Hinman Connects Blog

Over the course of their careers, most dentists will introduce a variety of new services into their practice. In fact, many of you may be planning to attend the Hinman Dental Meeting this year to explore new service opportunities or acquire the necessary continuing education time to master a new service.  These plans all make perfect sense. When seeking to increase revenue, expanding your service list can be an attractive option. And while adding services to your practice is certainly a good strategy for growing production or increasing your patient base, there are several important steps to take as you move in that direction.

Effective Ways to Introduce New Services to Patients

I recently spoke with a practice that had added sleep dentistry to its of list services. The doctor had taken many hours of continuing education and made a significant investment in travel and equipment to ensure its success. Unfortunately, his efforts had little effect. Two years later the doctor was disappointed to find that very few patients were taking advantage of sleep medicine at his practice. He hadn’t even recovered his initial investment, much less increased practice profitability. How could lack of success happen?

He had certainly obtained the right education and acquired all of the right hardware and tools. But after a little detective work, we found he had made a classic mistake. While he’d done everything right in preparing himself and his office for the new service, he’d done little to nothing to prepare his patients. Practices that want success with a new service must—as they do with everything else—focus on patients. Consider these three things when introducing a new service to your patents:

1.       Send an announcement. The announcement should introduce the service, explain it, and encourage patients to ask about it and/or refer other people who might benefit from it. This announcement can be sent as a card or letter, but probably not as an email or text. Introducing s new service should be viewed as something special and worthy of a formal announcement.

2.       Create scripting. A script should be written to educate every patient about the new service during patient calls and visits. It does not matter whether they are a candidate for the new service or not. Word of mouth can be powerful and patients who don’t need new the service may tell others who do. It may be hard to believe, but the average American has a sphere of 400 contacts.

3.       Develop an ongoing campaign. Every quarter, the practice should use online and print media to remind patients about the new service with new information or updates. It is best to take an educational approach rather than a sales approach, so patients perceive it as positive communication from the practice.

Send the Right Message

When introducing a new service, it is essential to educate patients and send the right message. In the case of the practice described above, the introduction of sleep medicine needed to be created as if it had not been there before. The doctor followed all three recommendations from this article, and for the first time began to participate with social media. Soon, he saw his number of sleep medicine cases triple in the first two years. It was a win-win-win. The doctor enjoyed providing the service, he was helping patients, and his practice was experiencing a nice increase in revenue.

Summary

Whenever you introduce a new service, it needs to be clearly communicated to the patient base and others. The three key factors are: communicating to patients that the new service is available, asking patients to refer others, and creating an ongoing communications campaign. This effort will maximize the results of adding any new service to a dental practice.