Insurance Anonymous - Dental Course

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 gonna 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 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

gas how much did you pay for gas this week I this morning yeah you just went to the gas station this morning uh what I wait 10 minutes and pay 443 a gallon four uh 443 a gallon okay last night I filled up my motor home because I'm going to motor homing after this today yeah and I think I paid $450 cents 558 a gallon holy cow where are you at Ma Matthew where 585 I guess California 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 just start with some mutual pain yeah yeah doing all of us oh that's right Jen you just at the gas station yes five bucks for your diesel truck Ben yeah it's ridiculous I'm glad I work 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 motor home was uh a bit pricey yeah it was pretty big it'll

be a couple hundred bucks Melissa same for 37 same as gen T Colorado yep Connecticut oh con let's go to Connecticut it's not too bad there 437 it's so much more affordable 5.99 Orange County ouch 490 yeah um 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 are you yeah providing some U benefits for just for gas because I do en enjoy there's uh oh 649

in Santa holy SM hell that's crazy um yeah I'm thinking about um Justin and I we're thinking about doing some Ben benefits for employees 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 at boomcloud um because I really enjoy seeing people in the office and I think I'm a a big culture geek so I like I for some reason

I like 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 stranton 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 wil Spar I don't know from Scranton from Scranton oh I think he was like born there was he yeah I don't think

he grew up there but yeah nice cool town there nice nice nice small airport I like that airport I like that airport too I used a lot I used to have like two clients that I would visit at the same time when I would go there and uh 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 bar Santa Barbara was the most 649 wow hopefully you drive a a

fish car you're yeah 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 PE 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 uh but we'll get started here so uh really pumped to be on this webinar today with Ben and Genevie 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 from me and that was not planned that was just kind of happened so funny it's so fun I I love seeing Ben in the neighborhood and uh 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 the really Prime New York strip and

he cooked it in his Trager that was actually really good I've never had uh State cook that way oh yeah and it was uh it was awesome was quite an experience that's all I how I cook it so I'm a steak snob so GL you like them and geneve I've I've I've known you forever I think just shortly after I started boomcloud um yeah we met each other and I'm just I'm happy that we're able to reconnect on a webinar again because we're we've all been

so busy and help practices um reduce the pen on cpos and and uh combat the challenges of today's market so today this is how we're going to um structure it Ben is going to go first Ben what's your title of your topic I 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 um I've done a

lot of webinars and speaking with Ben and um I always learn something new I'm going to be talking about dental membership ship growth hacks um I think everyone at this day and age knows what a dental membership program is so I I'll briefly talk about that but I'm going to talk about what is uh working in terms of growing a membership program because that seems to be the biggest challenge that practices have and then jenevie talk a little bit about what you'll be uh sharing with

everybody this webinar I'm gonna bring us home with some verbal skills so how we can have our patients uh accept our treatment regardless of what your insurance mix is so whether you're planning to drop or you're working with insurance uh just creating the 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 ins are you like the patient Whisperer new patient Whisperer new patient whis awesome no I want

to brag but if you call the wrong number I'm gonna I'm gonna make you a dental appointment okay that's funny um no jevie has lots of good content we I've been on lots of webinars podcast uh and podcasts and I've seen jenevie speak live as well as with Ben um jenevie you were the keynote speaker at Adam last year I believe right yeah I that was actually really cool and really nerve-wracking well 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 I allowed it so you guys can share the 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 tuna has started sharing screen yeah let me know when it pops up you you should see breaking out of there is a prison that looks like it's like what prison is that you know uh gosh I don't know this is uh this is the dental economics

theme on this particular article yeah yeah totally I borrowed it from them 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 uh in dentistry as well um so I'm from the South Pacific I'm from a

tiny tiny tiny island nation called American Samo 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's like Dad did you know that you grew up in Ocean I was like ocean I grew up in American sore what's ocean he's a fifth grader so I guess uh if I were to play that game smarter than fifth grader

I'd probably lose um you feel better my boyfriend's from Australia and he asked me if i' been to oania and I said I've never even heard of it what the hell is that grew is that like a lost city or something this whole area go equipping racist all right embarassing so me too I had no idea I grew up in America I know we uh being American s it's a US Territory it's one of the five US territories but it's actually considered um an Incorporated territory

of the United States because we have our chief government that is run by the high Chiefs and then we have the US government which is the governor and and then the House of Representatives and so we have one conr Congressional I'm sounding like someone right now we we have one Congressional delegate a member of Congress that's a non-voting delegate um so we have representation in Congress but we're considered um United States Nationals which is a version of citizenship but uh not full citizenship simply because of

the um government component we still own our own land which is cool um where my family land U my property our family land is kind of in the middle section where you see Le that's not they made a mistake on this it says Leona on the bottom that should say Leon so just just above that is several thousand acres that our tribe owns and so part of the government setup there is is American Sans 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 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 S one Island change immediately you see Hawaii there in the center s is South if you just go down to where the Cook Islands in Tonga is s 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 s and you know you see here David T in 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 public

shaming the 1980s version of wow K kanoy 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 list of people and but this is the environment that I grew up in's another that's hilarious here's a so

when are we gonna start shaming the insurance exacts yeah we'll get to that here in a minute so check out this one here you guys I mean right you read this you know that's what I thought first time I saw this of course you probably don't understand I know what that means I know what I basically what this says is that if you don't have a t-shirt you're not permitted into this store because it is not pleasing to the site and this was the grocery store

of um the Kims they're Korean and they've been renting our family um building for many for 30 40 years and I walk in this day and I I I go up to Miss Kim I said so Kim if I if I come in and I don't wear a t-shirt are you you're not going to let me in like no no you ugly you get out here you go you know you wear a t-shirt she starts just yelling at me and so the 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 skim 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 loves the rock back home because he's from s I said what about this dude will you let him in oh Roman re

oh yeah wwe1 what about this dude you know Junior SE football player well known and he's like oh yeah absolutely let these guys in so the next day I come back in I come back in without a [Laughter] shirt and uh 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 FES wow um 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 to 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 insurance BS right that we're all dealing with in today day and age but that's a little bit about me where I came from who I am um and and the purpose of 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 Jenna viiv is probably one of the foremost experts on the communication component that's why she's last you know 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 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 um 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 wi 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 um 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 professional 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 the 24 weeker to be exact and I recognize that we

might have some parents uh 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 um 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 gation so some background to 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 football for

the University of Arizona back when it was the pack 10 uh in the 1990s and my wife played softball for 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 the older you get especially for um a person like my wife who is 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 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 te uh by 22 weeks gation 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 perinatologist 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 the 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 weers don't survive there's like a less than a 1% chance of survival 23 weers there's a 5% chance of survival 24 weers it'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 um obes 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 uh the result of that this is literally five minutes after the sea 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 Ines in height at 24 weeks quite an amazing feat for for the medical community to be able to serve children born this early uh you know with all the Technologies and the advances

that they know now in the realm of H Sciences to help these children at this young age you know after this photo was snapped I went back to the room the the O where they were closing my wife um and then we willed her back to 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 U playing football and going to Vegas and doing naughty things which you kind of talked about before the web I started to beit 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 fol 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 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 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 gentleman opens the door and he's wearing business attire he has a stack of documents and I thought okay you know a a clergy person is coming in to say a prayer maybe so he opens the door and he whispers to me and says Mr twinky said no no it's Mr T man uh congratul ations on being a firsttime 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 son's treatment and 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 T 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 uh the space around your son's incubator right where you

left him uh and they're creating an operating room in that section the doctors are scrubbing in the nurses are scrubbing in all we need for you to do is sign this document this consent document to Pro so that we can proceed with this treatment he then handed me I don't have a room of Keeper in my office but anyway it was about that thick right and I looked at the last page and it was 603 pages and uh 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 was in 2010 um never in my life or in my dealings with Physicians oral surgeons dentists specialist have dealt with a consent form an inform consent document that was longer than three pages right and was written in and confusing legal language a lot of informed consent is very clear on paper so that you understand as as an individual what's really going on right it's

it's the law so he he handed me this 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 are 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 Di because I don't really know what I'm agreeing to at that point he finally he uh caved I guess and gave in threw in the towel and he says well Ben um essentially what's going on here

is that the neonatal cardi thorasic surgeons that normally deal in this type of surgery uh 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 planed 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 this surgery um you're you're essentially you know giving the hospital

a 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 cardic 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 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 i recog that that's not always professional but sometimes we're tempted to say it right like I am right now sitation 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 too 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 Hightech act that passed last year right federal law applicable in all 50 states I have a legal right to 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 just a minute but naturally yeah the question of survival yes he did survive

so this is him uh three years old tyy beach where my wife is from I mean look at those beautiful teeth right those are nice arches they no longer exist 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 I've never served 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 on giving way too many options I

mean for Crown treatment Restorations often times I mean Jordan seen this in his lab 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 yeah Jordan saw many lab many lab slips with that instruction yeah what what what happened tell us what happened Jordan oh a lab slip came in with a with a case and it it basically it said please use the cheapest materials available and this particular office uh was signed

with pretty much every po 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 the nobody was focused on quality uh of of even just my my tooth right um but that's that's kind of the the the gist of the story that we we we got many lab slips like that coming in that just said just use the cheapest

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 falsely in prison in 1996 Derek was convicted of a murder that he didn't commit during his two-year decade stay or 20-year uh stay in a heavily gated bar 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 a to fight just excuse me to fight Injustice as a successful plaintiff the legal experience he learned in lockup molded him into one of the greatest advocates for those who are charged for crimes they did not commit Hamilton was awarded a

$7 million settlement for imprisonment that was based upon false and fabricated evidence from illegal system to designed 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 D Association was started by the C uh excuse me Delta Den California started by Cali 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 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% we

talked about gas prices and this is another slide that I ripped off from you Jordan so thank you very much kind sir anytime brother yeah we share we share a lot of content we do you know the Ada and AGD is is basically asking the insurance companies to help you know help with PPE cost 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 associations try to plead with the insurance industry

Signa comes back and says F you mother effer I'm gonna give you a 15 and 36% cut right yeah Delta Dental comes to some states and they say you know what we're going to follow what sickness says screw you 10 20 to cut for sir and ma'am damax 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 gonna be really sad we're gonna start by being a little

shocked that's the oh Emoji that's what I would call it yeah at the Yankee at the Yankee one of the Denis in the back said ah you know the FW 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 line right um and so he started to give back he started to recognize the need knowing that insurance

companies are not going to help his practice so he started to help his team right we're kind of all in that position in terms of this whole realm of inflation how do we address that from an insurance participation pers perspective and that's that's what we're going to talk about here briefly right uh 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 Anti-Trust 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 um we we looked up the realities of dental insurance only 6% so this is 2019 data two 2019 and before as you probably are aware uh Dentistry utilization um has declined in a lot of States but 2019 pre pre 20109 only 6% of

people with an a PP plan reached their annual Max 22% uh received the benefit for a restorative procedure or PID to deductible only 36% of it the were considered active the interesting thing is that children um for Medicaid only 52% in every that's the average of every state on the utilization for poo it's 51% one of the more 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 ins 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 PO is actually used towards poo 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 and absolutely they do so I want to talk about a couple things first this whole idea behind why 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 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 10 most trusted professionals according to the gallop polling and you talk about where the insurance industry is Holy Smokes they don't even rank right and Congress yeah sons of uh 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 insurance industry to lease your credibility to lease the trust that the the public already has in you um I'm going to 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 metti and Etna sometimes siga if you're

in Texas where a lot of the school districts use Sigma and everybody in every doctor in those communities are in network with Sigma the point is is that we are the ones that tend to unmistakenly give the insurance companies the authority to make these feed Cuts simply because whenever they do these Fe 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 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 the guy on the top 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 $2 and a half million dollar 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 ATA CEO makes towards 50 million

$60 million 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 um 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 commented in uh it

wasn't public so I don't want everybody to see it but he he's pointing out that a lot of people who are listed as endorsing dentists are retired and dead and that don't take them off the because of exactly what you're saying it provides them credibility that they have all of these participating doctors that might not even be true spot on interes that is another trick that the insurance company uses is they will retain doctors that would choose to not rec credential a doctor that's retired or

where the license expired like oh well we'll just Overlook it and clean it up maybe 20 years down the road we'll remove that oh my leave it on that list yeah yeah but that's that's another trick that they use so my suggestion let's let's cut out these insurance plans right they're toxic they're poison 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 Insurance profile um I recommend now when I'm using the fair Health database if you want to Google Fair Health you can check it out I recommend the 80th percentile for fair health and the reason why is because most insurance plans like Etna metal life Guardian Sigma 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 adaas percentiles are pretty close to that around the 65th you're not necessarily overpriced when it comes to setting your fees at at the fair Health 80th per percentile my pick for a paid fee analysis is is Benco 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 Fe estimator dorg 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 F estimator dorg 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 Benco is a perfect perfect partner to to ask for that type of fee analysis on Fair

Health this is what H this is what you see we'll just SK quickly go through this for the sake of time now the out of Network insur 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 porcena ceramic crown 152 in this particular community in Seattle Washington is considered the 80 percentile um 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 endd 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 going to be losing

out on on a lot of potential income there part two is how you are contracted with insurance sometimes you might find that the denx contract governs M Life Etna Ameritas 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 Etna by talking to Etna directly when your Etna contract is actually through denx 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 that 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 they're they have no awareness of it at all and there's no master list and there's no there's nobody in the entire office somebody

who was an office manager 10 years ago set it all up well 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 that's that's what also makes it so complicated complicated running practices and kind of seems scammy yeah yeah you have you have to have your ongoing list right who is metti really paying under if they're be paying under denx or maverest or Carrington Platinum you have to straighten

that out just for the sake of like what Genevie 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 Etna has agreed to follow Fair Health's 80th percentile so on and so forth with Sigma Guardian in M life and

so that kind of bakes the question you know when you uh when you assess and and research how these insurance companies pay out of network which one should you start with for me in most communities it's meant life in many in many other communities it's Etna but the four top out of network paying plans in the country are MetLife Etna guardian and Signum 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 their preventive care visit whereas a lot of atam LIF Guardian insigna plans 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 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 am going to skip that because that is my buddy Jordan's section here and I'm just going to 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 patience 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 uh 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 a lot of patients that no matter what they give you a hard time and dropping insurance is a perfect way to weed 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 genev is going to talk about here in in about an hour or so

I use unrestricted but I also clarify I 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 um of course this is being recorded where you can re access this later um but but what I want to get to here are just a couple of um recommendations

on verbage when I talk to patients you know during the the part where we're not out of network we're in the process of terminating I 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 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 months you'll get a letter from us and that'll kind of explain things in further detail um about our journey to go to the status to protect you as our patient to 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 right or with the insurance industry in general and some of you may be thinking well that's not true because when

when Suzie 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 Debs 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 in genen and jording can talk to this a little bit more is that when we go through this journey of dropping Insurance especially with Met Life Signa Etna uh 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 at least my recommendations on the scripting for a small fee of $5,000 I will share any of this with the price of admission is is free as it pertains to me sharing I have some of the same stuff too so we

can and I I can send it off as well so absolutely critical to drop it here's a question for you Ben real quick from Melissa hi how you doing um hi Melissa 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 um it's a little bit tougher

to Institute a global policy in that state to drop insurance is all at once my first rule of thumb with dsos as it pertains to Insurance participation is that it I I recommend it's always handled on a per state basis right because every state is different Alabama Blue Cross Blue is your number one um in terms of patients and then Pennsylvania it's Delta United Concordia so it's different right in a state I 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 in as many in network participation agreements those 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 look 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 your your questions answered and that way we keep moving along so the kodok study good friend of ours Gary Takis who runs the driving dentist podcast yeah 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% 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 network you typically raise it 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 patience 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 metti um you could lose 33 to 37% of your metti 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 7 to 10 per. so all in all what that means is that you have a lot of room mistakes when it drop when it comes to dropping insurance I recommend not tolerating too many mistakes the goal is to retain at least 85% or more of these patients as you walk out

of network and really the best way to do that is don't talk to Jen myself don't do what this guy did he's like these sons of next to me they all take Delta I'm gonna burn their practices down and that way their patients will come to me let's be kind to each other life is hard enough now 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 jenev 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 feif for s or un out of network practice with uh as many ppos as you feel is necessary Jordan I yield both the screen and mic back to you my friend thanks dog you like that oh that's my contact way if needs it 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 there 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 hey lots of just yeah just so I can gauge 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 a good mix awesome okay well I'll explain what a membership program is in 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 um for practices it's been my passion for a long time now um 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 running in loops 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 um and growing up

we worked uh 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 know yeah yeah she's she's awesome um Ben and I run a podcast called uh the navigating dental insurance uh podcast say no top.com I'm the founder and CEO of boomcloud which is a software company that helps uh manage membership plans and I hate demo Insurance that's a little bit about me um so I like

to uh 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 um 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 an admin work to get the revenue uh needed from insurance patients number two the profit margins Ben talked a lot about that in

his uh presentation your profit margins are being attacked uh and then number three the patient experience often patients blame practice for insurance issues or maybe the patient doesn't understand how the insurance plan works uh 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 going to be talking a lot of the C well all three of these things cash flow profit margins of 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 uh Ben mentioned a story earlier today about uh 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 po Under The Sun It's a it's I mean saw it on the on the dental lab side with a lot of our clients but I'm I'm just amazed now running running boomcloud and seeing a lot of the Utah practices how they're just uh attacked in so many ways with these P ppos so my I 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 uh you know the Ada and other organizations are warning us of inflation and encouraging um well in bold we've got wage inflation hitting uh I even seen wage inflation in my own company which has been uh very interesting uh to uh manage but um in bold here then it at the end it says it's extremely important to have this conversation with dental insurance paays 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 Fu mother effers from your slide something like that something like that and start started uh cutting or what uh po started cutting more is that what it seemed you you gave a whole list I don't memorize all the numbers siga yeah yeah Delta guard well all those plans started cutting fees by 10 to 30% sure as a response to this I'm sure yeah sounds 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 and I I be talking about how we can do that and how membership program can uh Aid with that uh effort in your practice Ben mentioned also uh inflation rate 7.9%

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 Pro uh when you have a membership program so subscription Revenue uh I've been talking a lot about this lately with inflation On

The Rise uh the reason why subscription revenue for membership programs is so important especially whether it's a a recession or inflation uh uh 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 uh 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 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 um patients buy three times more with your practice or say yes to treatment three times more is probably another another better way to say it um 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 um as consumers and uh we'll we'll discover what that does to us but also um membership programs allow you to reduce dependence on ppos which is a a profit increaser as Ben uh mentioned in his presentation helps you increase profit so and then automating tasks and um using Automation in this day age reducing the human element of of tasks is going to help uh 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 may be doing it a little bit off from my definition this is for you as well um so my definition of a membership program it's an alternative dental insurance man managed and

designed by your practice where patients pay an automated subscription monthly or or yearly subscription fee to get access to certain benefits and discounts or savings to your office that 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 a does anybody not have Amazon yeah they would be in the Dark Ages it seems 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 a thousand dollar signs that was a lot I think Britney and I might be in the same Britney what's up we're toal we're friends we're total friends that's awesome I sometimes forget what's in my packages so do I at my door like what that I bought yeah start stealing your packages Jordan I bet you wouldn't even notice if I stole your packages I'm sure you wouldn't so

enjoy enjoy the product dri my dogs treat yeah so th 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 who can say the same thing literally with every membership program in any category that we buy from uh when you subscribe you buy more um and we found the same thing in in dentistry 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 Britney I feel concerned 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 and you're looking at him like what are you doing here kick him [Laughter] out you don't go into Costco to buy one thing that's just weird yeah hey did my microphone turn off can you guys hear me I got alert 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 going to 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 going to be uh focused on the word subscription a lot of practices think they have a membership program but they're not uh the patients aren't subscribed it's not Auto renewing or there's no recurring Revenue uh component to their membership program uh good example is a pract 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 you shouldn't though just personal two cense the simpler they are the easier they are for your team to sell and then the easier it is to grow your membership I yeah I exactly I remember when iall 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 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 want offer with seven whoa I'm like don't do 10 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

snap snapshot of this what we're finding though uh recently that a lot of practices obviously are in different demographics and have different situ uations so we're finding that um a practice can't just be like yeah I just charge 300 bucks 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 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's some Trends out of these uh here at here at boomcloud 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 $888,000 a year and you can look at the poverty rate to 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 um so this is what we're finding though the top 10 successful growing Dental membership uh practices out there are uh looking at the median income of their location and this is the range they're pricing at it's

30 to 0.56% of the median income so this example with Palm Beach Gardens Florida the range would be around $263 a year to $492 a year the bigger the population so uh populations with I believe like $8,000 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 uh so you want to be really strategic the cool thing about this uh we have a my team

understands all what to look at and they help a lot of our practices is be strategic looking at their pricing a lot of people out a lot of uh membership plans out there just just kind of use a box uh like a plan of 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 a practice that was in a in a low population and a a high poverty lowincome uh state in city

and they were having a hard time growing their membership program we looked at the demographics helped the practice uh 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 cool thing is the opportunity continues to grow for membership programs uh when I started doing this back in 2016 and and Consulting with practices you know um just under half of the United States

didn't have dental insurance it's now over over half uh of the population of the US does not have dental insurance in 2020 with the uh the covid-19 issues um it it forced 28 million more Americans into early retirement uh 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 our small business owners and

employees is small businesses and that's another thing we're going to talk about have a Target so opportunity continues to grow the longer I've been in this it it it gets really 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 uh my favorite thing to talk about it helps produce uh predictable recurring Revenue I managed a dental lab which follows a cash flow

trend of dentistry and uh 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 at 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 GameChanger for them we all know that there's feast and famine months SU I think they still call that um 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 uh patients commit with their wallets so they're less likely to cancel and if they do that recuring 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 the 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 meing 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 would 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 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 Topline funnel to attract uh more uh uninsured patients um add a network patients

things like that uh patient retention tool so once they become a uh 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 a case acceptance right meaning uh patients say yes more to case acceptance if if you if you look at the membership model it is a compl complet 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 sub we live in a subscription economy right so many business 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 um 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 uh 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 warlo is the author um he actually just spoke on the on

Mark Cy'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 the valuation of your practice so if your practice you know getting ready to exit um your recuring revenue is something you definitely need to look at yes but we all have Amazon am Prime go buy this on Amazon honly 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 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 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 discount the thief for service officers tend then I 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 time

I promise you it works well and let let's be honest because that that is a a normal a normal concern especially from a like a fif for Service practice I he we hear that all the time but there's there's something what I like to call give to gets um 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 are giving a subscription

and they're getting a discount so it's not uh a a devaluation of your services because there is it's a it's it's a 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 Genevie of when somebody thinks of oh I'm just I'm focusing on the discount it's 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 pass 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 can't even talk to me unless you read this book yeah yeah I that have you read the automatic customer no get away call me next week call me next week yeah um 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 the mechanism when you have everyone paying a subscription on one platform and you can go let's increase that by 5% or whatever percentage and boom the next month or the current month that uh that increase uh 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 I think my days

of cash flow um loving came when uh 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 um really fix um I know a lot of people may think cash FL may be profit uh but it's

not cash flow is just the timing of money when it comes in when it leaves this is why I like membership programs because uh you can design it in a way where cash is coming in right before payroll so you got to get a lump sum from subscription into the bank account so you can make sure you're paying your employees on time when I managed the dental lab that having the cash flow issues I remember this saying hey I can't pay you today next week right

and as employees you don't want to NE you never want to do that to your employees um 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 bad economy um so that's why

I love this strategy and how it can help your practice skipping that um uh is Daniel is that you hi Daniel 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 or 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 uh that states that you can increase uh prices that's just good uh business practices um and then what a lot of our practices do um at the end of each year they'll increase it by a certain percentage and um since they use the boom Cloud platform they can just get in um 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 that 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 boomcloud do that uh with our 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 um but I think it's really important to understand what type of Revenue um 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 um 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 and people signing up because there 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 uh patients to your membership program that can generate $35,000 a month in predictable recurring revenue and we typically suggest you look at the the existing uninsured because most likely they're not coming into your practice because they have the 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 in some time so in uh the low hanging fruit was 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 sonnel my sales funnel math there uh 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 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 uh to scale it and grow it um first off systems help you scale um 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 uh at boomcloud um before they manually running their membership program um and you can see a year later after having a system like boomcloud manage their plan they were able to scale it quite a quite a bit in a year's time um which resulted in lots of recurring Revenue um a lot of these practice came to us wanting to reduce dependence on ppos gave them more confidence um 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 um you always want to start with your existing um uninsured patients your existing inactive patients because they're not coming to your office um and they're not producing a revenue maybe here and there they are um you know and you can easily do that by having flyers and brochures in your office um sending email blasts uh 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 uh 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 have uh insurance and keep in mind that uh over half the United States doesn't

have dental insurance uh I never had dental insurance and still to the day I don't and neither do does my team we actually uh 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 boomcloud 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 um I think it's a wonderful tool you can do Facebook ads uh a a lot of the practices that I'll be showing you here in the next little bit um um have started with uh 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 Genevie will will touch on there verbage is is King in regards to marketing and attracting patients um 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 um and they'll send mail marketing pieces educating that they can come to

the practice without insurance making sure you have uh information on your website um that explains your membership program and allows people to sign up from your website using Google ads uh and then live presentations I know lots of practices that have gone to like the the 55 and up communities or even B2B businesses and uh presented to those uh 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 back no I can hear you you can hear me okay I keep I keep getting an alert hopefully I'm sounding okay um so this is a new thing that's happening um in I mean it's been going on in the in the membership space for a while but it's it seems to be uh becoming more and more popular um is attracting small business owners and their employees to come and join your membership

program which I think uh I call this leveraged sales uh meaning uh you're not selling you know one-on-one from you know a p a consumer model um as they come in which I think is great I love leverage sales meaning you can go find a 20 location business a 20 uh employee business educate them on the benefits of joining a membership program and how the the business will save money and retain patience in this in this interesting Market we have um where where what do they

call 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 um we need to focus on retaining employees um a a dental membership program could be a benefit for a lot of these business out there your 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 uh we've actually had some practices that have very success with bar owners and their employees um because with the pandemic um they uh uh they suffered quite a bit and were trying to retain people but yeah I I know we would all like that right who wouldn't like a bar owner to come in

I'm sure you can swap some benefits there um so we're looking at a lot of Industries and seeing uh which ones are more likely to join a d membership program and and get their employees on um so you want to identify an industry or or a niche um 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 an 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 in a visit campaign is what we call them so visit the local areas we had a practice that targeted restaurants that did really well setting up restaurants and their employees

um to their Dental membership program they just went around visited all the local restaurants and uh got in contact with the owner and signed up all the owner and their employees so um it's just simple as just networking and reaching out right um and then obviously uh I tend to focus on it doesn't say this on here but I te tend to like to focus on like Health oriented businesses people businesses that um are in front of people like accountants Market a marketing agencies are working

with people restaurants that you know they're face to face with people um any type of advisor or consultant uh realators are a good one um and there's hubs of realators out there that they always working with people you know if they've got you know they're not taking care of their teeth they're going to look weird and people probably won't trust them as much um mental health uh uh um offices day spas things like that and then of course the assist 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 who has to face a customer they're going to be a little bit more health conscious uh that we're seeing um but there's a lots of different Industries in your area this is just a an example Target list uh where we're finding a success uccess when practices reach out and provide information to to and education to start having their employees join the membership program so uh that's what

I I see that's what's happening now in the industry and I think it's a really smart strategy to go about it um 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 and educating getting 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 lwh 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 um you want to start with your existing uninsured patients uh 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 Genevie point we feel like they focus on the discounting we're already getting you know 100% of them paying

their full fee which it's 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 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 that actually uh started a membership program from scratch um during the pandemic in 2020 and um this particular practice they were in California which had a lot of strong regulations um in running the practice they um the first month and a half I believe two months um they they targeted their uninsured patients and got 281 patients to sign up just under $7,000 in monthly recurring revenue or $882,000 in annual recurring revenue and they focused on really simple stuff reaching out

to their uninsured and inactive patient base uh didn't even start with any type of Facebook or marketing campaign which they eventually led to that uh which I still think is super important uh is is to not just Target your uninsured but make sure you have a marketing and and marketing strategy to continue growing it because this a membership program is a numbers game you're not going 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 uh next practice here this is about a year in after they launched a membership program uh from scratch first thing they did uninsured and inactive patients that weren't coming to the office and then they this pra particular practice used Facebook advertising and targeted 55 and up uh individuals and invited them and educated invited them to join their membership program uh so in a year over a thousand active membership patients all these practices I'm showing you are single location um so

if you're running multi-locations uh it's rinse and repeat uh 26,000 over $26,000 in monthly recurring Revenue over 300,000 in 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 pan 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 a wonderful benefit here uh this next practice here just under 2,000 through way over 2,000 now um they use Direct Mail marketing after they attracted their existing uninsured patients they use Direct Mail marketing targeted 55 and up communities in their local area and other markets but that was the main thing they did um and they in a year and a half they generated about uh just under $50,000 in monthly recurring Revenue over a half a million dollars in annual recurring Revenue once again whether

they do dentist year or not Ben question question for you um in the insurance model they have a very similar model right a subscription model what is the usage rate uh of of patients that use uh like a a dental uh poo plan is it like 50 40 under 50% that actually use it is that what 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's

going to use it 100% I think a lot of practic will come in to your point Genevie of oh I'm I'm just focusing on the discounts why we're GNA discount we're devaluing um but in the reality is not every patient that joins a membership program if you look at this dashboard here 2,000 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 uh present it to patients

and and communicate with them but you're not going to get 100% usage rate but you will get 100% reoccurring revenue from them you know Jordan maybe you're gonna cover this but I think just an important thing that you're demonstrating here is you have a lot of um monthly recurring Revenue examples and that's another place that I watch people get really hung up is 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 $500 you know like coming up with that $1,500 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 cancelling 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 space it so

thanks for reminding me um so the the cancellation rate is actually higher on yearly subscriptions meaning patients will join and then maybe the next year they end up cancelling because maybe it's not right 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 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 found that there's a higher cancellation rate when a patient subscribes yearly now obviously on the 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 mult f you know larger families even just a family of three uh a lower barrier of Entry um I also call it Evergreen it's an evergreen subscription $30 a month

it you know is is not noticeable on a bank statement compared to you know $300 a month um or a year $300 a year excuse me um so there's some under the radar payments is what I call that um and then with the Evergreen um being under the radar um it's Evergreen meaning patients most likely will not cancel a monthly subscription because it is under the radar and it's not a huge pain point when 30 or $60 gets pulled out even $100 gets pulled out um

of their bank account it's just uh very under the radar payment so what we see that me monthly membership subscribers last like they stay longer with with the subscription compared to 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 okay 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 yourself a

lot of people don't do it because it's a lot to keep track of 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 boomcloud because one of our practices that I was working with in the early days W they had like over a hundred maybe was 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 um she uh uh was had a a binder and she was flipp been through it every day and making sure she's running payments manually every day monthly payments I felt so bad for her we when we built boom Cloud at the time she was one of the first to join she had lots of pain 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 yeah so that's well and being the top being the in the topic of growing a you know talk 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 do 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 producing it it's not it's probably not producing it because they don't are aren'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 uhuh um on our on our platform we allow HSA payments um and I think there's like a what is it 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 typ 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 there's some states like the state of

Washington for example Ben I know you speak up there a lot uh they actually the state of Washington doesn't allow practic to do to do yearly subscriptions it's it's only monthly subscriptions uh if you talk to the insurance commissioner um he's gonna 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 it's you actually can through the direct Primary Care laws 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 they have you on a dart board yeah yeah yeah well vice versa I've got them on a dartboard uh anyways so this is what the these case studies are what practices are achieving and we're seeing more and more growth uh these days as as especially as um patients move from job to job in this type of market and uh businesses want to offer more benefits to retain employees a membership

program is awesome solution for your local businesses but uh this so this particular practice back this they used uh was direct mail to 50 five 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 un your existing uninsured and your existing inactive patients and um whether it's business uh B2B type marketing or Community type marketing with the local uh 55

and up communities um I I would pick some some type of uh 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 right so these are some examples here uh wrapping up um I would encourage everyone here to go uh schedule a demo learn about how the boomcloud platform can

help your practice uh create organize and scale or grow your dental membership program uh and'll automate a lot of the tasks that uh you you don't want your office manager to do I don't want this shouldn't be another uh Insurance admin pain 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 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 and 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 they're both office managers that have used our product over over over time um and would definitely do this than manual work but what makes

boom cloud different there's lots of platforms out there and what we're focusing on at boomcloud is is exactly what we've educated you today um we have a team of of Revenue growth managers that help uh your practice grow that we focus on growth we call ourselves the dental growth platform a membership growth platform um and our team helps you your practice do uh uh text campaigns to your uninsured patients uh even some uh call out and Outreach campaigns to your un insured in inactive patients that

express interest and help you sign up more members your membership program we're building some artificial intelligence I call them Revenue Bots uh that actually will help uh identify uh in your practice management system who your uninsured patients are and uh actually automatically send them uh text messages inviting them to join your membership program as well as finding your maybe you're dropping a certain insurance company or a PO contract and you want to educate those patients about your membership program um our artificial intelligence in the platform

will be able to identify certain insurance people pra excuse me patients that are in are on certain insurance plans and you can uh tailor marketing text and email campaigns to educate those patients about your membership program uh we're we have a businesso business finder that we've built and are continuing to build in in our platform that actually you'll be able to type 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

verbiage templates um 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 uh because we understand that uninsured patients may not uh 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 uh could definitely provide a Marketplace

for your patients to accept treatment and help your practice give a whole solution right sales solution from attracting uh patients to expanding and ret retaining and expanding uh case acceptance with your patients so encourage you guys to go to boomcloud tocom click that bright pink button on our website that says schedule a demo and uh schedule one with my experts uh here's a GI gift for coming and hanging out with us today uh it's a a book on how to create and grow a dental membership

program just go to boomcloud apps.com book and you can download that and start reading and uh learning a little bit more about membership plans so that's it for me Genevie so we're gonna shift gears and you're gonna 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 share did I do it I did it 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 yeah let's keep that going yeah okay perfect with me trying to get my slideshow going here here we go so obviously we've got you all riled up are you guys Frozen no we hear you uh oh you're Frozen Jen I'm frozen back I can still hear you though we can see you yep okay can hear you uh oh it's saying my internet connection is unstable of course right

when I take over yeah that's how it goes y 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 verbiage skills and you have to have a team that's trained to execute on that strategy so you can't just 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 um 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 that 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 uh there's a handful of plac is 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 I'm happy to send you anything that's in the slides today afterwards and of course we're 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 appreciates about me all the time understand

why I do I do H yes uh 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 verbage is the importance of mindset right uh

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 overe expanation 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 doneal work done and I think that's an important shift to remember and to get back to on our industry and none of the verbiage 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 over simplified 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 and the right from the right place um and I think that's more important than perfectly Polished memorized scripts love it is what we tend to teach people to do so the most common obstacles in you know growing a practice and where we bump into really ineffective conversations and Dentistry really come down to these three things which is funny Jordan because this is your pyramid right yeah totally Hast acceptance or expansion and our retention of them so totally I

love it we could have shared a slide if 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 going to 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 I 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 um 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 what insurance covers these people don't have money these people don't have high Dental IQ 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 not it's not a real thing and uh all patients are just normal humans there's no such thing as the people I get it too like Google patients we we hate Google patients like Google try to find a patient that's not a Google patient I don't know to tell you all people are looking for your number on Google like every single person is Google 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 side note I love Price Shoppers uh Price Shoppers guest what you guys guess what Price Shoppers need more more value education they need dental work oh that when somebody calls me and says how much is an implant guess what that person needs they need an implant and isn't that awesome buyer in yeah also 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 a 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 and any Facebook group you're in in Dennis 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 uh I know I sound a little bit uh poy 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 at bias yeah 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 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 um 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 outof network type offices often find call lead conversion as low as like 33% that's not uncommon at all meaning one in three p 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 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 that are dental office you literally can't even touch a 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 they're 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 schedules pretty much everybody schedules and in their mind what that means is 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 have positioned it that way and most offices have never even had a conversation about it at all it's just a 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 uh 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 Genevie how can I help you we are met with almost always one of two questions do you take Blue Cross B Shield do you take Delta Dental are you in network with Sigma 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 rote 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 patient call 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 da da da da da What patients hear 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 this over with no we don't and 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 because dting them to fill 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 Frank 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 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 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 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 it works across the country and actually in more more than across the country multiple countries useless 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 Pro

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 a number in case we 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 I 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 um 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 then 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 uh Ben's verbiage of unrestricted but I'm I'm clear about what that means we're unrestricted which you might know as 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 turn 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 in my schedule is 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 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 uh 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 to Dental 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 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 tooth 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 getting interrog ask these questions when really what we should say is oh my gosh what happened happened tell me what's going on totally and I 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 setup 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 the 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 op saying a little birdie told me you had an ice fishing accident right versus what walking in and saying I understand that you've chipped an upper right and Sizer 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 uh a little bit of what it sounds like hey one of you guys want to roleplay this with me I'll do it okay what color am I what color 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 my okay thank you for calling Dr Smith's office this is jenevie how can I help you yo jeneveve I was wondering if You' take Delta Dental I'd be happy to check on that for you what is your name uh my name is jcom okay jcom 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 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 9113 67210 great 555 321 Z right yeah yeah and job who I think for sending you to our office yeah I think I found I think I found you on Google I'm one of those Google patients you're 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 I do I do I answer that

my two my two 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 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 ready 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 verbage once

you can open it up to it 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 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 their 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 JC con can I grab your number just in case case we get disconnected right so finding 300 ways to say this in a very

natural way and being less reactive and less uh less urgent about just getting that part over with can be really really helpful um so looks like we've got a message yeah we got a question here me to read it for you yeah a patient 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 AR 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 range 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 body

of the implant but we do restore them with you it's 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 impant would cost Junt I would 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 $6,500 to $10,000 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 when you say uh we can't quote fees over the phone you have to come in for an examination and d d d it feels like I do can I mention one thing that I noticed that you did so you you you ended the

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 there there is a strategy to that we we we train our sales people and people who talk to customers all the time to use Dynamic s silence after an open-ended question I think it's it's a really good tool to realize that you had 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 give 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 and'll be 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 their 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 and a lot of I want I want that to get out there because then I can overcome it a lot of what we do too on on like 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 and 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 is it pertains to really all of the ways that we can grow a dental office starting with new patients which is the concept of warmth versus competence um meaning basically people have to like and trust you before they care about your

skills that'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 a 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 will 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 it's it's why they're a 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 it 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 and the conversations I've heard where we're explaining downgrades in a very first new patient conversation but pH 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 denst street

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 Danielle 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 a 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 upfront 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 than 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 we 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 the primary reason to take a pause build connection into your conversation first before you provide competency or answers okay um I do have a new patient intake form if you guys want to uh 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 uh a team through this process uh the other thing that I just like to say in my sort of last piece about the phone is that and 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 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 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 p 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 there's weird negative things that we W tell ourselves about first questions right but instead I just said well you know we like to have one but tell me why you asked 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 this doctor has some not 22 not 24 23 23 and um I saidwell I saidis there any reason that you don't want to have one and it goes on he goes on to say thatw he 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 I'm thinking this team member is upholding a policy right she's

she's doing the thing that they 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 no it's just their policy and he saidwell how about this we'll get 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 I'm like yeah I said I 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 in visit line because my mom just said she'd pay for it so this guy lost a patient a lifelong patient over an fmx in a policy I promise

you he doesn't even know it right and I just had a $6,000 phone call yeah all because I was curious and connected and 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 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 radar what a difference that

can make it's my little uh Soap Box about that so uh 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 we know 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 assistants 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 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 um again also on the treatment planning side the worm versus competence very much comes into play um we are train in CL 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 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 the level 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 H jennice 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 as somebody who 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 being shamed yeah because our 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's 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 they 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 doc sometimes we have moments that we nailed it right like the treatment plan that you delivered was awesome I the patient

totally is going to do this treatment we're pretty certain of it and then they walked 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 preo right if your team is telling you these people only do what insurance covers or they wanted a preo I promise you patients don't even know what a pre was until we taught them those words not those are

not words patients know no no patient has ever been like can you do a predd 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 are a lot of a blind spot and if you're a 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 UPF front is you deliver the treatment plan you walk out of the room you are then left uh their patients 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 it 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 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 uh blonde is expensive to maintain you guys my wife blond she did yeah I'm not like not like crazy blonde but it's it's like dirty blond so yeah I know how expensive that is you know uh so what I really needs to happen to have better more successful treatment acceptance and clearer understandings and less misunderstandings with 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 estimated 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 overe explain it this tooth costs this much insurance is going to pay this much your estimated patient portion is this much

and we explain it all sometimes in way way way too much detail and then what happens is and this is where 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 was $887 right we're telling them today's $87 so they feel like they've paid you then when insurance pays there's $14 more we send people the bill and they said you said it was $87 to wish I will have treatment coordinator after treatment coordinator saying they signed that it's an estimated patient portion it says estimated patient portion 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 to 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 $1,500 looks like your insurance plan should help us out with about $800 so I'm GNA have you take care of $700 when you come in

next time and then whatever's left over after insur insurance pays me we settle up then how does that sound there's that magic how 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 $1,500 looks like we're expecting about $800 from your insurance I'm GNA 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 do 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 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 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 $874 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 uh 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 I'll send any of that to you or hopefully you screenshotted it uh the other thing that's um 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 going at connecting with people these are things that I've I've always been good at but I truly believe my superpower and treatment acceptance is that I th% 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 going to

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 just believe that when people call your office they want a 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 followup 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 NE people there's a lot of we're 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 um so if you are afraid of followup or you just simply don't have a follow-up system treatment plan follow-up can be really really helpful and uh 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 a in-house plan right Jordan like people who have unscheduled treatment maybe don't have benefits totally 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 like let's do this let's get you set up with our 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 patience

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 Co 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 uh your verbage 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 a 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 this 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 dises that's horrible making our dentist appointment it's always on the bottom of the to-do list calling and saying your 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 to be wrong they're not gonna resist it there's a really weird thing when you say you're overdue that like the first reaction is like oh you haven't come to your dental appointment there'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 message that's interesting so if you if you are the person who's managing that recare which is really not just filling 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 the value of how practice grows and recare 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 backside 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 in active 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 recare calls but I think it's just because we look at it wrong and we don't understand that it's not recare it is patient retention it's practice growth you cannot grow practice without retaining your P patience 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 calls 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 put them on your 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 recare call um anyway this was a practice that thought they were killing at 413 new patients in a year but their net gain was only 80 and they had 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 I'm happy to help you understand it so we've 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 uh 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 genev there's a lot of ease in this oh and it's actually misspelled here look at that oh my gosh I've had that happen too don't worry about it it's so many e even I have it misspelled that's pretty terrible U it's spelled like the real way you would spell management not this type of it's Genevie at poy practice management.com I'm also like the only Genevie poppy on Facebook so you can very accessible that

way yeah I think you're the only Genevie 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 Logics we can uh send you that if you're looking for a team resource um 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 record 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 today or by Monday depending on how long it takes the process so there we go take any questions or any common questions you hear Genevie or Ben with anything

here I'm looking I don't see anything no there are no questions coming in so far I I think most of them were uh asked during the presentation so awesome you guys thank you so much for coming Ben and Genevie 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 um so we hope you guys have a rocking Friday and a great weekend and for those that are watching the recording whatever

day it is we hope you have an awesome day take care everybody all right bye