Patient Prism Helps Dental Investors, Practices & Groups Limit Their Risks & Remove Barriers to Growth

Patient Prism Diligence enables you to assess the quality of your new patient leads so you can improve your ad messaging and targeting,” says Amol Nirgudkar, CEO of Patient Prism.

June 2023—Whether you are a private equity investor or a strategic buyer, you want to understand the strengths and weaknesses of a prospective investment. If you are on the sell side, you want to leverage your strengths, remedy weaknesses, and take advantage of opportunities to increase valuation.  

Patient Prism offers dental practices and dental groups unmatched transparency into their marketing, call-handling, scheduling efficacy and cancellation management. Additionally, it delivers data-driven understanding of expansion potential and when to introduce further growth tactics. Meticulous use of Patient Prism aids in intelligent revenue forecast and change management initiatives across all aspects of your organization.

Perhaps, most critical to you today, Patient Prism Diligence enables you to immediately spot and correct weaknesses in your patient acquisition and scheduling process.

Managing Acquisition, Retention & Cancellations 

Sustainable practice growth depends on the acquisition of new patients, retention of existing patients & management of cancellations.  

• You need new patients because their contribution to the top and bottom lines is generally higher than that of existing patients. 
• Without effective marketing and scheduling, you are unable to attract the right quality and quantity of new patients. 

• Managing cancellations in real-timeis critical to maintaining a full schedule, healthy EBITDA margins, and exceeding forecasted growth.  
• Capacity optimization via smart schedule management is key to profitable revenue growth.  

Dental practices compete for high-value new patients.  They also desire an optimal flow of existing patients with a predictable re-appointment system.  Identifying challenges to patient flow in diligence can present an opportunity on both the buy and sell sides of the deal.  

Of Marketing & Micro-Metrics

In today’s healthcare economy, direct patient marketing is the # 1 channel for practice growth. Google Ads dominates the digital paid ad space, and millions of dollars are spent each day to motivate the right patients to call the practice.  

Advances in materials and methods have allowed most dental practitioners to provide higher value services than ever imagined before.  Dental implants, orthodontics, veneers, sleep apnea, oral cancer screenings and many other services have increased the life-time value of each patient over the past decade.  

These high-value services along with the advent of digital marketing has enabled dentistry to move to a direct-to-consumer (B2C) approach in reaching patients.  Digital platforms like Google Ads and Facebook have enabled dental practices to predictably attract the right leads into the marketing funnel.  The rise of marketing dollars has also heightened the importance of return of investment (ROI) and necessitated the need for a new field of conversion optimization. 

 In Google’s view, conversion optimization ends at a customer either visiting a website, clicking on an ad or making a phone call lasting more than a predetermined number of seconds.  The macro-metrics provided by Google therefore exaggerate the number of conversions and under-estimate true conversion cost. Measurement of micro-metrics therefore becomes paramount in identifying true leads, true conversions and true cost.  

Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to efficiently track, filter, and report micro-metrics can provide a competitive edge to dental practices in making improvements to your marketing, curtailing unnecessary advertising outlays, and focusing your human resources on the highest-value new patient opportunities. 

CPL & CPA - Micro-Metrics to drive Practice Performance

Your CPL (Cost per Lead) is basically the cost you pay for a prospective patient to click on your ad. Google and most paid platforms like Facebook, Bing, and Instagram charge for each click of your ad. The cost can range from $10 per click for a cleaning ad to $300 a click for a full-arch ad. The cost depends on various factors like geography, the quality of your website, bidding strategy, ad relevance, and many other factors. A good marketing agency can help you optimize this to help you attract the right patient for the lowest CPL. 

Your CPA (Cost per Acquisition) is the average cost of digital ads to acquire new patients divided by the number of booked appointments. If your CPL and CPA metrics are incorrect or unknown, there is a high chance that your marketing dollars will never yield the results they were intended to achieve. 

Determine CPL & CPA with Patient Prism Diligence

Patient Prism allows the most precise measurement of CPL and CPA by accurately qualifying leads into the right buckets. No other call-tracking platform does this at a high level of accuracy. Our AI machine-learning models have been trained over 12 million human-coached calls and therefore are over 95% accurate in predicting true leads and corresponding booking status. 

The true booked leads can now be fed into Google’s Ad platform using Patient Prism’s Enhanced Ad Integration.  The integration allows precise write-back into the specific ad-campaign that resulted in the prospect to click on the ad and make the call.  

Patient Prism, thus enables you to have a clear understanding of the money spent on ads and the new patients that not only clicked on the ad but also booked an appointment. Using Patient Prism, you can obtain the most precise cost per acquisition and make marketing decisions that are based on reliable metrics. 

Since our AI models accurately understand the context of conversations and place conversations in the relevant buckets, we are able to dig deeper into the booked appointments to determine CPA by a particular campaign. For example, if you have an ad campaign with a budget of $2,000 per month for Invisalign, Patient Prism can give you the accurate average cost of acquiring an Invisalign patient. This can help you hold your marketing agency accountable on two levels.

1) Did they bring in Invisalign patients?

2) Did those patients book an appointment? 

Patient Prism Diligence enables you to understand your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), for each ad campaign, and make smarter marketing decisions.

Why Lead Quality Matters!!

Are the leads from your advertising congruent with the types of patients you want to serve? Oftentimes, marketing can drive the wrong leads into the funnel, leading to a high number of unscheduled appointments. For example, if a pediatric dental practice receives a high number of adult patient calls or a non-Medicaid practice receives a high number of Medicaid callers, you are wasting marketing dollars and the human resources spent on answering these calls. Worse yet, your office receptionists or call center agents are likely keeping qualified leads on hold and not picking up calls from leads who would be ideal for the practice. When you are aware that your advertising is driving the wrong types of patients to call, you can take action to improve your advertising.

Patient Prism Diligence enables you to assess the quality of your new patient leads so you can improve your ad messaging and targeting.

Sometimes, Operations trumps Marketing

Discover and manage scheduling and capacity issues

The shortage of clinicians has severely impacted the capacity of dental & healthcare clinics around the country.  Patients across the country are waiting anywhere between 1 week to 20 weeks for an appointment.  Booking patients more than a week out usually results in no-shows and patients choosing other providers for their care.  

Patient Prism’s advanced models determine the percentage of callers who could not book an appointment due to scheduling concerns. Patient Prism also calculates the average new-patient-appointment lead time in your practices (the average number of days it takes for each office in your organization to schedule a new patient). Many Patient Prism clients have utilized our AI-enabled real-time capacity-management models to design and quickly implement strategies like adding providers, optimizing schedules, and booking patients at sister locations. 

Patient Prism Diligence enables you to improve scheduling and make informed decisions to increase your capacity.

Determine & Remove Pricing & Insurance Obstacles

Patient Prism’s insurance and pricing models have stood the test of time. Since launching in 2020, we have identified over 400,000 appointments that were not scheduled due to pricing and insurance concerns. Many of our enterprise customers have made important decisions based on this intelligence. Some decided to go in-network with additional insurance plans, while others dropped unneeded plans. Some have trained their teams to have better financing and discount plan conversations with patients. 

Patient Prism Diligence enables you to see the rate at which pricing and insurance concerns are the reason new patients do not book appointments in your offices. Patient Prism’s micro-metrics enable you to see the preponderance of inquiries related to specific plans and the specific services that require greater attention to financing communication.

Determine & Remedy Gaps in Phone Agent Training

Patient Prism’s advanced Voice Fingerprint Technology attributes the call results to the individual agents who answer calls, so you can see customer service performance at the individual employee level. Additionally, because Patient Prism’s AI uses a 14-point “call basics” inspection to evaluate the quality of each agent’s conversation on each call they answer, 14 micro-metrics are tracked that identify exact gaps in training that your agents can work on using our vast library of training videos. 

Patient Prism Diligence enables you to monitor the performance of your phone receptionists on a deeper level to enable effective change management.

In addition to seeing performance of a single agent, you can determine performance of all agents across the organization to determine where the most training needs are.  

Track cancellations in real time so you can rapidly fill open appointments

Recent surveys by the ADA Health Policy Institute have found significant concern among providers about the rise in appointment cancellations and their impact on productivity and revenue. Cancellations wreak havoc on practice schedules, and if they aren’t filled on a timely basis, they can lead to lower profit margins. Patient Prism’s real-time cancellations-tracking model allows you to see cancellations occurring in your offices and take action to fill open slots with patients waiting for appointments.

Patient Prism Diligence enables you to see the cancellations occurring at each of your offices so you can take measures to reduce cancellations and no-shows. 

Measure your true potential to increase new patient bookings 

If you do not book the patient on the phone, you may be leaving a lot of new patient revenue on the table. Patient Prism Diligence enables you to see how many of your offices’ calls are missed opportunities with high potential for follow-up.

Consider: Patient Prism users whose teams make follow-up calls to qualified leads increase new patient acquisition by an average of 30%.

Note: With Patient Prism’s advanced reporting features, you can pull leads for follow-up based on the services you are promoting, and thus, prioritize how your human resources will be used best to call back and sell your services. Soon they will see that following up with leads helps them meet your organization’s goals for increasing the conversion of high-value patients.

When your teams fully implement all the functions of Patient Prism, you will be delighted with Patient Prism’s DeepLens narrative call summaries included in missed opportunity alerts. These summaries arrive within a minute of a new patient call failing to result in an appointment and provide intelligence to make effective follow-up calls. The real-time alerts and constant tracking of qualified leads enable your team to proactively call back leads in a timely fashion and offer to help them have the services they are seeking. 

How fast could your business grow if your teams converted 30% of the qualified leads they proactively called back?

Patient Prism Diligence enables you to see how many calls from qualified leads result in “missed opportunities” and the estimated monetary value of those opportunities based on your fee schedule. We will happily coach your teams to use the Patient Prism platform to facilitate follow-up calls to win over tracked leads as your patients. 

Diligence Is Just the Start

By quickly identifying opportunities and weaknesses in marketing, scheduling, cancellations, and more, Patient Prism can assist diligence efforts on the buy and sell side and help optimize transaction value. 

But Patient Prism Diligence will surface more than weakness. It will surface your true potential. 

By fully using Patient Prism on an ongoing basis, your organization can continue to unlock doors to increase your value. And Patient Prism will be the one AI platform that gives you the new patient-acquisition edge you need to grow and outpace your competition.

You will be able to track a realistic estimate of incoming new patient revenue and forecast new patient acquisition and cost per acquisition. You’ll be able to tighten up your vision and goals, then align your team efforts and behaviors to support those priorities. 

Buyers and investors: 

• Ensure a proper valuation before you invest in a dental practice or group.
• Plan for post-acquisition growth.

Sellers:

• Plan how to increase the valuation of your practice or group.
• Use the one AI platform that gives you the best new patient-acquisition edge
  

What's included:

• New Patient Schedule Rate
• Existing Patient Schedule Rate (optional)
• Missed Call Report
• Cost per Lead Calculation
• Cost per Acquisition Calculation (by campaign if requested)
• Agent Scheduling Performance Report 
• Agent Call Basics Report 
• Booking Performance by Office
• Cancellations by Office
• Scheduled Lead Time by Office 
• Reasons Not Booked by Office
  • Scheduling 
  • Pricing
  • Insurance 

• Marketing Effectiveness
• Operational Gaps 
  • Capacity
  • Pricing
  • Insurance
• Cancellations