us does not have dental insurance in

2020 with the the coven 19 issues if it forced 28 million more americans into early retirement in the in that fourth quarter so the number continues to grow and the opportunity to offer membership programs especially to people who are getting who are retired or be getting ready to retire is a wonderful large market and in that mix our are small business owners and employees to small businesses and that's another thing we're going to talk about how to target so opportunity continues to grow the longer i've

been in this it it it gets really uh amazing some of the benefits of starting a membership program are a robust patient loyalty system um and a way to help patients as well it's a it's a total win-win solution for practices my favorite thing to talk about it helps produce predictable recurring revenue i managed a dental lab which follows the cash flow trends of dentistry and i've now run a software company that uses you know what we teach subscription revenue and uh my journey through recessions

and through market challenges has been a lot more pleasant than than the days of the dental lab with a non-recurring revenue model so i'm really passionate about helping businesses really figure this out and um have it be a game changer for them we all know that there's feasts and famine months september i think they still call that recurring revenue helps with that um recurring revenue helps increase the value of your practice over time as you build it and grow it gives you a platform to reduce

dependence on ppos patients commit with their wallets so they're less likely to cancel and if they do that recurring revenue continues and then like i said before members buy more so that's kind of a high level recap of what we just said here so uh what did what did john say here median income is yeah so i would look at that median income and that you may want to look at uh john in your case you may want to look at a what we call a

discount only subscription plan um with that median income uh situation and um that's another really interesting strategy uh where you just offer a discount and a subscription and maybe a few benefits but you can limit the nice thing about membership plans is you can limit the offerings and tailor it to um that median income so thanks for sharing john that's very interesting we'd like to know the poverty rate and then the the um the uh population size because that will that will play factors into uh

your pricing as well okay when you think about a membership program a membership program is a a sales funnel strategy is what i typically how i typically look at it you can use it as a patient attraction tool use it in your marketing your top line funnel to attract uh more uh uninsured patients out of network patients things like that a patient retention tool so once they become a a patient they join as a member and they retained a retention strategy which every business needs to

have an attraction retention and an expansion strategy and that's a case acceptance right meaning uh patients say yes more to uh case acceptance it if you if you look at the membership model it is a complete uh from start to finish sales funnel model that is extremely important not only in dentistry but in all all businesses that's why you see you know amazon costco so many other businesses are doing we live in a subscription economy right so many businesses are doing that because if you look

at the sales funnel um it benefits a lot of different parts of that or the full funnel so um i'm going to skip that book and go to this book this is my homework for everybody today grab this book this is the book that it's called the automatic customer this is the book that actually inspired me to create boom cloud to help our friends in dentistry create recurring revenue but it does require a new mindset when you create a membership program you have new metrics to

understand in regards to recurring revenue and cancellations and growth rates and all these things this book does an excellent job um in educating the practice manager and the the practice owner on how to think about subscription revenue it's really awesome john warlow is the author he actually just spoke on the on mark kosty's podcast the dentalpreneur uh awesome episode i would encourage everyone to go listen to that um but the uh he talks a lot about you know how recurring revenue helps with evaluation of your

practice so if your practice you know getting ready to exit um your recurring revenue is something you definitely need to look at yes but we all have amazon prime go buy this on amazon honestly i know it i had jordan insisted that i read this book like within a week of meeting you like is that what i did and i have read it but i think it actually really is just to pipe in here i watch mindset of a membership plan is where i watch a

lot of doctors get hung up and that they get really scarce thinking about what they're giving up they focus on the discount and they almost can't i mean for all the people i know that kind of haven't taken this leap yet this is where they get stuck and they're they're like you the people who already pay me full price you want to give them a discounted the fee for service offices so i'm gonna get a cleaning for free and i it devalues me and they i

get i watch them get really stuck in this cycle and i try to assure them like over and over again i've helped people implement this and what happens in every case is their retention is higher their pre-appointment rate is higher and their case acceptance is higher across the board yeah every time i promise you what works well and let's be honest because that is a normal a normal concern especially from a like a fee for service practice i we hear that all the time but there's

there's something what i like to call give to gets you're not just giving a discount for the sake of it um if you're doing that i would definitely agree with that argument but you you have what we call a give to get you're giving a subscription and they're getting a discount so it's not a devaluation of your services because there is it's it's it's a type of trade right you're offering the subscription they're getting this so it's not entirely like just a straight discount to your

point genevieve of when somebody thinks of oh i'm just i'm focusing on the discounts like oh cool but here's this other end of it that you're getting in regards of recurring revenue and increased case acceptance and all that fun stuff it's a it's a wonderful path so thanks thanks for chiming in there i'm glad that i made you read that book read the book before you can be my friend you didn't even talk to me unless you read this book yeah yes have you read the

automatic customer no get away one of my favorite quotes uh from the book or one of the best parts about creating automatic customers through subscriptions that you insulate yourself from the worst of a potential recession i like to add that it also helps combat inflation because of the mechanism when you have everyone paying a subscription on one platform and you can go let's increase that by five percent or whatever percentage and boom the next month or the current month that that increase is shows up in

your bank account so um moving forward uh i love cash flow i i kind of sound like a geek when i say that um i think my days of cash flow loving came when i managed my dad's dental lab and cash flow was a huge issue a lot of the practices were struggling with it too and it just trickled down to the dental lab it was a huge issue that i put on myself to try and solve for my dad's business um and which eventually led

to me helping practices solve it through membership plans um you know and i think cash flow is always the most important thing in any business regardless you know i look at some of these big businesses here in utah that have all these big buildings but they're floating on the backs of investors and you know when the when a bad economy comes out those buildings will be empty um so cash flow is king in in your practice the fact that practice or insurance companies attack your cash

flow is something to really consider and really fix um i know a lot of people may think cashflow may be profit but it's not cashflow is just the timing of money when it comes in when it leaves this is why i like membership programs because you can design it in a way where cash is coming in right before payroll so you gotta get a lump sum from subscription into the bank account so you can make sure you're paying your employees on time when i manage the

dental lab that having the cash flow issues i remember this saying i can't pay you today next week right and as employees you don't want to you never want to do that to your employees and this is why i love memberships and the subscription model it's so predictable and you can design it to where you've got revenue control for inflation purposes and payroll purposes to make sure and ensure that you can cover the costs of your employees because you never want to have morale problems with

your employees uh no matter if you're in a good economy or a bad economy so that's why i love this strategy and how can help your practice skipping that um is daniella is that hi daniella did i say your name right i think i just glanced at it um with she has a question uh with membership with a membership plan in place how do you increase monthly yearly fees to counteract inflation or otherwise do you send an email to subscribers language to do so without subscribers

drop the plan to increase fees yeah so you want to have something in your legal agreement that states that you can increase prices that's just good business practices and then what a lot of our practices do at the end of each year they'll increase it by a certain percentage and since they use the boom cloud platform they can just get in either set up a new new plan with increased prices and then move all their patients to that plan and of course you want to educate

your patients so that's what's happening and then that so that's typically when i say you can use it as like a revenue control platform um i'm typically talking about how our practices using boom cloud do that uh with our suite of tools hopefully that made sense um i'm a big visual guy i think i'm constantly getting my calculator out and like doing math like this and my wife rolls her eyes every time i don't know why but i think it's really important to understand what type

of revenue you get i would look at if you were to start a membership program or if you have one and you don't feel like it's optimized enough a lot of practices find value in looking into their practice management system finding uninsured patients that maybe haven't come in a while and starting to reach out to them through marketing campaigns we help our practices do this all the time and they see an influx of calls and people signing up because they're in most practices that are you

know been existent for a while they have a large amount of uninsured inactive patients um that you can easily tap into and build a recurring revenue stream off of that low hanging fruit so imagine if you signed up a thousand you know patients to your membership program that can generate 35 000 a month in predictable recurring revenue and we typically suggest you look at the existing uninsured because most likely they're not coming into your practice because they have the the insurance mindset of i can't go

see the dentist i don't have insurance right and most likely they haven't come into the practice in in some time so you know the low hanging fruit would be to focus on them turn them into a recurring revenue stream which then turns into a case acceptance stream um back to my son my sales funnel uh math there we looked at practices across the nation and found that um uninsured members spent more right i'm not just saying that we've looked at the data um uh uninsured uh

or patients that became members spent two to three and a half times more than non-members um across the board we looked at a thousand a lot of our practices on our platform and thousands of patients and uh it was interesting that we found that they ended up spending more which i think we all knew that because we our amazon example earlier that we all spent more it's the it's the same membership effect okay so this is my favorite part to talk about here there's lots of

things to grow your membership program in fact this is probably the biggest problem i'm seeing out there with practices they don't typically know how to grow it you know you may not be a marketer or a salesman but there's really simple things that we can do to scale it and grow it um first off systems help you scale if you don't have a great system to help you manage your membership program it's going to be really hard to scale these are three practices that came to

us at boom cloud before they're manually running their membership program and you can see a year later after having a system like bloom cloud manage their plan they were able to skill it quite a quite a bit in a year's time which resulted in lots of recurring revenue a lot of these practices came to us wanting to reduce dependence on ppos it gave them more confidence and practice to start reducing and converting patients to a membership program but i always recommend you want to start with

your existing patients so right here on my slide deck you always want to start with your existing uninsured patients your existing inactive patients because they're not coming to your office and they're not producing a revenue issue maybe here and there they are you know and you can easily do that by having flyers and brochures in your office sending email blasts a lot of practices will have an announcement letter that they send out announcing their membership program to their entire patient base because you never know which

patients have lost insurance or are sick of it and just want to get rid of it or what are the situations so or maybe they have family that doesn't have or friends that don't have insurance that they're like oh yeah you should go to dr so-and-so's office they they help uh they have a program for people that don't have uh insurance and keep in mind that over half the united states doesn't have dental insurance i'd never had dental insurance and still today i don't and neither

do does my team we actually we provide there's a dentist down the street that uses our platform dr anderson awesome awesome man um we i buy my employees uh dental membership program uh that that work here at boom cloud that they all go see him they we joined his membership program i i don't i don't like insurance i mean i hate it you saw my bullet point early on my presentation i hate insurance so um i'm a big believer in membership programs i'm a i'm a

member of a dental practice so i'm not just talking i'm i'm actually a member um another great thing is using your the social media what we have most practices are on social media i think it's a wonderful tool you can do facebook ads a lot of the practices that i'll be showing you here in the next little bit have started with facebook ads uh targeting with direct mail i think direct mail marketing um really any type of marketing channel works as long as you have the

right messaging the right verbiage which i know genevieve will will touch on there verbiage is is king in regards to marketing and attracting patients but a lot of practices have used direct mail marketing to target the 55 and up communities people who are getting ready to retire or are retired and they'll send direct mail marketing pieces educating that they can come to the practice without insurance making sure you have information on your website that explains your membership program and allows you to sign up from your

website using google ads and then live presentations i know lots of practices that have gone to like the 55 and up communities or even b2b businesses and presented to those types of potential patients to join membership programs and that works really well because you're offering education with a solution at the end of it so the next one i'm going to talk about ah is my did my mic turn off the you can hear me okay yeah i keep i keep getting an alert hopefully i'm standing

okay um so this is a new thing that's happening um i mean it's been going on in the in the membership space for a while but it seems to be becoming more and more popular is attracting small business owners and their employees to come and join your membership program which i think uh i call this leverage sales uh meaning uh you're not selling you know one-on-one from you know a paid a consumer model um as they come in which i think is great i love leveraged

cells meaning you can go find a 20 location business a 20 employee business educate them on the benefits of joining a membership program and how the the business will save money and retain patients in this in this interesting market we have um where where what are they called the great resignation where where employees are moving and uh going away from their current jobs and it's just just a huge migration of employees moving around in an age where we need to re focus on retaining employees a

dental membership program could be a benefit for a lot of these businesses out there you're in your community but we're looking at this right now and helping a lot of practices do this um you typically want to identify an industry to target and i have a target list on this other side here um that are i typically say say that again bars is on your list i don't know who put that somebody put bars we we have we've actually had some practices that have very success

with bar owners and their employees uh because with the pandemic um they uh they suffered quite a bit and we're trying to retain people but yeah i know we would all like that right we wouldn't like it borrowed or to come and i'm sure you can swap some benefits there so we're looking at a lot of industries and seeing uh which ones are more likely to join a dell membership program and get their employees on so you want to identify an industry or a niche you

want a typical business size is five to 50 employees what we're seeing that are more likely to join a dental membership program and get their employees built coming on um you want to identify the core leaders of that you could do that so easy with linkedin in fact i got a whole article that i'm i'm writing and it'll be on dental economics magazine on how to attract small business owners and their employees to your membership program to get not just one employees but many right uh

you can start an email uh list in a visit campaign is what we call them so visit the local areas we had a practice that targeted restaurants they did really well uh sending up restaurants and their employees um to their dental membership program they just went around visited all the local restaurants and got in contact with the owner and signed up all the owner and their employees so it's just simple as just networking and reaching out right and then obviously i tend to focus on it

doesn't say this on here but i tend to like to focus on like health oriented businesses people businesses that um are in front of people like accountants market agent marketing agencies are working with people restaurants that you know that are face to face with people um any type of advisor or consultant realtors are a good one um and there's hubs of realtors out there that they're always working with people you know if they've got you know if they're not taking care of their teeth they're gonna

look weird and people probably won't trust them as much um mental health uh uh um offices uh day spas things like that and then of course the sister the assisted living or the 55 and up communities a lot of people have been having success with their uh insurance brokers anyone who's customer facing has to face a customer they're going to be a little bit more health conscious uh that we're seeing but there's a lot of different industries in your area this is just an example target

list where we're finding uh success when practices reach out and provide information to an education to start having their employees join the membership program so that's what i see that's what's happening now in the industry and i think it's a really smart strategy to go about it in addition to that as you're going at a network with um with your uh insurance uh the the ppos that you're working with figuring out and educating them to convert over to a membership program is another wonderful strategy so

that's kind of what i i think is helping practices grow starting with the low-hanging fruit um don't skip that step you want to you want to have some early wins when you launch a membership program especially if you um are just have a brand new membership program fresh on the on the market you want to start with your existing uninsured patients some people try to skip that because they're like well we don't want to get our patients in our existing patients in because we feel like

like to genevieve's point we feel like they focus on the discounting we're already getting you know 100 of them paying their full fee which is not not true um and uh it's the best way to drive those early wins for your practice so i'm gonna shift gears a little bit talking and i'm going to talk about some cases what we're seeing out there in the in the industry and what practices are doing number one number wise i like looking at some numbers here so these are

some old screenshots of our some of our practices uh this is our our dashboard for boom cloud so if you see this first example this is a practice actually started a membership program from scratch during the pandemic in 2020 and this particular practice they were in california which had a lot of strong regulations in running the practice they um the first month and a half i believe two months um they they targeted their uninsured patients and gen got 281 patients to sign up just under seven

thousand dollars in monthly recurring revenue or 82 000 dollars in annual recurring revenue and they focused on really simple stuff reaching out to their uninsured and inactive patient base didn't even start with any type of facebook or marketing campaign which they eventually led to that which i still think is super important is is to not just target your uninsured but make sure you have a marketing and marketing strategy to continue growing it because this a membership program is a numbers game you're not going to going

to drive an immense amount of success if you only sign up you know 20 50 members you want hundreds to thousands of members so this next practice here this is about a year and after they launched a membership program from scratch first thing they did uninsured and inactive patients that weren't coming to the office and then they this particular practice used facebook advertising and targeted 55 and up uh individuals and invited them and educated and invited them to join their membership program so in a year

over a thousand active membership patients all these practices i'm showing you are single location so if you're running multi locations uh it's rinse and repeat uh 26 000 over 26 000 in monthly recurring revenue over three hundred thousand uh annual recurring revenue and keep in mind this is whether they do dentistry or not uh whether you go to hawaii on vacation or not that revenue is coming in uh for the practice or whether you're shut down because of a pandemic or not compared to that you

know talking about that other practice um so this is recurring revenue passive income that's coming in um which is a wonderful benefit here this next practice here just under 2000 through way over 2000 now they used direct mail marketing after they attracted their existing uninsured patients they used direct mail marketing targeted 55 and up communities in their local area and other markets but that was the main thing they did and they in a year and a half they generated about just under 50 000 in monthly

recurring revenue over half a million dollars in annual recurring revenue once again whether they do dentistry or not ben question for you um in the insurance model they have a very similar model right of subscription model what is the usage rate of patients that use uh like a dental uh ppo plan is it like 50 40 under 50 percent they actually use it so you said yeah it's about it's 37 on average for adults and for children it's 51 yeah interesting so um very similar uh

things happen in a membership program not everybody is going to use it 100 i think a lot of practices will come in to your point genevieve of oh i'm just focusing on the discounts why we're going to discount we're devaluing um but the reality is not every patient that joins a membership program if you look at this dashboard here 2000 patients are going to use that membership program at once or even in a year's time there's going to be a percentage it's going to vary depending

on how you present it to patients and and communicate with them but you're not going to get 100 usage rate but you will get 100 recurring revenue from them you know jordan maybe you're going to cover this but i think just an important thing that you're demonstrating here is you have a lot of monthly recurring revenue examples and that's another place that i watch people get really hung up fearful of offering the monthly payment because what if they cancel and you know i watch a lot

of people not be able to sell their plans because if you're a family of three and your fee is five hundred dollars you know like coming up with that fifteen hundred is too much for a lot of people or it feels like too much but i don't know if you have details about it personally i rarely see people canceling at the monthly rate because it's just so under the radar yeah i actually do have some information on that um um typically i talk about that when

i show pricing but i totally spaces thanks for reminding me um so the the cancellation rate is actually higher on yearly subscriptions uh meaning uh patients will join and then maybe the next year they end up canceling because maybe it's not right the timing they don't want to have a 800 payment come out because of time maybe it's before christmas or the holidays you know whatever there's a lot or a birthday party whatever um or a vacation you know there's lots of scenarios in a consumer's

life that that may throw a wrench in them if it's a yearly big yearly subscription especially for families um and we've we've found that there's a higher cancellation rate when a patient subscribes yearly now obviously on the practice side the benefits are you get cash up front it's it's wonderful uh the i like monthly membership programs because it is a lower barrier to entry especially for multiple fam you know larger families even just a family of three a lower barrier of entry um i also call

it evergreen it's an evergreen subscription thirty dollars a month it you know is not noticeable on a bank statement compared to you know three hundred dollars a month um or a year 300 a year excuse me um so there's some under the radar payments what i call that and then with the evergreen being under the radar it's evergreen meaning patients most likely will not cancel as a monthly subscription because it is under the radar and it's not a huge pain point when thirty or sixty dollars

gets pulled out even a hundred dollars gets pulled out of their bank account it's just uh very under the radar payment so what we see that monthly membership subscribers last like they stay longer with with the subscription compared to yearly i do have numbers on that but i don't remember them exactly right now i'll get that i'll get a slide out on that thanks i'm just throwing it in in the context of growing your plan it's something i always encourage people yeah to to consider but

if you're trying to administer it yourself a lot of people don't do it because it's not keep track it is a lot to keep track of um if you're going to do a monthly membership program manually and i remember i mean that's one of the reasons why i started boom cloud because one of our practices that i was working with in the early days what they had like over a hundred maybe it was too close to 200 members that the poor office manager um lisa was

her name she her her daughter went in high school with me um she lisa she uh was had a binder and she's flipping through it every day and making sure she's running payments uh manually every day monthly payments i felt so bad for her and we when we built boom cloud at the time she was one of the first to join she had lots of pain that's actually better than a lot of offices who literally can't tell me how many members they have or they discover

it as that person comes in when i yeah so well being the top being that in the topic of growing and you know talking about growing a membership program you what you measure you grow and you improve and uh to that point because i hear a lot of that too in the industry where practices are like uh i got a membership program how many members you have i have no idea oh so you you don't know how much recurring revenue that's producing or or even how

much you know if you have certain goals because it's not it's not it's probably not producing it because they don't aren't automating discount it's a cash discount yeah so or jordan i don't know if you guys are looking at this matthew's asking can people use an hsa to purchase membership plans yeah uh-huh um on our on our platform we allow hsa payments um and i think there's like a what is the flex payments flex cars or whatever um yeah absolutely patients can they're purchasing uh services

right dental services um in a membership program a lot of exams and cleanings are included so absolutely we see that all the time um you know with patients that have those types of cards that's cool so yeah it's yeah it's used for for health care um so by all means use it if they have it so great question but yes i do like monthly subscriptions a lot more they i mean they both have they both have pros and cons right uh there's some states like the

state of washington for example uh ben i know you speak up there a lot uh they actually the state of washington doesn't allow practices to do to do yearly subscriptions it's it's only monthly subscriptions uh if you talk to the insurance commissioner um he's going to jerk jerk you around a little bit and say you can't do membership programs period but if you look at the state laws uh that you actually can through the direct primary care laws uh which encourage medical that's because the insurance

commissioner is in delta's pockets yeah i know i've talked to them over there yeah let's just say they don't like me [Laughter] they haven't got a dart board yeah yeah yeah well vice versa i've got them on a dartboard anyways so this is what these case studies are what practices are achieving and we're seeing more and more growth these days as as especially as patients move from job to job in this type of market and businesses want to offer more benefits to retain employees a membership

program is an awesome solution for your local businesses but this so this particular practice back to this they used uh it was direct mail to 55 and up communities and that drove their success and their growth so there's many ways to grow a membership program um but i would encourage you to pick one pick one marketing strategy aside from attracting your on your existing uninsured and your existing inactive patients and um whether it's business uh a b2b type marketing or community type marketing with the local

55 and up communities um i i would pick some some type of marketing and focus on it and make sure it works uh before you do it because marketing is an experiment um not everything is going to work across the board in in every different market um so you want to make sure it works before you scale it [Music] right so these are some examples here uh wrapping up um i would encourage everyone here to go schedule a demo learn about how the boom cloud platform

can help your practice create organize and scale or grow your dental membership program and it'll automate a lot of the tasks that you you don't want your office manager to do it i don't want this shouldn't be another uh insurance admin pane right where we see lots of practices that manage a manual membership program they're like oh this is so tedious and and hard to manage and they would rather manage you know insurance we want practice you know practices come to us because they don't they

they want to set up the membership program right and they don't want to give another job to the office manager because we know how busy you guys are uh running in practices i mean my mom and my aunt my my mom is a twin i'm a i'm a twin too i i need to start showing those pictures huh guys um and uh they're both office managers that have used our product over the over over time um and would definitely do this than a manual work but

what makes boom cloud different there's lots of platforms out there and what we're focusing on at boom cloud is is exactly what we've educated you today um we have a team of of revenue growth managers that help your practice grow that we focus on growth we call ourselves a dental growth platform a membership growth platform and our team helps you your practice to uh tax campaigns to your uninsured patients uh even some call out and outreach campaigns to your uninsured and inactive patients that express interest

and help you sign up more members to your membership program we're building some artificial intelligence i call them revenue bots that actually will help identify in your practice management system who your uninsured patients are and actually automatically send them text messages inviting them to join your membership program as well as finding your maybe you're dropping a certain insurance company or a ppo contract and you want to educate those patients about your membership program our artificial intelligence in the platform will be able to identify sure certain

insurance people prac excuse me patients that aren't sure are on certain insurance plans and you can tailor marketing text and email campaigns to educate those patients about your membership program uh we're we have a business of business finder that we've built and are continuing to build in in our platform that actually you'll be able to type your zip code in and find local business in your area and automatically be able to reach out to them with some of our verbage templates right inside of our platform

so those are some things that um practices are really interested in why you know what makes us different in the marketplace compared to some of the other platforms out there and then we do have a finance marketplace where because we understand that uninsured patients may not you know if they don't have insurance they're going to need some type of financing option so we've partnered with some banks and finance partners that could definitely provide a marketplace for your patients to accept treatment and help your practice give

a whole solution right cell solution from attracting uh patients to expanding and retain retaining and expanding uh case acceptance with your patients so encourage you guys to go to boomcloud.com click that bright pink button on our website that says schedule a demo and uh schedule one with my experts here's a gift for coming and hanging out with us today it's a book on how to create and grow a dental membership program just go to boomcloudapps.combook and you can download that and start reading and uh learning

a little bit more about membership plans so that's it for me genevieve so we're going to shift gears and you're going to end and uh i'll take over here let me see i think you can take over right or do i have to stop no you have to stop first okay stop sure did i do it i did it you got it all right i will take over here and jordan maybe you can do questions in the chat if anybody has questions for you so we

can keep oh yeah let's keep that going yeah okay perfect uh here with me i'm trying to get my slideshow and go in here there we go so obviously we've got you all riled up are you guys frozen no we hear you uh-oh you're frozen genevieve i'm frozen i can still hear you can see ya yup okay uh-oh it's saying my internet connection is unstable of course right when i take over yeah that's how it goes all right so anyway i'm still here i'm not going

anywhere uh now that we've got you all fired up and ready to you know drop every insurance and we all hate insurance i do want to i do want to start by saying yeah i i worry when people throw their hands up and want to drop all insurance at once i think you have to be smart about your strategy around participation and how you do that and be measured in your approach about how you go about it um and also you really have to have verbage

skills and you have to have a team that's trained to execute on that strategy so you can't adjust say we're not participating with insurance be on your high horse about it actually be really negative about it because what happens when i see doctors and managers reach this breaking point with insurance and make these decisions is the way it gets communicated to our patients is really negative and it's very much a roadblock where basically what i will literally hear teams say is we're not we're not network

with anybody you know they just kind of throw it out there and they put that roadblock out right at the beginning and just try to get it out of the way because they're so uncomfortable with having these conversations so uh similar to jordan's funnel there's a handful of places that we can talk about this and i'm going to try to give you my best new patient whisperer case acceptance stuff today but i'm happy to send you anything that's in the slides today afterwards and of course

for resending this replay so you can share it with your team um but this is me i've been in dentistry for a really long time i've done everything from dental assisting to actually owning and managing seven practices in wisconsin at one point i am a customer service maniac i'm an enthusiastic change agent which not everybody appreciates about me all the time i understand why i do i do uh yes and i'm a new patient whisperer so i'm good at building initial conversations with patients that create

leads to appointments and so i want to share some of that and how having a membership plan can uh play into that and how you can actually convert new patients regardless of your participation with insurance so the first thing that um i always really have to kind of get out there before i talk about verbiage is the importance of mindset right if you we like to believe that our patients have an insurance mindset but i can tell you very much that our industry has developed an

insurance mindset and in many ways we have actually taught our patients to have an insurance mindset if you look at the amount of time your own front desk teams or if you're on a front desk team the amount of time that's going into your day of verifying exactly what insurance will pay for every single thing and then communicating uh with specifics and over explanation about insurance and then guess what we're wrong anyway and the patient still owes us 17 and they're mad and it re reasserts

for us that patients only care about insurance and they want to know exactly what insurance covers all of that cycle is very much built by the way that we design our conversations over exceptions over instead of majorities and so our industry is very much dominated um we've created basically front desk teams at this point who view their job as knowing insurance which is actually really unfortunate to me because yes we have to know about insurance but our job if you're a treatment coordinator is not to

explain insurance it's to help people get dental work done and i think that's an important shift to remember and to get back to our industry and none of the verbage that i will ever share with people doesn't work if your head's not in the right place about it so i could talk about this single thing all day but just kind of keep in mind that some of these things will sound maybe oversimplified or crazy to you but it's because i don't let the detail of insurance

participation hinder my belief that patients want to do work or my ability to help them proceed with it and feel free to disagree with me in the comments i'm used to it similar to what ben was saying you know i'm i'm not the most conventional in terms of my verbiage but i think what i teach people to do is have really authentic conversations with the right intention in the right from the right place um and i think that's more important than perfectly polished memorized scripts what

we tend to teach people to do so the most common obstacles and you know growing a practice and where we bump into really ineffective conversations in dentistry really come down to these three things which is funny jordan because this is your pyramid right yeah totally case acceptance or expansion and our retention of them so totally i love it we could have shared a slide we should have uh coordinated on that and there's a lot here i could probably spend an hour talking about any one of

these things but i'm gonna just try to give you like the most usable practical things that i can today so when i talk about insurance mindset the first thing that i really try to work with teams on is checking their own negativity when i hear teams saying you know we can say we hate insurance but when your teams are repeating that they hate insurance this is problematic because invariably that carries through to the way they're communicating about insurance with your patients perhaps my biggest pet peeve

is when people tell me these people every single practice that i work with across the country will tell me that i don't understand because these people only do insurance covers these people don't have money these people don't have high dental iqs these people don't care about their teeth you know i can tell you also for sure that in practices across the country i've never encountered an actual population of these people there's that it's not a real thing and uh all patients are just normal humans there's

no such thing as these people i get it to like google patients we don't we hate google patients you're like trying to find a patient that's not a google patient i don't know how to tell you all people are looking for your number on google like every single person that's hilarious we also label our patients as insurance driven or price shoppers you know we have populations of people that are less than ideal patients uh a side note i love price shoppers uh price shoppers guess what

you guys guess what price shoppers need more more value education they need dental work oh that's it when somebody calls me and says how much is an implant guess what that person needs they need an implant isn't that awesome buyer intent yeah also a little side note i there's this deep standing belief in dentistry that people are price shoppers are literally compiling some sort of spreadsheet of how much each person charges for cleaning in town and i promise you that's not true absolutely not the case

they're not calling you simply to record your price into a spreadsheet and then hang up what they're saying is can i afford this can i come there yeah that's what that question means and the promise you the office that they're stopping at is the one who will help them overcome a price obstacle or help them make it affordable in their budget it doesn't mean it's the only thing they care about so these are all things that are reiterated for us in a negative way in any

facebook group you're in in dentistry we write articles about these things and it's because we as an industry are ineffective at overcoming these objections and we continue to make it true so i know i sound a little bit uh pokey when i say this but new mindsets do equal new results and i want you to know that unfortunately humans are good at making themselves right so when we believe something to be true we are good at producing even to our own detriment we are good information

bias yeah the very outcome that we're fearing right so and we were happy to do it too we're like i see i knew it you know we actually like validate ourselves negatively so we do have to change our head a little bit in order to have different results and different outcomes and all of these things um new patients there's so much to this but if you are contemplating removing some or all of your participation with insurance or maybe if you already operate outside um most insurance

participation being good at your new patient phone call is absolutely critical it's the single most important thing you can do to grow your practice and if your team has not been trained on the phone this is a problem so um i work a lot on new patient conversion and i work with marketing companies that often measure the data on this because they've gotten wise to the fact that there's a big problem with new patient conversion in our industry because we don't train people to even recognize

phone calls as leads right that's just not how dental people are trained but marketing companies that measure this especially for out-of-network type offices often find call lead conversion as low as like 33 that's not uncommon at all meaning one in three pers one in three people will actually schedule an appointment when they call your office so if you don't track your calls if you don't record them and track call conversion in your office i strongly recommend that you do it and i recommend that you get

it started before you begin exiting insurance plans as well because it's critical that even if you provide training that you're following it up and driving accountability around it well-intentioned team members can literally kill your practice on the phone and not on purpose right they're just not trained to do it different we require great amounts of training to touch these things in our dental office you literally can't even touch the scanner in an office without a bunch of training right and yet i have been in dental

offices where on a person's first day the first thing we have them do is pick up the phone right we view the phone as like our lowest skill task can you just pick up that ringing phone can you just get that phone you should have your best person answering the phone at all times not your worst person or your newest person but i've seen people like scrambling for a business card because they don't even know the address of the office that they're answering the phone at

right like that's how unprepared we put people on our phones you know comparatively ritz carlton makes you watch a person answer the phone for three months that's maybe a little bit overkill and not realistic for our industry but that's how important their first impression is yeah so if you think about this um what we really teach people to do on the phone is pick up the phone and answer questions pick up the phone and be helpful and so when i ask dental team members how do

you guys do with new patients what they'll say to me over and over again is pretty much everybody's schedules pretty much everybody's schedules and in their mind what that means is like everybody who calls and says i'd like to schedule an appointment i'm a new patient i don't care about insurance those people all schedule right but what they don't even count in that mix for their own head is people who said do you take this insurance and we said no do you the people who said

how much is this thing and we said we don't quote fees over the phone click we tell people no all the time and if i ask them about those calls they'll say things like well they just wanted to know right it doesn't even register in their head that that was a lead and we never positioned it that way and most officers have never even had a conversation about it at all it's just to pick up the phone and be helpful this is very much uh the

way people are trained and it's well intentioned but it's ineffective from a sales and business growth standpoint and it becomes especially critical if you're changing your participation with dental insurance so really one of the most critical things you can do for your front desk or especially your phone team is to get them prepared for dentistry's most terrifying question which as we all know do you take my insurance right every time we pick up the phone we say thank you for calling dr smith's office this is

genevieve how can i help you we are met with almost always one of two questions do you take blue cross blue shield do you take delta dental are you in network with cigna right that's the first question or it's how much is this thing how much is a crown how much is a new patient visit and if your team is prepared with a very wrote answer or something clever like we participate with all insurances where we can work with almost anybody or some in some cases

we actually have team members saying you have to call your insurance don't ever do that please don't ever ever have a potential new patient called their insurance because i promise you that patient's not calling you back okay this question is a question we get all day long and most people have zero training or capability of handling it right and they don't register this as a new patient lead so first of all this is a new patient lead second of all having a clever immediate answer is

not going to serve you when we give a roundabout answer that says we work with all insurances what patients here is no and it's over it's done and that's why our conversion rate as an industry is so low so typically what i hear is a clever answer a little bit of that judgment coming in and some cases i can almost hear the eye roll right they're just getting us over with no we don't in some cases it's really bad honestly the attitude is so bad like

no we're not in network with anybody you have to pay cash and they're just like getting it out of the way because they're used to this being a problem and so they just want to get it over with and they get it out right away and then if that person manages to stay on the phone if they jump that hurdle for us then we start with things like what's your birthday which is a weird first question to ask people but oftentimes i hear dental people ask

that question before they even know a person's name yeah tempting them to feel how old are you it's very strange we start with information gathering and we very much manufacture conversations that we remain in control of that are yes no questions information gathering questions and so if you look at any other company that spends what we spend on marketing to produce phone calls most other companies would send that phone call to a trained salesperson we send them to a person who is not at all prepared

to sell frankly usually don't even like the word cell and um are basically trained insurance experts who want to show them everything that their insurance isn't going to do for them to be helpful right that's kind of how we've set this up in our industry it doesn't make any sense but that's what we're all doing it's okay we can fix it so chapter one of our new mindset is just a little different way to do this um and i won't be able to give you all

of these details but i just want to give you an idea of how you can send this call in a different order because this is what has to happen when i put this call conversion process slide up as i'm training teams a lot of times people will look at this and say yeah that's pretty much what i do pretty much pretty much do that on the phone the problem is this is not what anybody does on the phone what happens is they ask us the question

do you take my insurance we say no done it's over they say it's a yes no it's a back and forth so to be able to do this we have to teach our teams to be a little bit less reactive to that first question and essentially to become really effective at putting a pin in the first question without being elusive or deceitful right so by that i mean when we pick up the phone and they say do you take my insurance i say something like let's

check on that for you what's your name and actually if i'm answering in my own state in wisconsin i probably would say like oh sure let's check on that for you what's your name i believe you should sound authentic and it should be you right totally i get that if you're answering the phone in new jersey you sound a little bit different than i do framework definitely works and it works so it works across the country and actually in more more than across the country multiple

countries use this okay uh then once we have the opportunity to move past that first question not with the intention to deceive them later on with a clever answer but with the intention to connect with them and understand this caller a little bit it allows me to provide them an answer or solution that makes the most sense for this caller so my best example of this is if i can say let's check on that for you what's your name grab their name i don't ask their

birth date weirdly i just get their first name my number in case they get disconnected and then i say something like tell me what we need to get you in here for right i just open it up open-ended i don't say so do you have a limited focused or comprehensive new patient exam like watch a lot of people get really black and white and really weird with this stuff i just say tell me what we need to get you in here for the answer i am

going to provide a person about how we work with insurance is probably going to be different with a 50 year old man who hasn't been to the dentist in 15 years but just got a delta dental card right versus a mom with three kids who wants their teeth cleaned and if i can have the benefit of positioning the use of insurance and how that will work for them in our office after knowing them and after connecting with them and probably being best friends with them at

this point because i'm super likable right yes yes right the thing is the tip is everybody's super likable when you're talking to another person about themselves when people talk about themselves they like you and that's the trick here right so i learn about them interesting and i provide the answer and then i say and my answer is so let me tell you how insurance is going to work for you in our office right then i lead in i'm not being sneaky or tricky right i love

ben's verbage of unrestricted but i'm i'm clear about what that means we're unrestricted which you might know is out of network we do that so that we can provide the best care right we give that answer i don't like to deceive people at all it's not good for your practice to just get people through the door and trick them it leaves bad reviews they only come once it creates a lot of churn in your office and then i say let's do this let's get you in

and i make the appointment that sounds like i invented it for them right it might go on my schedule as comprehensive new patient exam but it sounds more like let's get you in here we'll take a picture you know we'll take pictures we'll take x-rays we'll take a good look at everything we'll get a game plan together and then i'll help you figure out how we fit that in your budget how does that sound they always say that sounds great we put them in the schedule

and then at that point is when i gather their information like their address and their birth date and all of that information so that's the quick run through of my call conversion process i can send this to you if you'd like it the real key here is to build in your team the idea that we have to ask open-ended questions to connect with people and we have to do that we have to express an interest in people before we give that answer sales 101 is just

the the later in a conversation that you provide that same answer the more effective you're going to be right it just happens it's just magic you give the same basic answer one minute later and the result will be very different so ask more questions be prepared to ask open-ended questions this is an issue in dentistry uh if you listen in dental ops general phone calls we ask people yes no questions because it's how we stay in control right my best example of this is when i

hear people call with a toothache or a broken tooth uh a lot of our teams actually literally have a checklist of yes no questions that they have to ask they'll say where is the two upper lower right left is it third from the back is it fourth from the back is it sharp to your tongue is it sensitive to hot is it sensitive to cold is it throbbing at night i'm getting into it when really what we should say is oh my gosh what happened tell

me what's going on right totally i will tell you they will tell you most of those answers and also i was an assistant for many years i understand the clinician point of view that's driven weirdly from like our clinical team's desire to have all the information before a patient is seated and i will have assistants fight me on this and say well we have to have the pa set up and um i know well enough that we can identify one of 32 teeth in a matter

of seconds when a patient is seated and if you're set up for the wrong pa we simply have to flip the lever it's super easy to change that so it's not a huge deal but they get held up on information and competency and so then we produce that in our phone calls and i just don't think these sides of the business talk to each other very much and they don't understand what barriers that causes and they don't understand for them there's actually a lot more value

walking into the app saying a little birdie told me you had an ice fishing accident right versus walking in and saying i understand that you've tripped an upper right incisor that's not impressive right the story is what people connect on so get your team prepared and be prepared yourself evaluate your own conversations and evaluate it for the fact like are you asking open-ended questions is that happening so a little bit of what it sounds like hey one of you guys want to role play this with

me i'll do it okay what color am i what am i reading here you're gonna um be this light blue i'll i'll play the role of myself all right let me move some of my screen so i can see my script all right i mean okay thank you for calling dr smith's office this is genevieve how can i help you yo genevieve i was wondering if you'd take uh delta dental i'd be happy to check on that for you what is your name uh my name

is jaycom okay jake when was the last time we saw you in the office uh oh uh yeah i i don't think i've been uh the office before it'd be a new patient oh wonderful thank you for calling us today can i get your number just in case we get disconnected yeah it is uh nine one one three six seven two ten great five five five three two one zero right yeah yeah and jk thanks for sending you to our office yeah i think i found

i think i found john google i'm one of those google patients you're a google patient well i'm so glad you found us now before i check on that insurance tell me what we need to get you in here for uh yeah do i do i answer that my two thirds okay this is just an example of how you can very naturally avoid answering that question immediately out of the gate but it takes some practice and it isn't what we're wired to do and especially if you've

answered the phone for years in a dental office this is not at all where your brain goes we have dental offices um that are very busy now with a lot higher volume in a lot of cases very often when i'm listening to recorded phone calls i hear people basically saying okay have a great day mary great to see you blah blah blah like you hear the end of the other conversation and then it's thank you for calling dr smith's office they're not moving into these conversations

already and so when you're trying to implement a new path to your verbiage it's very hard to do that without slowing down and and having some really good training and some really good practice for it but again i'm happy to send these verbiage once you can open it up to tell me what we need to get you in here for if you have a lot of experience just getting it off in that different direction most people know how to alter their answer once they have a

little bit more context of what's going on for this person um but i have uh i have a lot of resources around this available so feel free to message me the real key thing is to get really natural at putting a pin in that first question not being so reactive to it and part of that is like not being so mentally reactive to it so it's partly words but it's also like getting out of your own head this time helps you as well right like it's

it will also help you see that just because people start with one question it doesn't mean it's the singly most important thing to them a lot of people will ask do you take my insurance or how much is a thing because it's the logical first question for them to ask not because it's a problem for them not because it's the only thing they care about and in our head we have just turned this into price shoppers and insurance driven patients and it's just really really not

true and i can only tell you that you have to you know give me the benefit of the doubt i've listened to thousands and thousands of recorded phone calls and i can tell you it really works to just take a pause put a pin in that question and connect with people before you answer the question and provide them some solutions the basic phrase is i'm happy to check on that for you what is your name if they said their name and this is why you have

to answer the phone listening you know it has to be i'm happy to check on that for you jaycon can i grab your number just in case we get disconnected okay so finding 300 ways to say this in a very natural way and being less reactive and less less urgent about just getting that part over with can be really really helpful um so it looks like we've got a message yeah we got a question here maybe for you yeah i'm really good at reading scripts okay

so if a patient actually asks you for the price you try to pin the question would you answer the price of it at the end i would i and i wouldn't give an exact price i don't quote fees over the phone and we have like a range these are really weird things that we're stuck on right but if we can't give people an idea what that feels like is it's too much for me to tell you would you give them like a rain yeah so i

would say let's see if i can get you an idea right tell me what's going on somebody says to me i need how much is dental implant i don't say well we don't technically place the body of the implant but we do restore them it's over and over again right if we can i help a person get an implant can i help them have an idea yes right so i would say well let me see if i can get you a range on that get you

an idea tell me about this implant you need everybody who needs an implant has a story to tell you it's going to be about how they lost the tooth what's going on their nightmare of a root canal that failed that there's so much to connect with them on right and then after they do that i'll say okay jordan i know you wanted to know roughly what an implant would cost jacob i didn't say something like it's super hard for me to tell you exactly because there's

so many factors that go into this but based on what you're telling me it could be anywhere from sixty five hundred dollars to ten thousand dollars right it could be anywhere from this to this why don't we do this let's get you in here have dr smith take a look at it he'll get us a better idea of pricing and then i'll sit down and help you figure out how you work that in your budget how does that sound sounds awesome [Laughter] when you say uh

we can't quote fees over the phone you have to come in for an examination it feels like i do can i mention one thing that i noticed that you did so you you ended the the question how does that sound and then you just you you stopped talking you went silent and i think that's called i call it dynamic silence when you do that it encourages like i automatically just said that sounds awesome right but yeah there is a strategy to that we do we we

train ourselves people and people who talk to customers all the time dynamics silence after an open-ended question i think it's it's a really good tool to uh realize that you've got that how does that sound is very specifically what i like to use because what a lot of times what we do in dentistry is we have a bunch of information and we'll say do you have any questions yes yes and you'll hear patients will like kind of freeze them like no because to have a question

they have to formulate what they're feeling into a question whereas what you say how does that sound people can just say that sucks yeah right they can they can just actually react from there they can just say what's in their guts and that's actually what i want them to say is oh my gosh i was really hoping to go in network or i was really hoping insurance would help me out or oh my gosh it's more than i thought it would be well a lot of

voting i want that to get out there because then i can overcome it a lot of what we do too on the unlike calls like this we we should be in the discovery mode where we're trying to discover as much as we can about an individual in their situation so that number one you can connect but also really uh help problem solve with them yeah there's a concept that i really like to teach people as it pertains to really all of the ways that we can

grow a dental office starting with mutations which is the concept of warmth versus competence um meaning basically people have to like and trust you before they care about your skills it's just a a real thing deep in our brains it's not just a warm fuzzy feelings thing like if we were cave people i would first determine if i trusted you not to murder me in my sleep before i care if you're a good hunter-gatherer like it's just deeply ingrained that we have to trust the person

before we care about their skills totally and we actually do that really backwards in dentistry and that we lead with our competence thinking that we'll drive trust and it doesn't it's why every dental website is all about the technology they have the training they have yeah and i'm not saying that stuff isn't great it's just that people don't care about it unless they like you and so it's why there are dentists you know that weren't technically the best but they walked on water for their patients

and you know there are people i watch that are great clinicians who really struggle to connect with people but we lead with this and we do it on the phone too you know we want to explain everything to you about what your insurance won't cover in this conversations i've heard where we're explaining downgrades in a very first new patient conversation but phil it it's not what we need to connect on and it's too much it's not helpful to people actually overwhelms them so this warmth versus

competence always leads with connection over solutions and we very much lead with solutions and then maybe if that goes over well we're like most people in dentistry that i meet as this isn't intentional they're all very nice people but there's a big difference between being nice and being connected they're not the same thing and connection takes a lot of being intentional about doing it and understanding like the simple ways that it's done a lot of it is starting with them starting with open-ended questions being willing

to answer what they care about first and not trying to be so control in the conversation and so focused on educating people i know that's not a popular thing to say but i will also tell you much of what we want to educate people on they don't care about and so i can learn what you might want to be educated on or informed about if i'm connected with you first i can give you a much better answer that's much more appropriate for the things that you

actually care about knowing about instead of blanket explanations that cover every facet of what might go wrong in a conversation so i could talk on this this part for a long time but yes uh daniel i i do try to give people a range and here's the beautiful thing is if you pin that question right and you say well let's see if i can get you an idea right and then we hear a story that really gives me but i have no idea what to quote

them right or i don't know enough about what things cost in a case like this to even give them an idea at least i didn't say no to them up front i heard their story and i can say something like you know ben i know you wanted to know roughly what this might cost and i really wish i could give you an idea there's just so many things going on i don't have a good enough idea but what i can do is get you in with

dr smith we can figure that part out and then i can sit down with you and help you figure out how we get this started that is a totally different answer then i won't tell you you have to come in right and that is not a skill that most people even are considering when they're answering the phone in a dental office so it i guess what i want you to know is especially if you're in office considering going out of network being good at this is

literally critical to your survival and growth like you have to have people who can learn to do this and learn to think that way and feel that way it's it's absolutely uh critical so sometimes when i teach all of this what i'll hear from people uh who do answer the phone is they just want to know right they just want to know if you take their insurance they just want to know how much it is they just want to know you know these people will only

do this this comes down to what these people they just want to know it's an urgency we feel because we're afraid of answering these questions i just like to ask people do you think you could better answer their question if you knew more about them the answer should be yes right and are you more likely to overcome objections if they feel connected to you and like you yes and so that is the primary reason to take a pause build connection into your conversation first before you

provide competency or answers okay i do have a new patient intake form if you guys want to email me for it i'll give you my details at the end and i'm happy to send it to you that kind of walks a team through this process the other thing that i just like to say in my sort of last piece about the phone is that the new patient side of this especially is that there's very rarely conversations between dental teams and doctors about what's working and not

working on the phone a lot of times we have policies in our office and we have team members who are so afraid of breaking the policy they're so afraid of getting in trouble about the policy that they will actually tank a phone call or miss an opportunity um because they're being upholders of a policy my best example of this and if you guys have heard me before you might have heard me tell this story i apologize if it's old at this point is that i i

had two offices in madison that were about three miles apart very similar marketing campaigns very similar demographics one was seeing about 35 to 40 new patients a month the other was struggling to see a dozen new patients a month it was really frustrating i was on my marketing company about it this is when my starting to record phone calls actually started um i just happened to have i guess the weird stroke of good fortune that both my office manager and treatment coordinator were out at that

office for a couple days in a row both of them were gone so i was filling in the front desk myself and the first day that i was there i scheduled eight new patients which is more than they were typically seeing in some months right and like the phone is ringing all the time i was missing calls you know like this phone is ringing and i had one new patient call young guy who said do you guys require an fmx which is a very weird new

patient question oh yeah but part of me in my head thought oh crap because my team is trained on our x-ray policy right and so very easily had that call not come to me they could have said yes we do we require a full series of x-rays on all new patients it could have easily gone that way and luckily i owned the place so i was curious instead of upholding a policy and i could have made all sorts of judgment about that question it could have

been a crazy no x-rays person i'm in madison wisconsin there's a lot of those right it could have been a person if you can't even afford an fmx you can't afford to come here though there's weird negative things that we tell ourselves about first questions right but instead i just said well you know we like to have one but tell me why you ask and he proceeds to tell me that he's been seeing dr so-and-so down the road a very reputable good dentist his whole life

he's been going to this dentist but it's this office's policy that when you're 23 you have to have an fmx which is very specific and obviously he's been quoted this policy and he's this doctor has some 22 not 24 23 23. and um i said well i said is there any reason that you don't want to have one and it goes on he goes on to say that well he'd recently had a panoramic x-ray to have his wisdom teeth removed and so he's not eligible for

an fmx and these are the exact words he's using this team member is upholding a policy right she's she's doing the thing that they've she's been instructed to do uh meanwhile i know this doctor would die to know he's losing a patient over an fmx but i said okay well is there um you know there's nothing going on there's no specific reason that they're pressing on you about this and he's like oh it's just their policies i said well how about this look at your x-rays

that are current sent over we'll get you set up for a new patient appointment uh if you need an fmx it's on me on the house right and he's like really like yeah i said i think we'll be fine with what you have but if you need one it's on me and he was like oh my gosh that's so fantastic he scheduled his visit and he's like oh by the way do you guys do invisalign because my mom just said she paid for it so this

guy lost a patient a lifelong patient over an fmx and a policy i promise you he doesn't even know it right and i just had a six thousand dollar phone call all because i was curious and connected and and i don't think we empower our teams to do things like that and i i run into things like this a lot when i'm working with people on this conversion side where there's like silly policies that if your teams if your doctor understood this was costing them new

patient opportunities they might change their mind they might be much more flexible and so i i promise you your doctor or your owner would want to know that that's an issue or that's causing an obstacle for people and doctors i would really encourage you to ask your team members about their new patient phone calls or their common objections and empower them to make judgment calls like that because a little give and a little bit of understanding in certain circumstances can create really big returns and i

just don't think it's really even on most people's radar what a difference that can make it's my little uh soapbox about that so on the case acceptance side of this thing we get in our own heads a lot uh as doctors and clinicians and depending on what your role in this is in thinking about what insurance is going to cover if this patient is only going to do what their insurance covers these are invasive thoughts sometimes the longer we know in our patients and we learned

that last time they didn't do it because of not having insurance or things like that we let it impact our thoughts and the way we communicate with patients on the front end of treatment planning a little too much um and so i i just encourage for my doctors on the call or even hygienists on the call or assistance if you're part of treatment planning is i watch clinicians get really held up with what they're afraid people will accept and also this the word need comes into

effect a lot like this person doesn't need this this tooth doesn't absolutely need this and so their filter is need and the scope of need is broad right if you get 20 dentists to look at the same tooth their what they think it needs will be different right i encourage clinicians to look at teeth and patients uh with the question would this patient be better off with treatment would this tooth be better served with a well-fitting crown versus watching it you know watching this amalgam decay

in another six month cycle right if you can ask yourself would this tooth be better off would this patient be better off would this patient benefit from us doing this that's the question we should be asking ourselves and i think it feels like a little bit easier filter to start to look at treatment planning through again also on the treatment planning side the worm for system competence very much comes into play um we are training as clinicians we are trained to educate people i actually grew

up in a pinky practice where i was told that if as the treatment coordinator assistant and treatment coordinator i was told that if a patient didn't accept treatment they weren't educated enough and i can tell you that that's absolutely not true it's not a matter of educating people people want to be educated about the stuff that's interesting to them they will never care about it but we care about it totally right i promise you no patient is very excited about getting educated about flossing it's just

not i'm sorry hygienist if there's any of you on the call it's not true they don't really actually want to be educated um they want to like you and then they want to know about the stuff that they find interesting and it's very hard for you to have conversations like that if we're leading with competence instead of connection and here again take a listen through your office right unfortunately educating in the dental office feels a lot like being critical it feels a lot like lecturing right

and we do it in a lot of ways and lecturing or making a person feel criticized if you read dale carnegie is one of the single biggest rapport breakers there is right it's why i can tell you if somebody answers the phone that a lot of people who have been out from the dental office one of the things that they fear more than coming to the dentist is the lecture or judgment they will receive coming yeah because they're educating feels a lot like shaming so if

you walk through the halls and you hear dental appointments or hygiene appointments starting with so what's your flossing like that's not a good place to start you know what tell me about your oral hygiene habits have they improved it's why people come in and like feel this need to self-report and i know it's been too long and we don't want our patients to feel guilty or shamed uh and i don't think most people intend for that to happen but because we're so wired to educate it's

very often what it feels like so just put that on your radar take a listen for where conversations are starting and challenge yourself work with your team to come up with five five open-ended questions in your pocket that you can mix up you know sometimes having different conversation takes preparing for different conversation being very intentional about putting that connection on the front end of your conversations uh on the other hand docs sometimes we have moments that we nailed it right like the treatment plan that you

delivered was awesome right but the patient totally is going to do this treatment we're pretty certain of it and then they walk down this magic hallway get up front to your treatment coordinator and you learn they're not proceeding right what the heck happened it went from like nailed it to yeah we're waiting on a pre-off right if if your team is telling you these people only do insurance covers or they wanted a pre-auth i promise you patients don't even know what a pre-auth was until we

taught them those words was not those are not word patients no no no patient has ever been like can you do a pre-d for me that's not a thing unless you're an office that does them all the time and have taught your patients those words but what happens very often and i don't think again i think this is an off-the-radar thing for a lot of doctors or a lot of a blind spot and if you're treatment coordinator you'll know exactly what i'm talking about here but

here's what happens in that in the time from your treatment plan to the time it gets up front is you deliver the treatment plan you walk out of the room you are then left the patient's left with a hygienist or an assistant who is super uncomfortable with the question that comes next which is will my insurance cover this or is this going to be very expensive and so that well-meaning hygienist or assistant will say you know what we can figure out exactly what your insurance is

going to pay and then they walk it up front and the handoff sounds a lot like bill needs a crown but he wants a pre-off and it's done that's done for your treatment coordinator uh it's we have now put the focus on exactly what insurance is going to pay right and so when patients say i want to know what insurance is going to pay weirdly dental teams turn that into he wants to know exactly what insurance is going to pay because the way we present treatment

plans very often is very specific and very detailed and then people who have misunderstandings about small amounts of money so then we put more energy into figuring out exactly what insurance is going to pay to which we will never ever be correct if you were if anybody was always correct nobody would have any ar right like that's just we're never correct um i can tell you that money is really not the barrier that we think it is obviously coming into an inflationary environment it's going to

be a higher stress but people still are getting tattoos people are still getting their nails done their hair done blonde is expensive to maintain you guys uh people like my wife she did yeah i'm not like not like crazy blonde but it's it's like dirty so yeah i know how expensive that is so what really needs to happen to have better more successful treatment acceptance and clearer understandings and less misunderstandings of people about money is that we have to simplify our language i am really done

with the words estimated patient portion we've been using the words after patient portion for all of my 20 plus years in dentistry mouthful and i know that we say estimated patient portion i know we explain estimated patient portion to people but here's where it doesn't work for us okay we present a treatment plan often very tentatively we slide it across the desk we over explain it this tooth costs this much insurance is going to pay this much your estimated patient abortion is this much and we

explain it all sometimes in way way way too much detail and then what happens and this is where because i just want if you guys take nothing else away from this today this is this is a huge problem in dentistry what happens is when that patient comes in for the treatment what we say is so today's 87 right when we explained it in a treatment plan we might have said estimated patient portion which the patient didn't really hear but when we collect it we say so

today's 87 but today was not 87 today was 887 right we're telling them today's 87 dollars so they feel like they've paid you then when insurance pays there's fourteen dollars more we send people the bill and they said you said it was eighty seven dollars to which i will have treatment coordinator after treatment coordinator saying are they signed that it's an estimated patient portion it says estimated patient person i know but it doesn't matter if they're mad about it it doesn't matter if they don't get

it and so i'm going to give you this magic language that works to not only increase case acceptance but also it works to help people feel prepared that they're going gonna owe more and then actually pay their bill when they get it so for me it sounds a little bit more like okay bill the total for that treatment on the upper right is fifteen hundred dollars looks like your insurance plan should help us out with about eight hundred dollars so i'm going to have you take

care of 700 when you come in next time and then whatever is left over after insurance pays me will settle up then how does that sound there's that magic how does that sound which forces them to respond to me that sounds good so that's good that's how we get the bar for treatment acceptance right but then it's very critical when you collect that you say okay bill today was fifteen hundred dollars looks like we're expecting about 800 from your insurance i'm gonna have you take care

of 700 today and then whatever's left over after delta pays me i'll send you a statement how does that sound you have to do it on both sides and honestly people especially if you're going to get rid of insurance participation start doing this now i do this with cleanings what we do for we teach people that cleanings are free because we say everything's covered today all set today no charge today there is a charge today there's a charge every time you come to the dental office

no dentistry is free so when you have a cleaning i say so today was 387 looks like insurance should pick most of this up right i'll i'll send it off to insurance if there's anything left over after they pay me i'll send you a statement how does that sound if you want to start exiting insurance you have to start preparing people that dentistry costs money right and so i know that seems weird but we are teaching people these things that come back and bite us and

we are perpetuating this very behavior that stresses us out and causes us so much work also you can really let go of trying to be exactly right about collecting 87 and 40 cents you can collect 85. right you can collect a round number that seems normal and have your patient fully prepared to pay you the difference and i promise you it's magic it really increases case acceptance and it really reduces phone calls when people get statements because they're completely ready for it and you can retrain

an entire patient base in a year just changing this language i promise you promise you and i'll send any of that to you or hopefully you screenshotted it the other thing that's really important about case acceptance is the simplification of that language it's really critical but also i i tell people this all the time i have good words i'm good at connecting with people these are things that i've always been good at but i truly believe my superpower and treatment acceptance is that i 1000 believe

that everybody's going to do it i don't believe that people come into the dentist get their teeth cleaned get an exam done and walk up to that front desk not wanting to do it i just don't think that's the actual if you didn't care about what needed to be done to your teeth you probably wouldn't show up to the dentist so i think that believing that people are there to take care of themselves and that it's your job to help them figure out how to do

it not if they're gonna do it is really what that role needs to be and if you can just honestly maybe i sound like a lunatic but truly if you can just believe that when people call your office they want to schedule when people walk up front need treatment they want to do it your language will kind of shift automatically and you'll be able to speak more to the positive side of what we can do with your insurance we'll be able to use more assumptive language

like let's do this and when you're using positive and assumptive language people feel more confident in you they have more trust in you and they will follow you along in a way that is very hard to believe based on how we have done it in dentistry but it's really a small tweak and a lot of it is is up here and so i could give you a bunch of examples of that but i want to kind of cover this last little piece this is my clever

my one clever animated slide this is the missing piece and treatment acceptance it's cute right missing piece is follow-up we don't follow up with people who didn't schedule um we have a really weird thing about not wanting to bother people right we don't want to bother people we don't want to bother people for you know we already called them once or if they wanted to do it they would have done it i'm not going to nag people there's a lot of work as a group very

conflict diverse and this is where that mindset kind of comes in when i call a person to follow up with them whether that's for a cleaning or for unscheduled treatment i'm genuinely calling with the intention to help them get going on it so if you are afraid to follow up or you just simply don't have a follow-up system treatment plan follow-up can be really really helpful and working with your doctor to find out like where you can follow up with people like what would be the

best place to start with a larger treatment plan you know looking at the types of common things that didn't get scheduled what's going on with those things being invested in what doesn't get scheduled and having a good follow-up system can make a huge difference in overall case acceptance these are also good people to target if you're implementing um an in-house plan right jordan like people who have unscheduled treatment oh you don't have benefits i totally think also uh tying into that positive and assumptive language i

totally assume if a person doesn't already have my in-house plan that when there's treatment to do then obviously they want to get on the in-house plan right so let's do this let's get you set up with your in-house plan so you can get the best pricing on this right so just putting that all in there in a positive confident way helps people see that you're there to help them figure that part out uh people have a lot going on don't be afraid to follow up with

them you are not bothering your patients right that is just not the case the final piece of that pyramid is loyalty right and i know we're running out of time but you are not bothering people when you call them for being overdue i'm currently overdue to see my own medical doctor since coven they've called me probably 17 times i'm not going anywhere else they're not bothering me and i still am every time they call me i think i have to call them back right so um

just know that your verbiage and your ability to connect with people in this authentic way instead of just like the murder list of people who are overdue really makes a huge difference and i think that's you know getting your head right about calling people who are due for cleaning uh this is my final little verbage tip i call people and say um hey jordan and looks like we haven't seen you for a little while looks like i didn't get you scheduled for your next appointment it

looks like i didn't do that right there's a really weird thing when you call especially women because it's like the ladies on the call we understand like when you get home from a really busy day of work and then your husband asks you about the one thing you didn't get done you feel like you want to choke him strangle somebody yeah hey how come you didn't do the dishes making our dentist appointment always on the bottom of the to-do list calling and saying you're overdue for

your oral health examination is not effective calling and saying hey jordan looks like i never got you scheduled for your next cleaning appointment do you have your calendar handy it's just a totally different thing it takes all of the blame off of them they don't have anything wrong they're not going to resist it there's a really weird thing when you say you're overdue that like the first reaction is oh you haven't come to your dental appointment it's like it's almost like a stiff arm that you

get back from people and just by saying i didn't do it completely changes how people respond to it even in a mess that's interesting so if you if you are the person who's managing that recare which is really not just feeling hygiene it's patient retention that's how we keep our patients and stopped from churning it's very very important and i think a lot of people don't understand the value of how practice grows and why re-care isn't just to fill in the cancellation from tomorrow it's how

we retain our patients actively i focus a lot on new patient stuff with people and i have practices that are sometimes seeing 40 50 new patients a month but never adding more hygiene days right so if you're seeing 40 new patients a month and you're never adding more hygiene time you really have to look at the back side of your of your dental office right the concept of churn is something we don't really look at and if you're seeing 40 new patients but 60 went inactive

for you know just basically inactivity that's a problem you're not growing you're just churning and you're way too dependent on new patients so i know nobody loves to be the person who makes re-cure calls but i think it's just because we look at it wrong and we don't understand that it's not re-care it is patient retention it's practice growth you cannot practice without retaining your patients and it's really important also if you just keep a list printed and you have hygienists randomly working on it when

they have cancellations i can tell you that is literally the least effective strategy you can possibly have in place i love hygienists they're not trained to be on the phone they're not comfortable being on the phone they resent doing that task and so very much what their phone call sound like is this is your hygienist you're overdue for your oral health examination and prophylaxis it's they turn into weird phone robots very nice people weird phone robots don't on your re-care list is like the last thing

to do in terms of a cancellation give it to somebody in the office who owns it who cares about retaining patients in your practice and then give them some verbal skills of owning it for the patient and connecting with them even through simple things like a re-cure call anyway this is the practice that thought they were killing it 413 new patients in a year but their net gain was only 80. and they have earned a lot of money here is a silent killer and if you

don't know how to look at this or measure this message me i'm happy to help you understand that so we get most of our patients we get two hours a year with we need to stay connected to them make them feel special and remind them why they chose us the final part is asking for referrals and reviews um and that very much comes into having a great patient experience and also kind of planning for it so i won't belabor that part of it this is my

contact information this is my email it's long genevieve there's a lot of ease in this oh and it's actually misspelled here look at that oh my god i've had that happen too don't worry about it it's so many e's even i haven't misspelled that's pretty terrible um it's spelled like the real way you would spell management not this type of it's genevieve at poppypracticemanagement.com i'm also like the only genevieve poppy on facebook so you can very accessible that way yeah i think you're the only genevieve

poppy i know so right so with that um thank you guys for who hung in here with us if um yeah just a little side note um i'll put it in the chat ben and i both have some of this similar content more recorded more of a training course style on a new product called dent logix we can send you that if you're looking for a team resource but now i can just kind of open it up if anybody has questions for any of us before

we wrap up for the day yeah and as as we're waiting for if there's any questions coming in so the recording will be processed uh being a longer webinar it'll take some time so i'll probably we'll probably have it ready uh either later by the end of the day or by monday depending on how long it takes to process so there we go any questions or any common questions you hear uh genevieve or ben with anything here i'm looking i don't see anything no there are

no questions coming in i think most of them were uh asked during the presentation so awesome you guys thank you so much for coming ben and genevieve always fun to hang out with you guys for a couple hours uh definitely need to be doing this more together um so yes thanks melissa so we hope you guys have a rockin friday and a great weekend and for those that are watching the recording whatever day it is we hope you have an awesome day [Laughter] take care everybody

all right bye