A recent experience of a good friend of mine prompted me to revisit the way that we used to create an Ultimate Referral Experience in our dental practice for our valued patients who were in need of specialist dentist attention.
I’ve seen some pretty poor referral processes in my time, and I’ve also seen some arrogant and unappreciative specialist dental practices.
And those are not ULTIMATE experiences for our valued patients.
The first thing that I tried to do at my dental practice was to locate specialists who would come to my rooms and deliver their services in my rooms to my patients.
Whenever you can offer THIS type of referral service in your practice you have the ability to control the referral process.
And that is important.
Because a dental practice that is able to provide as many dental services “all under one roof” is a service that many of your patients will be very appreciative of.
Doing this allows your patients to see the dental specialist without having to travel to a building or town or place that they are unfamiliar with.
The specialist service is then being provided in a location that your patients already know and trust. And the staff of your practice, who those patients know and trust, will be all around to add familiarity.
This is very, very powerful.
At my practice we were able to utilise the services of one travelling dentist who specialised in oral surgery procedures and implants, and who also was able to bring his own registered anaesthetic nurse if sedation procedures were needed.
We also utilised the visiting services of an overseas trained and overseas registered endodontist for a full day every two weeks. This dentist performed and enjoyed treating difficult endodontic procedures. This meant that our patients then didn’t need to travel across the city for their root canal treatments.
Crazy referral processes.
If your referral processes at your dental practice are flawed you run the risk of patients leaving your rooms and not having their specialist treatment completed.
And I’ve seen this happen.
I’ve seen dental practices where the patient is given the address and phone number of the specialist rooms and is asked to call the specialist and organise their own appointment.
And the necessary referral from the general dentist is either mailed or emailed to the specialist.
Or sometimes the referral is handed to the patient to take with them.
Often in these sorts of cases the patient ends up at the specialist in a confused state, and not really knowing what they are there to have done. And because the making of the specialist appointment is taken away from the referring dentist, the referring dentist doesn’t really know when the patient has been completed by the specialist, and whether the patient is then ready for further treatment at the general dentist practice.
In these sort of situations there is a major disconnect happening that is easily avoidable.
Here’s the best way….
Here’s what we used to do.
When a valued patient needed to be referred out to a specialist dentist, our dental receptionists and treatment coordinators would phone ahead to the specialist’s rooms then and there, right in front of the patient, and book the needed appointment for the patient.
First and foremost, this allowed our valued patient to see that there was a friendly and courteous working relationship between our dental practice and the dental office of the specialist.
Our dental receptionist and the receptionist of the specialist would coordinate all the necessary details right then and there for the patient, so that all that the patient needed to do was attend the specialist at the agreed time.
With this process working so seamlessly, our practice was also able to schedule our patient for ongoing treatment required following their visit to the specialist.
The dental specialist also appreciated that the patient referred to them in this manner had a better understanding of what was going on than a patient who phoned them cold to schedule an appointment.
When your dental practice is able to develop a good amicable working relationship with their preferred dental specialists it makes life easier for the patients, for the specialists, and for the dental practice.
Recently a friend of mine was referred by her dentist to an OMFS office, only to be told by that specialist practice that the OMFS was not seeing any more new patients.
This message was then conveyed [by my friend] back to the referring dentist who then jumped on the phone himself to secure my friend the necessary appointment.
When my friend attended the OMFS, it became apparent to my friend that the OMFS was just a rude and arrogant person who failed to ask my friend any questions and failed to explain anything to my friend about the condition she was seeking treatment for.
It’s when I hear stories like this that I realise that there is easily plenty of opportunity out there in the marketplace for dentists who care to build themselves successful dental practices.
And one location would be right next door to this OMFS practice.
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The Ultimate Patient Experience is a simple to build complete Customer Service system in itself that I developed that allowed me to create an extraordinary dental office in an ordinary Sydney suburb. If you’d like to know more, ask me about my free special report.
Email me at david@theupe.com