Financial accounting week is coming!

Financial accounting week starts on Monday, August 12.  And yes, financial accounting does sound somewhat boring, but it is a substantial, important aspect of the business side of an orthodontic practice.  Will it be some sexy financial accounting?  Awwwww, ye...Well, no, but we will cover some key topics like:

- Reconciling deposits between your patient accounting software and bank to ensure that no one is walking off with your funds.

- Key factors in preparing financial statements

- Preventing theft

- Financial statement analysis

- And so much more!

(Did the exclamation marks help?)

Case study: Running a successful Medicaid practice

We’ve all heard it before: “Medicaid?  You can’t make any money with Medicaid in most states.  Yeah, Texas, New Mexico, Tennessee and Arkansas make it easy –for now—but most other places, the reimbursement is way too low for a practice to handle the volume and earn a decent profit.”

In a number of ways, that statement rings true.  Your expected fee and monthly payment will be lower.  And since the market for Medicaid is generally very underserved (because of the lower fee and patient compliance issues), volume for practices accepting Medicaid can swell very quickly.  That can create a new list of headaches (some of which we discussed earlier).

But what gets lost in this discussion –and frankly, in the whole Obamacare-reduces-remibursement discussion-- is that solid business and efficiency systems supporting a practice enables you to earn a good living and provide top notch patient care to a patient population crying out for quality care.

For evidence of how this works, we take you out to our case study bureau for a closer examination of one such situation.

Read more...

Six tips for improving the consultation experience

Every practice has its own style, own culture and own atmosphere.  Some practices go for upbeat, bright and active.  Others prefer laid back and relaxed.  When you do a new patient consultation, you certainly want to convey all of that to the new patient.  As such, there is obviously no one way to conduct a new patient consultation.  You and your staff have to feel comfortable in order to make potential new patients feel comfortable.  

Given this, there are some overriding principles and techniques that have proven successful over the years that contribute to a better patient experience and improved batting averages.  Some of these may be obvious, but over time, they’ve been shown to work.

Closing sales: Check your batting average

You know the situation well: you’ve put in effort, time and money into getting a potential new patient to come into the office.  Now, that patient and possibly that patient’s parent/guardian stand before you waiting for you to make your pitch to tell them why they should sign up with you and not that practice down the street.  You know the practice down the street: it’s the one with the waterfall and first run Pixar movies on 24-hour loop.  Sign this patient and that means good reviews on Yelp, Angie’s List and other social media; referrals which lead to another network of referrals which leads to reduction in reliance on media advertising.  That leads to more patients, more profit and less administrative headache.  Lose this patient and the flow of potential patients slows as this one tells all of his and her friends about the way your practice just didn’t add up.  Combining this patient, reviews and referrals, letting that patient walk out of the door means the loss of this year’s Christmas bonuses. 

Okay, it’s probably not that dramatic, but when you get a patient in for a consultation, you want to close him or her.  An orthodontic practice is not like a Macy’s, where thousands of people walk through the doors on a given day and you are trying to get a strong enough percentage to make a purchase.  You will get a select number of new patient visits during a month and you want to make as many of them count as possible.  And despite the extremes of the example above, one extra closed case can seriously have a multiplier effect on new patient activity in the future and you want to get as much of that 

In the end, getting a patient to sign a contract is a reflection of the selling effort of the practice.  So, how do you improve on selling cases?  We begin our examination of that topic by determining if there is a problem.  From there, if there is a problem, how big is it?  And no matter the size of the problem, how do you go about improving on results?

Marketing Monday case study: the competitive market

        When it comes to advertising your practice, as you get into the process, you notice a lot of noise surrounding you.  Competitive advertising not only for the same service, but other services that might cause a potential patient to redirect his or her dollars to that service and delay the start of treatment.  

Historically, we have seen markets where attracting patients was relatively easy.  We’d go in with aggressive pricing, spread the message via various media outlets (some TV, some radio, some social media).  Because we faced a fragmented set of competitors who were either averse or unable to fund electronic media marketing, our message sat front and center for the potential patients in the market.  Strong results followed.  In fact, some were so strong that the doctor requested that we turn off the advertising shortly after opening to give him a chance to get caught up.  Some smaller markets like Montgomery, AL and Macon, GA fell into that category.  Other large markets with an underserved population seeking affordable treatment also proved to be fertile.  Miami, FL and Seattle, WA fell into that category.

Some markets did not lend themselves to such a neat solution.  Group practices with greater resources than an individual practice regularly advertised very low fees to attract new patients.  Like us, they had multiple locations to offer convenience to patients throughout the market.  Being heard in those markets was much more difficult.  What do you do?  For more on that, let’s take you to our Marketing Monday case study.

4 factors to note before sending another patient survey

In this post, we turn over the controls to Michael Cusimano, a colleague with deep experience in practice management and an MBA.  In addition to this article, we have some specific, usable survey templates that we'll get added to the tool kit in the very near future.  Of course, if you have any questions or need additional information, contact us.

To survey or not to survey, that is the question.

Most, if not all dentists and orthodontists aim to provide their patients with a great in-office experience.  The most common motivation to providing a great patient experience is that most doctors understand the value of a referral and realize that the key to a referral is great customer service.  The question offices struggle to answer is, "Do our patients think we're going a great job?"   Often times, in order to gain insight to what kind of job they are doing many dental offices decide to implement a customer satisfaction survey.  You know, those 3 to 5 question post-card sized surveys that ask "how'd you like us?"  The problem is that after a great deal of staff time, a sizable amount of money spent, and a decent amount of surveys completed, the unfortunate truth is that not much is learned.

In this blog post I'll point out the major problems with the typical postcard-sized customer satisfaction survey a large number of practices use to evaluate customer satisfaction.  I'll point out 4 pitfalls in detail below.  However, the core problem with producing or purchasing a customer satisfaction survey is that many offices do not have the resources to properly create and administer a customer satisfaction survey that will generate valid and reliable data that produces actionable information.  Furthermore, the expense and effort involved in developing a useful survey is often not necessary for many dental and orthodontic practices.  

There are 4 basic pitfalls/warnings related to simple postcard sized customer satisfaction surveys:

3 ways to increase daily volume without compromising quality

One of the most frequent responses we receive when proposing improving processes and systems to our clients is “your systems require seeing more patients in a given day.  Won’t that compromise the quality of care for my patients.”  At MyPracticeEngine, we know that your most important job is to provide the highest possible level of care and we are very sensitive to that fact.  As these improvements are proposed, a keen eye is directed toward ensuring sterling treatment and outstanding results.

When we propose methods for practices to increase the patients seen per day, most initially look at the proposal and say “we can’t handle that.”  Once they put new processes into practice and get comfortable with them, those same practices report on the ease with which they can handle a new patient load.  

The process for increasing volumes can get intricate and very specific to the design of a practice, its patient base and staff, but here are 3 of the big suggestions that usually turn up your practice’s “bandwith” no matter what the particular circumstance:

The fixed cost nature of your practice

        Following up on a recent post, one of the most frequently asked questions we receive is “if I do increase my volume with a lower monthly payment, won’t the increase in cost from servicing these additional patients consume any potential profit?”  The answer is no.  The reason is because most of your largest costs are fixed in nature.

As we examine this more in depth, let’s look at the definition of “fixed cost.”  In standard economics-speak, a fixed cost is a cost that does not vary with the number of transactions or volume in a given practice.  To see how this affects your practice, I will take you through some of your major expense line items: