Soon the warm summer days are going to end. Vacations will be over. School will be back in session. And your schedule is going to dwindle like the leaves on the trees. The dreaded September Slump is coming.
Sometimes also referred to as Sucktember, September can seem like a difficult month for dentistry. You may be scrambling to figure out how you can fill your schedule so you can continue to increase productivity and profitability at your practice.
Dr. Tarun Agarwal is a practicing dentist and practice owner of Raleigh Dental Arts and the founder of 3D Dentists, an educational training platform. He has seen that dentists have substituted busyness for business which has led to a decline in case acceptance, which in turn affects September’s success.
“We’ve worked in a model where busyness has been the key to ‘good business,’” Dr. Agarwal said. “When we allow busyness and chaos to take over, our diagnosis goes down, communication with patients goes down, and time that we spend talking about financial options goes down.”
Throughout his 22-year career, he has lived by four tips that have helped him avoid busyness while improving case acceptance and keeping his schedule full.
Diagnose better
“Diagnosing better isn’t necessarily doing more. Sometimes diagnosing better is actually doing less dentistry,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Sometimes diagnosing better is doing more ideal dentistry versus patch and filling dentistry.”
He feels that having a successful September starts with creating good habits in January that last throughout the year. He notices production in September heavily relies on what was diagnosed in July and August since there is a two to four week lead time on treatment.
“My team members feel Sucktember, but I personally don’t feel it because we are very conscientious about July and August and what we are diagnosing,” he said.
Improve communication about treatment
Dr. Agarwal firmly believes in spending a minimum of one hour for hygiene recall visits. That way, there’s time to communicate with your patients and diagnose treatment during their appointment. He has seen many dentists try to cut their recall visits down to 45 minutes because they have more patients they want to fit in.
“If you squeeze in an extra couple of patients a day because you squeeze 15 minutes off of each appointment, you are probably seeing three more patients which might be five or six hundred dollars more in total revenue,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Or you can give people a time to communicate and diagnose and all it takes is a diagnosis of a couple fillings, crowns, or implants and you’ve made up for all of those revenue issues.”
Experience has taught Dr. Agarwal that not all team members are great at presenting treatment to patients.
“Not everybody is born with the gift of communication,” he said.
Using tools such as digital cameras, X-ray machines, and digital impressions assists Dr. Agarwal and his team by filling any gaps in communicating to patients the treatment they need completed.
“When you have such great records, then you have all the tools to show your patients exactly what is going on,” he said. “Trust is born for most of us when we can show our patients what is going on versus just relying on words.”
For example, Dr. Agarwal enjoys using the CBCT machine because it allows him to slice and dice the images to show patients exactly what is happening. He believes patients don’t care about being taught about the diagnosed treatment. Rather, they want to be able to trust you and confidently know you are doing the right thing.
“Case acceptance and trust have a direct correlation to how much you show your patients, not how much you educate your patients,” Dr. Agarwal said.
If your practice needs an easy way to present personalized treatment plans that include intraoral photos or other visuals, check out Dental Intelligence Treatment Plans. These templates help patients understand why their treatment is needed in an easy-to-understand format.
Make dentistry more affordable
Dr. Agarwal often asks himself, “How can I make my dentistry more affordable?”
He notices giving patients different payment options, including monthly payment plans, directly affects the amount of treatment accepted.
“Affordability has very little to do with price and has more to do with the fact that the modern consumer is a monthly payment consumer,” he said.
With Dental Intelligence Patient Financing, you can make paying for treatment less stressful for patients and provide great options for them in order to make dental care more accessible (and get paid quicker!).
Leverage your schedule
“We, as dental professionals, are not taking advantage of this time to experiment with our schedule,” Dr. Agarwal said. “Starting in July and August, take advantage of the September slowdown with a new way of looking at it.”
For example, he finds that if your production is typically down 20 percent in September, that’s about six hours of work a week. Instead of keeping the same schedule, he suggests setting one day aside for ideal dentistry and then compressing your schedule the rest of the week.
By using Dental Intelligence Smart Schedule, you can see your schedule in a daily, weekly, or monthly view. This allows you to see, at a glance, how you could rearrange your schedule to make days that fall below production goals more successful.
At 3D Dentists, he teaches clients how to create what he calls “priority scheduling.” This allows dentists to prioritize the type of dentistry they enjoy and want to do.
Then, he suggests making your team aware of this goal and celebrating the happiness performing your ideal form of dentistry brings you.
“It’s amazing that when you put your goal out there, people start diagnosing to fill the schedule that you create,” he said.
He also discovers that new patient blocks are usually the first to be replaced by other types of appointments in most practices, yet he believes these appointments should be the most important priority.
“By removing new patient blocks, we are stifling our future in many ways. New patients, by and large, need more dentistry than existing patients,” Agarwal said. “New patients also adapt better to cultural changes in the practice.”
Finding joy in dentistry
Dr. Agarwal continuously teaches these principles to his own team and instills them in his own practice, as well as in other dentists who use his educational training platform.
“My goal is to help dentists find happiness and joy within their profession, so they can find and live happiness and joy in their personal lives,” Dr. Agarwal said.
For more tips on how to make September a successful month, check out our eBook “10 Ways to Avoid the September Slump.” If you want to learn more about Dr. Agarwal, you can find him on all social media platforms as “T-Bone Speaks.” Don’t forget to check out his educational courses offered at 3D Dentists.
