Hello everyone. I'm Ryan Mohamed with Becker's Hospital Review.
Thank you for tuning into this episode of the Becker's Healthcare podcast
series. Today I'm excited to be joined by Dan Fahe,
head of marketing at Next Health,
who spoke with more than 500 dentists and the survey to get a sense of how
they're feeling about 2023.
The conversation is full of a lot of insights on how dentists can grow their
practices, even when facing a lot of uncertainty in the economy. Dame,
thank you so much for joining us today. How are you?
I am doing great. Yeah. Excited to be here.
Yes, I am. So excited to talk to you today. Um,
and with that we can dive right into our discussion.
So to kind of get a good basis, the first thing I wanted to ask you is,
what is the state of Dental report?
It's actually, uh, it's a good question and kind of an interesting story. So,
you know, two years ago we were searching for some data. We figured,
so must be looking at what dentists are doing,
asking 'em questions and trying to map trends. Uh, and we kept hitting blanks.
We couldn't find any, uh,
really good current data on what is happening in the dental healthcare industry.
Uh, so we decided to do our survey ourselves. So we actually went out,
we spoke with more than 500 dentists,
and last year we really focused the report on what are they doing to improve the
experience of the patient. We called it the year of the patient.
This year we wanted to take a little bit of a different tact, uh,
and we wanted to focus on elite revenue growth practices. So we went out, again,
surveyed more than 500, uh, dentists,
and we looked at what are the best of the best the elite practices doing to keep
growing the revenue every single year.
So the state of Dental 2023 is all about elite practices and how they keep
growing.
Perfect. Thank you so much for sharing.
And in the report you study elite practices.
How are you defining elite practice?
Yeah, so we broke out the report into a few different audiences. We looked at,
uh, practices that saw, uh,
negative revenue growth in 2022 practices that saw average revenue growth.
So zero to 20% and in the elite group are practices that grew more than 20%
last year, and only 6% of the total practices grew more than 20%.
So we wanted to study what are those 6% of practices doing to kind of keep
hitting that benchmark. And a few things jump out. One, they hate cancellations.
They are at war against cancellations.
They do everything they can to minimize cancellations. Uh,
if you think about it, right, you have your office manager,
you have your hygienist, you have your dentist in there,
and if you have an empty chair, no one is making any revenue. We actually had a,
a practice Nobo dental, uh, that uses nexel as weightless feature. Uh,
and basically they, what they do is if they ever get a cancellation,
they ping out all apostle people that might have an appointment coming up to
fill that chair, and they see $3,000,
$3,000 in new revenue every week just from using nextels wait list feature
to go war against cancellations. Uh,
the second thing that elite practices do is they really have adopted Silicon
Valley style metrics, so kind of unusual metrics to measure their business.
An example of that would be return rate. Uh,
so the best practices return 85% of patients. What that means,
if you come in for once there's a, uh, 85% chance or more,
you will come back for a second appointment.
So that's really important is how do they get appoint, uh,
patients to keep coming back.
Another example is optimizing the number of patients. Each provider, uh,
sees you to stay.
So the best practices we find the providers are seeing more than 11 patients per
day. Uh, the third thing that lead practices do is they really kind of automate
everything. They automate the reminders online, booking their forms,
their payments.
They've really adopted technology and that really helps improve the lives of
their staff, uh,
and makes it easier for their staff to really spend their time focusing on the
patient experience.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing those.
And what are some of the 2023 predictions from the report if you could share?
Yeah, so we in the report had a whole prediction section on 2023.
One really interesting thing is that dentists,
like many of us are not very optimistic about the economy.
Only 20% of dentists believe, uh,
that the economy is gonna be in a good shape in 2023.
But what was kind of crazy is that 63% are, uh,
63% dentists are optimistic about their business.
So even though they don't really think the economy's in great shape,
they feel really good about their business.
Even the ones that actually had negative revenue growth in 2022,
most of them think they're gonna actually see revenue growth in 2023.
So dentists are very optimistic about growing their practices.
A second prediction we saw is that patient loyalty is up. Uh,
patient loyalty has actually increased since pre pandemic.
Dentists are seeing patients stick with them and be more loyal. Uh,
and really a lot of the metrics that dentists are focusing on is not acquiring
new patients. That's always important,
but how do they increase the number of appointments out of existing patients?
Uh, the third prediction, uh, that we saw and more of a negative note,
is that this is gonna be a really difficult year for practices to retain their
staff.
That is the number one challenge that we heard from dentists is how do they keep
their staff and retain their, their great staff. Um,
you've seen this with a very hot labor market, even with the down economy,
that people have a lot of options today,
particularly highly called staff and dentists office.
So retaining staff and the report talks a lot about techniques that those elite
practices are doing to invest in their staff to make sure they don't lose that,
that really important office manager and the receptionist.
Oh, yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for that insight. And you know,
we're all patients to someone and I'm curious to hear what dentists are doing
to improve the patient experience.
Well, I I, I'm curious, Mariah,
if I had to kind of throw this question back at you, like what,
what's the thing that you're a patient, right? What,
what do you get most frustrated at or what do you wish your dentist would do for
you?
Yeah, you know, that's a really good question.
Something that you mentioned earlier,
trying to decrease the number of no-shows is those text messages are, you know,
people's lives. So also always sending those text messages. Yep.
Like a week before the appointment,
two days before the appointment is really key for me, um,
to make sure I have it written down a line planner and making sure I actually
have the time if I do need to, you know, reschedule or something like that.
Yeah, you know, it, it's, I love that answer. Uh, we, we asked in the,
the survey, what is the number one complaint that you hear from patients?
And actually top complaint was hard to reschedule, and it makes a lot of sense,
right? You go to the dentist, uh, you finish your appointment often, you're,
you're filling out some sort of, uh, card that postcard that's gonna be, uh,
sent to you six months later, you know, Hey,
you have an appointment in February. It's like, sure, you know,
I'm free in August.
August comes around and suddenly that Tuesday in the middle of August is booked
and you need to reschedule. And it's really difficult. Uh,
so hard reschedule is, is a top complaint. And patients,
like you mentioned with the messaging,
they want a consumer experience in healthcare and that,
and that's what we see where a lot of people that are working with Nexel is
saying, Hey, we wanna digitize our practice.
We wanna make it easy to reschedule.
And we actually launched a new feature called OneClick Booking that allows
patients to click once on a calendar and reschedule. And,
and patients really love that. Uh, a couple other complaints that jumped out.
Uh, too much paperwork and missing reminders. Uh, so patients again,
wanna make everything easy.
So they want to fill out the paperwork before they come into the office.
They want those reminders through text. They don't wanna have to get a,
a call or a voicemail through a reminder,
and they want everything to be automated. Uh, one, one, uh,
practice we're working with Pinecrest Dental, uh, automate the reviews.
So whenever a patient has a positive experience,
they send 'em a review and they actually got more than 250 reviews on Google,
which really helps grow their practice. As, you know,
when you're looking at a practice,
you wanna make sure they have a lot of reviews.
So even automating that level makes it much easier for the patients.
And reducing all the friction is what kind of those elite practices are doing
for their, their patients.
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing that. And for you,
what was the biggest surprise from the.
Report? You know,
one question we asked in 2023 that we didn't ask in 2022 was looking at social
media usage. Um, and I was actually really surprised by this. You know,
dentists in general are, are very good at adopting social media,
or 80% of respondents report that they're using social media to
promote their, their practices. And it makes a lot of sense.
Social media is actually one of the places that patient first looked to book an
appointment. 41%. This kind of blew me away. 41% of new, uh,
appointments booked, um,
come through seeing some sort of social media experience, uh,
and of course the most popular forms of social media in order where,
where Facebook as as number one, uh, Instagram and LinkedIn. Uh, again,
what was surprising though was a very low adoption in TikTok. Uh,
if you kind of look at TikTok, that's the fastest growing, uh,
social media platform.
It's the largest social media platform for basically everyone under 40,
and only 8% of dentists are on TikTok. So this's a huge opportunity. It,
it could be feel a little bit foreign, uh, it can feel very, uh, different,
but if you're a dentist and you're trying to capture a really untapped audience,
uh, TikTok would be a,
a really great way to get a high return and really acquire a bunch of new
patients through that, that that channel. And we actually are,
are coming out with a new, uh,
guide@nexel.com on how dentists can really build out a TikTok
strategy,
I think will be really helpful for people as they start spinning up TikTok, uh,
based social campaigns.
Yeah, that's very smart. Yeah. That's a, that's a good thing to,
for them to be doing right now.
And if you had to summarize the state of dental in 2023,
how would you do that in a couple sentences?
You know, it, it's a, it's a very media report,
so it's hard to summarize in a few sentences, but, um, I,
I guess maybe I can share a few observations that kind of jumped out. Um, one,
um, you should seek revenue growth next year. Most dentists are optimistic.
We talked a little bit about that earlier. Uh,
if you're not growing 20% or not expecting to grow 20%, uh, reader a report,
we have a lot of ideas, a lot of learning from those elite practices, uh,
on what to do to grow more than 20% next year.
And that should be your benchmark as as a practice. Uh,
the second big observation is that the best practices are obsessed
with technology. They're focused on making sure their patients are coming back,
and they're doing that by really automating and reducing, uh, friction.
They're making it easy for patients to book. Uh,
we saw one practice who was in that lead category, grand Streete Dental.
They embed their online booking on their website, social email, even handout,
physical cards, QR card. But they make it, uh, easy as possible book.
They avoid cancellations and they also keep their patients engaged.
It's not just those every six months,
they're constantly sending an email posting on their social media.
So patients are building relationships,
and that's one of the reasons why we're seeing more loyalty from patients is
that they actually have a relationship with their dentists outside just going in
and out of the office every six months. Uh,
and then the third big observation is hold onto your staff for dear life.
These people are so important, uh, to your practice. And again,
the more you can automate your reminders, your scheduling, your booking,
and not having your staff have to spend all day on their phones all day doing
double data entry, uh, into their, uh, uh, practice management system,
allow your staff to focus on the patient experience.
That's what we've seen from staff.
That gives 'em a lot of energy and we have a lot of tips on their board on what
you can do to, to really make sure your staff is invested,
but holding onto your staff and make sure retaining your staff should be one of
your top priorities for any practice in 2023.
Absolutely. I definitely agree. And before I let you go, um,
if someone like me wants to read the full report, where,
where could they find it?
Yeah, uh, just head over to xcel.com. It's nx uh, health uh,
dot com. Uh, you'll see a banner, uh, on top of our website.
You can get the report. It is free. Uh, you need to download it from there. Uh,
and we suggest, uh, checking out. We'd love to hear from you, uh,
things that you liked about the report,
things you would love for us to see in the next state of dental report.
But if you were trying to grow 20%, you wanna hit that leap practice strategy,
uh, for next year, um, really encourage you reading the report.
I think you'll find it really valuable.
Perfect. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Dane.
It has been a pleasure speaking with you.
And I'd also like to thank our podcast sponsor Next Health listeners.
You can tune. It's a more podcast from Becker's Healthcare by visiting our
podcastPage@beckerpodcast.com. Thank you again, Dave.
All right, thanks. Yeah, it was fun being here.