6 Steps That All Successful Practices Follow – Do You?
By Jodi Jacks for the March 2019 DSM Insider
The road to Dental Sleep Medicine (DSM) success is paved with the carcasses of well-intentioned dental practices. Many of them were just like you. They wanted to do something new, provide comprehensive care, and create a new production stream. Over the past 15 years, I’ve seen a lot of offices like this. You may even own one of them. During that time, I’ve observed and studied the most successful DSM practices and they certainly share some traits, some common DNA.
Whether you’re brand new to DSM, aspiring to do more of it, or transitioning to DSM exclusively, these 6 steps are like a GPS beacon to follow the path to success. You can do this.
Train Your Team
You’re familiar with the old saying “Don’t put the cart before the horse”? This adage applies when implementing Dental Sleep Medicine. You would never recommend to a patient that you would place an implant if you had never been trained to place one, would you? Too often dental practices want to start screening their patients and spreading the word to the local MDs about this great new service they are going to provide before they have been trained.
You can spend dozens of hours building physician relationships and thousands of dollars developing marketing outreach but if you don’t know how to efficiently manage the patient journey, it’s all for naught. It’s a waste of time and money. Education first.
The most efficient and cost-effective method to do this is through remote training with a team of experts. It costs much less than taking everyone to a course and it’s done according to your schedule. Dental Sleep Solutions offers the DS3 Experience which will get you and your team up and running with Dental Sleep Medicine in less than 45 days.
Identify an Expert Medical Biller
Don’t do this on your own. At least, not at the beginning. You will struggle, fail, and bail. Fortunately, there are experts out there that know exactly what to do and will ensure that you are able to maximize your patient’s benefits. Billing medical insurance can be very profitable if you have an expert partner in your corner.
Paying a medical biller is worth the investment! Dental practices that decide to bill medical insurance themselves are far more likely to stop providing oral appliance therapy than those who have hired a medical biller to do it for them. Medical billing for an out of network service is completely different than anything your team has billed to dental insurance before. You are now dealing with MDs who are approving or denying your claims and your documentation must prove medical necessity for the device, even if you have an Rx from an MD for it. Talk with 4 Pillar Billing today to see how they can improve and streamline your medical billing experience today.
Screen YOUR Patients
The ADA says you should, and I agree. There is no need to externally market when getting started. Your existing patients of record are the low-lying fruit. You’ve established trust with them, they’re in your office twice each year, and they need your help. Prevalence statistics show that one in four of them suffer from sleep apnea. Discuss sleep with them. You can also get your fingers wet by treating your team, family, and friends. They’ll thank you for it, it’ll boost your confidence, and they’ll become your #1 ambassadors in the community!
To simplify the screening process and organically broach the topic of sleep with your patients, use a simple, yet effective screening tool, such as the DS3 Digital Screening App. When your patients check in, your front desk team will hand them a tablet with a short questionnaire that will automatically score the results for you and provides the patient with a risk factor.
Identify a Sleep Ambassador
You want to do it all. Well, you don’t really, but you feel compelled to do it all. The ONE consistent trend among the most successful DSM practices is a dedicated Sleep Ambassador. Many dentists opt to wait to anoint this person until they reach some imagined tipping point. That’s backwards. This person is tasked with managing the sleep facet of your practice from gathering letters of medical necessity and tracking metrics to requesting sleep tests and ensuring appropriate screening. I know one dentist that floundered for years treating 2 patients per month. Once she identified her Sleep Ambassador, she consistently began treating 10+ patients every month. How does that sound? Identify your Sleep Ambassador….like yesterday.
Network with Physicians
Not only is it the right thing to do but communicating with the other health care professionals is one of the best and most cost-effective methods to market this procedure.
If you referred your patient to a specialist, wouldn’t you expect her to communicate with you about your patient’s status? And if that specialist always kept you in the loop and brought you in on important decisions regarding your shared patients, would that encourage you to refer more patients to them? It’s the same thing with your local MDs.
Dental Sleep Solutions polled 48 MDs and asked about the desired length of correspondence and what their preferred communication is. Unanimously they said “no more than 1 page” due to time constraints and “fax” respectively. DS3 automatically generates concise correspondence for your patient’s other healthcare providers. Additionally, with the click of one button, DS3 digitally faxes these letters through a HIPAA Compliant Digital Fax Portal. Getting your name in front of your local MDs as often as possible will keep you at the top of their referral list when they have a PAP non-compliant patients.
Optimize Your Marketing
Once you’ve gained some traction by implementing each of the steps above, it’s time to begin promoting your life-saving treatment outside your practice’s walls. For those dental practices who want to make Dental Sleep Medicine a larger part of their practice then it is time to bring in the experts in DSM Marketing – Marc Fowler of Bullseye Media. Marc and his team have created the most comprehensive direct-to-consumer dental sleep marketing program available. It includes internal and external as well as online and offline marketing strategies and resources.
By following these 6 steps, you will implement and grow dental sleep medicine into a successful part of your dental practice. It takes hard work, it doesn’t happen overnight and the team at Dental Sleep Solutions will be there with you every step of the way.
