Emmott On Technology: The Reactivation Equation

Emmott On Technology: The Reactivation Equation
Thursday, February 21, 2013

Many dentists spend countless hours and tens of thousands on marketing efforts chasing the elusive new patient while sitting quietly on a fortune.

The ADA estimates the average dental practice generates between $700,000 and $1 million worth of incomplete diagnosed treatment per year. From 20 to 30 percent of your current patients are non-responsive, yet most of them probably still consider you their dentist. Your existing patients are a rich vein of gold just waiting to be mined.

Existing patients already have a relationship with you and the office. They have a higher level of trust than a new patient who does not know you. They are more likely to accept recommended care and tend to have more substantial work done. More importantly, it is the right thing to do. You will be providing needed care, preventing the damage of neglect and improving the health of your patients. As a side effect you will significantly increase the profitability of your practice.

Patients drift away for many reasons. They start a treatment plan then fail to complete it. They agree to treatment but never start. They miss a continuing care appointment then fail to realize how long it has been since the last checkup. They move, miss the re-call and get busy. All of these people still want care and want you to be their dentist they just need a reminder. In fact some are actually waiting for your call to get started again.

It is important to point out the difference between re-call and reactivation. Re-call is often referred to as continuing care and that is in fact a better description. Re-call is people continuing with their care through prophys, checkups, early diagnosis and treatment. Reactivation is for those patients who are not in an active continuing care program and do not respond to routine communication.

How do you find and reactivate these patients? In the olden days BC (before computer) you could do a tedious hand audit of the charts and call inactive patients. With digital records you can run reports to discover which patients need care or have failed to follow up on re-call. That is a lot easier than a hand audit of paper records, but it still requires a human being to put hands on a keyboard run the report and follow up with a letter or phone call.

A better more efficient and less expensive way to reactivate patients is to outsource the whole process to an online e-service. Sometimes called cloud computing or SAS (software as a service), an e-service takes your practice data and does the job—in this case finding and re-activating patients—online automatically with no humans and no hands on keyboards.

There are several e-service companies offering reactivation however my favorite is ActionRun. I like ActionRun because it not only finds non responsive patients but it uses a type of artificial intelligence to evaluate the patient clinically, send a personalized letter that motivates patients to seek care and then tracks the results.

For Example: the system discovers a patient who had a root canal completed on a molar but never had a final restoration placed on that tooth. The patient is then contacted and advised to return for that specific treatment even if there was no crown treatment plan in the records. The computer looks at a whole host of the patient’s personal factors, such as age, sex, insurance status, location, motivators, finances, medical conditions, etc., and tailors the reactivation message to appeal specifically to that patient.

The system then tracks the responses and learns what message works and what doesn’t. This is called a self learning system. The learning is not restricted to your office and your data but can call upon the accumulated wisdom or knowledge base of over nine million procedures and over 250,000 patients.

The system also tracks results by appointments and ROI.

For example if Bob Jones was sent a letter advising him to return for a crown on a molar endo tooth, did he make an appointment? How much did he pay for the service? In this way ActionRun can tell you exactly how much income the system generated. So far the results have been remarkable with many offices getting a 500% ROI or better. In other words if you invested $300 with ActionRun you get $1,500 or more of completed treatment.

We are just beginning to learn to use the digital data we generate in effective ways. E-services are a great way to use technology to improve the dental health of our patients and to increase profitability. The future is coming and it will be amazing!

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