“Dentistry is competitive, and patients are impatient. To outcompete other nearby dental providers, you need to know where patients are falling out of your sales funnel,” says Amol Nirgudkar, CEO of Patient Prism.

March 2023—Every dental support organization uses business intelligence tools to understand how their business is doing, but sometimes it’s not enough to know how it’s doing. You want to know why and what you can do to improve performance. Patient Prism’s AI allows you to dig deeper, and in the case of DSOs, micrometrics have tremendous strategic value. 

For example, you may see on your Patient Prism dashboard that 80% of incoming new patient calls have been converted to scheduled appointments. An important question is “How many of those callers were seeking high-value procedures such as implants, veneers, crowns, and orthodontics?”

That number is a micro KPI. 

Within the group of high-value callers, how many scheduled an appointment? Increasing the percentage of high-value patients will move you closer to your revenue goals.

Within the group of unscheduled patients, what were the reasons they did not schedule an appointment? Was it pricing? Was it a scheduling issue? Was it insurance? Could your receptionist have used some better prompts to help get that first appointment scheduled?

You now have data four levels deep. 

The AI can instantly pull those micro metrics for any period. When you know why prospective new patients did not book appointments, you can solve the problems. 

Patient Prism is integrated with your Google ads

One of the best features of Patient Prism is that it fills in the gaps between the leads generated by your Google ads and actual customer conversions. Until now, your ad tracking stopped at knowing if the lead made a phone call and how long they stayed on the call. Now, with Patient Prism, you can see into those phone calls that come directly from your ads. 

The AI in Patient Prism will monitor those calls and analyze the conversations and topics mentioned, along with the results of the calls. Within seconds of a call, your dashboard will be updated with data indicating the day and time of the call, the ad that prompted the call, and if the caller booked an appointment.

You can instantly see which callers may warrant callbacks based on who did not book an appointment. You can then click on each call to see the full information.

• Is this a “good” prospect you should call back? 
• Is the caller someone who would benefit from receiving more information in a second conversation? 
• Would the caller benefit from speaking with a different team member? 

The AI call summary will help you make those judgments.

Connecting the dots…

One of the holy grails of running an ad campaign is following the lead all the way through their journey to their first appointment. Without connecting the dots, you won’t understand why people clicked on but didn’t make an appointment. Tracking what happens in that first call is the key to knowing if your ads are truly converting into revenue.

Commonly, the AI identifies obstacles to conversion occurring at the front desk

Let’s say you have invested heavily in a digital ad campaign to increase the number of patients seeking implant treatment. On your dashboard, you see that week over week or month over month the number of implant inquiries has increased but the percentage of scheduled implant callers has not increased.

In this scenario, when you examine the reasons implant callers did not book, you find three reasons in the call summaries. Some callers were fearful of the cost of treatment, some callers were disappointed they could not schedule an immediate consultation, and some calls generated by the implant ads were not picked up by a live receptionist. That’s three different issues. You can go another level deeper by having the AI pull up the hours during which the implant calls were unanswered.  

Now, you can manage those identified problems

You can set up your IVR to direct implant inquiries to a priority line for pickup and instruct all front office team members to back up the receptionist if the priority line is not picked up by the third ring. When you receive alerts for following up implant calls, you can instruct your treatment coordinator to call back those callers on the same day to explain implant fees in general and financing options. Hopefully, by the time of the callback, an opening has been found or created so the coordinator can offer an immediate consultation.

Those high-touch callbacks win 25-35% more new patients.

Sometimes an ad fails to generate new patient opportunities

What if an entirely different outcome is measured by the AI that tells you the implant ad is not attracting potential patients? That’s a different problem that needs to be addressed by your marketing team.

Don’t waste dollars on ads that aren’t working for you.

By staying on top of the AI’s analytics, you have intelligence on which ad to test a different message, schedule, media, or target region. You also know the relative value of every implant call generated by the ad. If few leads are coming in, every single one of them must be optimally handled to realize a return on your investment. The front desk needs to be alert for these valuable leads and know how to best converse with implant-seeking patients.

The AI measures your capacity to grow

Patient Prism’s CEO, Amol Nirgudkar, reports a common challenge of dental groups. They get stuck at 3% same-store growth because their schedule is packed. They are booked 65 days out. Thus, new patients wanting high-value services hang up and call alternative providers. These groups need more capacity. 

“Patient Prism surfaces the why behind problems so you can solve them,” says Nirgudkar. “We’ve had clients expand their operatories and teams based on the demand Patient Prism track. Recently, we onboarded a large client that was not growing. Patient Prism’s AI quickly found that 33% of their incoming calls during business hours were unanswered. Based on that one micrometric, they could start addressing the failure points in their phone system and fix the problem.”