September 2023
“With over 60 offices in two states, Peak Dental Services is one of the best-run organizations out there. They use Patient Prism in a way that everyone should,” said Patient Prism’s cofounder and CEO, Amol Nirgudkar at Dykema’s 10th annual DSO Conference.
AJ Peak replied, “When we first made the decision, it was a marketing one to drive incremental patients. We believed it would help our folks answering the phones improve the new patient schedule rate. And we did make a double-digit improvement of 15 to 20 percent depending on the location.
"More recently, in the last year and a half, with your team and our team working together, Patient Prism has become a bedrock for us in marketing analytics...everything from measuring leads on the front end of the entire marketing funnel to seeing who scheduled and who showed up to lifetime value to marketing spend and integrating the data with our data warehouse.”
“Using Patient Prism, I think we’ve consolidated what used to take three vendors.” − AJ Peak, CEO of Peak Dental Services
Running the business better in 2023 has been important in the face of higher interest rates and wage inflation. Innovation has enabled DSOs to rise to the challenge.
AJ Peak said, “We’re running the business measurably better by pursuing more automation, backfilling no-shows, and improving higher throughput. We're running the business measurably better than we ever were in order to get the same margins.“
Patient Prism enables Peak Dental Services to spend less on marketing and reduce the impact of no-shows. “We were getting the leads, now let’s get more of those leads to show up,” said Peak.
“We’ve done an enormous amount of work to reduce any dead space with our providers, particularly hygienists. And I think we're now exploring how we can take some of those capabilities to backfill the doctor's schedules because they, too, see no-shows.
"We're asking, what can we do to make sure we are doing more with less? If we're short on capacity, meaning dentists or sometimes physical capacity, we want to shrink that no-show rate to get as close to 100% utilization as possible."
“DSOs don’t tell doctors what to do,” said Nirgudkar. “They don’t tell them how to practice,” so motivating changes in scheduling could be challenging. “How do you do that?”
“It's a combination of data and of best practices, and it's not one metric,” said Peak. “It's saying, ‘Look at the efficiency metric of this practice, and by the way, they have better customer satisfaction scores and indices for quality than you do.’”
Doctors are worried about being outperformed by others, so AJ Peak connects doctors and office managers to other top performers. He humanizes the KPI, so it doesn’t go in one ear and out the other.
“Connecting two office managers or one dentist-owner to another -- that kind of two-combo punch has been most effective for us. And it's hard, then, to hide from the data. Plus, they’ve talked to Dr. Jones and alleviated their fears.”