What makes dental care a valued investment versus a fix patients choose begrudgingly? 

One morning I had an automobile breakdown in my “beater” weekend truck. We have all been there – filled with the inconvenience and anxiety of dealing with a problem that came up unexpectedly. I was hoping to find a place that could get me home that day.

I googled around until I found a reasonable looking repair shop close to the breakdown. They worked me into their schedule so I could get the old truck back on the road. It was pleasing to have the problem fixed, at least for that day, but I measured this against how I have experienced service at the shop that takes care of my daily driver car.

Dental Service Emergency vs Dental Relationship

There were many aspects of the breakdown with my old pickup truck that reminded me of a dental emergency. I found someone convenient and they had the best intentions to provide a fix.

It was a shop I didn’t have a relationship with. They were kind and helpful, but there were so many things missing that would have been unlikely to happen if I treated my old truck like I do the car I have been so much more diligent in taking care of.

The shop focused on the problem that was presented to them, not looking beyond a simple fix to get me back on the road. While I was appreciative, it is very unlikely that the next problem (or even the true cause of this one) was looked for. I did not leave with any feeling that I wouldn’t be in a similar situation as soon as the next problem arose.

I reflected on the years I have spent with the auto shop that takes care of my primary car. I have a valued relationship with them. They know me and know that I appreciate them taking the best care of the investment I have in the vehicle I drive every day.

When I take my car to an appointment, they look over everything. They tell me when to expect maintenance and repairs in the near future and throughout the life of the vehicle. I trust them and know that they have my best interest in mind. In return, I am very appreciative, expressing gratitude when I write them a check for their services. I have never broken down in the cars they take care of for me.

To be continued …

There is a distinct difference between team versus staff. Teams work together toward a shared goal while staff are a group of people who happen to work under the same management. Team members work side by side, whereas staff members work in the same space.

If you are wondering how you might transition from having a staff to working within a team, you might consider engaging with your staff to learn each person’s communication style.

Communication Can Make Your Staff Into a Team

At Pankey, we focus on four communication styles: expressive, driver, analytic and amiable. However, people are multifaceted, so they almost never exhibit just one style but instead have a mix of styles. It is this mix that makes us fascinating and gives us individuality.

Teams are made up of people who develop meaningful relationships that initially center on shared work goals. These relationships form when people get to know one another. Taking the time to go through a communication styles exercise with your team allows them to deepen their knowledge of each other. It has the added benefit of helping to identify the strengths of each person.

The Pankey team shares some similarities with practice teams. We spend most of our time working together to serve others. For us, it is the doctors who attend our courses. For you, it is your patients. In both situations the team works together but focuses on someone outside the team.

Although there is no “best” communication style, our team has found that certain styles are more conducive to certain situations. Also, in challenging situations it is often best to pair people who share the same style.

Despite the fact that there are no hard and fast rules and everyone should be treated as an individual, I’ve also noticed that there are certain predictable behaviors based on the communication styles. Our team feels that the knowledge we share about our communication styles helps us work together and serve our community better.

Dental failure and being ‘perfect’ in patient care is a key stressor for dentists. In her first blog on this topic, Dr. Brummett talked about deciding to work toward perfection rather than feeling frustrated about not achieving it. Read on for the rest of her story:

Stop Trying to Be the Right Kind of Perfect

The next morning after my revelation about perfection, I woke up, had coffee, and realized the patient who had been the focus of my upset (over a mistake I made) had texted me. She wrote, “Good morning Dr. Brummett! I just wanted to let you know that I am doing well and have not had any pain.”

What? My patient was doing well, texting me to tell me how well, and she was thanking me?

A quest to provide myself with a new perspective and a reminder acronym began. This perspective would hopefully take shape so that I could share it with my team, my children, and anyone suffering from the punching match of perfection.

Perfection can be the root of depression and upset, which is why becoming perfect will be my focus and acceptance of the process my goal. Perfect will stand for seven perfect words:

P is for position, as it’s good to remain humble about one’s status.

E is for effort, not the result.

R is for resilience, as I will fall, get back up, and grow from the failures.           

F is for facing the fear, embracing the challenge, and striving in the face of fear.

E is for empathy, treating myself and others with compassion.

C is for courage, as though I might not have a cape, I can still use my whole heart.

T is for trust, because with perseverance I can trust that everything will work out.

Later that day, my patient contacted me again and wanted me to know one last thing. She said, “I forgot to thank you for your gentle touch.”

This acknowledgment really drove home the point to me. I will attempt to stop looking through my rearview mirror and look forward through the front window of my life. I will allow myself, and encourage others, to become.

I am thankful for Dr. Pankey’s courage to share his failures and for our patients that believe in us and show us gratitude and appreciation. Now, isn’t that perfect? 

Failure is a hard thing to accept in dentistry. This is especially true because what constitutes ‘failure’ can mean different things to different patients and different dentists.

Keep reading for an anecdote that puts failure in the dental practice into perspective:

Changing Your Perspective on Dental Failure

On my way home from work one day, I turned the radio off, looked through the rearview mirror, and thought, what a day! I had just left my dental office dealing with a “dental failure.” I felt disappointed that this sort of difficult situation had occurred.

Then, this question came to the forefront of my mind: Why do I think I can or should be perfect? With that question, a wonderful reminder appeared out of the blue.

Bill Davis had conversations with LD Pankey about his philosophy and wrote an amazing book that I refer to often. The story I remembered was about Dr. Pankey sharing his own failures. He had worked five cases out on the Monson articulator and said that he basically obliterated the patients’ occlusion.

He shared how all five of the cases failed. He then stated that four of the five patients stuck it out with him because they felt he was conscientious enough to see them through. That’s when it hit me! I realized I had been thinking about this perfection thing all wrong. And, in the voice of Richard Green in my head, I could change my perspective. 

What if I didn’t focus on being perfect, but on becoming perfect?

In my own personal religious growth, I am learning how to develop my physical, mental, and spiritual health. I can learn the principles and values inherent to my faith and develop my character, but I can never truly be perfect. What if I approach my dental life in the same way? On becoming.

To be continued…

Dentistry is rapidly segmenting into two distinct professions.

One will be what most patients think of as traditional dentistry. The tooth fixer and cleaner. The technician. These dental offices will focus on bits and pieces of treatment to get full insurance dollars from each patient each year. The staff will likely also be fragmented by tasks.

The other profession will be the doctor of the oral-health system. The valued family advisor on health and wellness. As Pankey-trained dental offices, we are well positioned to become the relationship-based advocates for our patients’ health.

Training Your Team to Advocate for Patient Health

How about your team? Have you put in the time to train and behaviorally change your most valued support?

A most important person in that team approach is the hygienist. Are they having conversations about total health? Social conversations don’t lead to behavior change that improves the health awareness of our valued patients.

Again, as Pankey-trained dentists, our hygienists can have a huge impact on our patients’ perception of our unique thoroughness. Occlusal awareness should be part of hygiene discovery about their health.

Bringing Up Occlusion in the Hygiene Appointment

This can involve simple questions: What have you been noticing about your bite? Chewing? Jaw? Headaches? “What have you been noticing about [fill in the blank]…?” can begin a discussion.

Depending on the conversation, one can follow with: “We are noticing that, as people live longer (keep their teeth longer), we see things slowly develop that can lead to big concerns. In our office, our purpose is unique – we want you to be able to enjoy eating all the foods you love the remainder of your life. I will look at potentially traumatic bite forces for you.”

How do you introduce occlusion in your hygiene exams? Let us know in the comments! 

Exceptional service is more than just a set of benchmarks we strive to reach in the dental practice daily. It’s a philosophy that steers the ship, drives everyone on the team to seek greatness. As such, it can’t be a mandate handed down to your team. It has to go deeper than that.

There are three things you can do that will enable your team to embrace and embody exceptional service. Remember, it must be natural to them, instead of forced, if the impression they give is to come across as genuine.

3 Steps to Truly Exceptional Service

1. Be a Good Role Model

This may seem too simple to work, but it’s like magic. Model exceptional service and your team will inevitably follow suit. Set an example that also sets the tone for your dental practice as a whole. Go out of your way to surprise patients with how good your service can be.

It’s easy to expect greatness from others while not putting the same pressure on yourself. Walk the talk. Live an unbridled excitement for patient care that’s completely clear of resentment toward their demands or needs.
Choose quality and excellence in every way you can, whether that be in your stationary, your lab, or even the drinks you have in the waiting room.

2. Hire People Who Go the Extra Mile

During your hiring process, make an effort to find team members who inherently want to go above and beyond. They should have a personality intent on always taking success to the next level. It’s not as difficult to sense this in an interview as you might think.

Ask the interviewee what they consider an exceptional doctor’s office experience. Go even further and ask them to talk about their own experience providing care beyond expectations. Then, ask why they did this. Use your own intuition to decide what their story means about them.

3. Reward Exceptional Actions

No dentist is an island, which is why you’re always hearing about the importance of your team. It’s a lesson we all need to be reminded of throughout the years as we grow complacent, things change, or new challenges arise that reveal cracks in our team’s capabilities.

Your Team is Key to Exceptional Service

Because exceeding expectations is an intangible thing, you can’t easily make it an actual practice policy. It’s not a rule, it’s a goal. If you want to make delivering exceptional service part of your practice brand, it needs to be an aim shared by all of the people on your team. They must genuinely enjoy delivering exceptional care. It must be the attitude that drives them.

But like anything, your intention to mandate exceptional service can backfire. This will leave you frustrated and your patients confused. A great analogy of this is an experience my husband and I had purchasing a car. The salesman insisted on taking us to a repair place nearby, despite the fact that we knew where it was. He told us he couldn’t get a ’10’ on the sale otherwise. As it turned out, this task was necessary to fit the quality control expectations of his superiors.

Exceptional Service Can’t Be a Mandate

This transparency wasn’t a good thing. It made it sound like our salesman was more worried about his performance review than our needs. The exact same problem can happen in the dental office. It’s why you don’t want to make exceptional service a strict rule. It has to be genuinely wanted by your team.

So how do you develop a practice culture that makes this happen? It all comes down to three key factors that will encourage your team to embody a true passion for patient care …

Check out Part 2 of this series soon!

It’s a hard truth to swallow: acquiring more and more new patients won’t always lead to success or contentment. What we think will solve all of our dental practice problems can sometimes be the exact opposite of what we really need.

I remember talking with a dentist who had empty patches in his schedule that he was desperate to fill. He had also noticed that his practice did a half day less of hygiene than the previous year. He then made it clear to me that he needed new patients, but wasn’t sure how to go about getting them.

Before I dove into a solution that might not work, I clarified the problem. It turned out we were dealing with a very different animal.

The New Patients Conundrum

I immediately asked him how many new adult patients he was averaging per month in the last year. His answer was around fifteen. This piqued my interest and set alarm bells ringing. I told him that doesn’t make sense and explained the math.

Fifteen new adult patients per month should imply two one-hour maintenance visits for every person. That ends up totaling 360 extra hours in the schedule or 45 full days of hygiene. Clearly, this dentist’s problem wasn’t attracting new patients, it was keeping them!

He was blown away by this realization, but it’s not uncommon for dentists to assume new patient acquisition is the problem. In reality, we need to think more like business owners and measure what is worth measuring. In this situation, my advice was to focus on figuring out why patients weren’t sticking around for the long haul.

How we see a problem can be a problem in and of itself. Once we recognize the true source of our frustration, we can take active steps toward a resolution. Hygiene is the core of a practice, after all, and deserves the right kind of attention.

When we love what we do, we do it better. This is a popular lesson in literature and in life. Tom Sawyer had an aha moment after convincing his friends to whitewash the fence his aunt had tasked him with by making it seem like play rather than work.

This quote from Mark Twain says it all: “If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

Obligations v. Choice: Loving Dentistry

While there was a time that I felt obliged to do dentistry (to pay off debt, to take care of family, etc.), I am now blessed to choose the vast majority of what I do and how I do it. I still have plenty of debt to pay off and am a long way from financial freedom, yet I find myself most days with a smile on my face.

This is because of the conscious choices I’ve made over the last 18 years after I first learned of Dr. Pankey’s Cross of Life. Many of those choices have helped blur the line between work and play for me.

When Work Becomes Play

When any of my mentors would talk about their work as any semblance of play, my initial response was one of significant skepticism. I had even seen my childhood dentist, Dr. Mark Stetzel, truly loving his work, his team, and his patients.

But early in my career, I had a difficult time envisioning that for myself. With the ‘Golden Age of Dentistry’ supposedly in the rearview mirror, I wasn’t sure my work could ever actually feel like play.

Today, I am so grateful to have a team around me that has chosen me and vice versa. They believe what I believe. We are pulling on the rope together because we get to do more of what we enjoy doing each day. We have learned about our own and each other’s strengths and we play to those strengths more and more.

So much of what we do on a daily basis has become play for us because we have realized we’re not obliged to do dentistry in a way that doesn’t align with our own values. We get to help people who want to be healthier make choices to do just that.

The choice to incorporate Dr. Rich Green and Don Clifton’s work on maximizing strengths in a dental office was such an important one for me. It created an aha moment much like Tom Sawyer’s. When people get to do what they are good at on a daily basis, they don’t feel obliged to go to work. Rather, most days can seem more like play!

Growth should be the primary goal of every dental practice. No matter how well things are going, planning for and promoting growth ensures that any setbacks do not completely derail you. Growth is also valuable because it keeps your practice lively with new patient energy and ensures your team stays engaged.

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed my first two tips for 2018 that encouraged developing a marketing plan and increasing whitening services. Keep reading for my final two pieces of advice:

Thrive in 2018: Patient Education and Experience

Use Digital Photos for Patient Education

Take the following series of six digital photos on all new patients:

1. Natural smile
2. Close up retracted view
3. Upper occlusal view
4. Lower occlusal view
5. Left buccal corridor
6. Right buccal corridor

Load the photos onto an iPad or tablet for patient viewing. This will convert the process from passive to active for the patient. Be prepared to hear two frequent comments from patients: (1) “Wow, I have never seen my teeth like this before!” and (2) “Yuck!”

Provide a Remarkable New Patient Experience

The first visit to your practice should be an awesome experience that helps new patients become more interested in their oral health. Take some time with your team and design a new patient experience that is more ideal.

Consider beginning with a simple office tour that shows the patient some services that are available. Include a new patient interview where a team member takes the time to get to know your patient and understand their ‘dental story.’ Make it a ‘wow’ experience where patients leave saying, “I have never been treated so thoroughly before!”

The four tips presented in Part 1 and 2 of this series are an excellent way to develop a thriving practice in 2018 and beyond.

As you begin to implement these recommendations, think of the following axiom: To achieve what you have never achieved, you must do what you have never done. Here’s to your success!