This article was written by the Planet DDS staff and originally published on DrBicuspid.com. This is the second article of a five-part series with DSO leaders at the Dykema Conference in 2024.
With higher wages, higher supply costs, and stagnant insurance reimbursement rates, dental practice leaders are looking for innovative ways to increase same-store revenue.
In some cases, they’re tracking their current processes and protocols to identify inefficiencies and implement solutions. In other cases, they’re deploying technology to make it easier to schedule patients, provide treatment, and collect payment.
In this article, we look at clinical innovations that are driving same-store growth in dental practices from solo locations to groups with more than 400 practices.
8 Clinical Tips to Increase Same-Store Revenue
To help you boost your practice’s revenue, here are eight top clinical tips that can drive same-store growth and enhance patient care:
1. Schedule same-day dental care.
People are busy, and they don’t want to have to take off more time from work or arrange for someone to watch their kids if it can be avoided. “Chart reviews are crucial,” said David North, the CEO of Squire Dental, which has twenty affiliated locations.
“If someone is scheduled for a crown on the upper-left quadrant, is there anything else that needs to be treated too? We look at who’s coming in for hygiene and typically find two or three patients a day with outstanding treatment. It’s our goal to make it easy for patients to finish receiving the treatment they need to be healthy.”
2. Use dental hygiene therapy.
Dental Care Alliance is deploying GBT (guided biofilm therapy), which replaces cavitrons, reduces tension on the hygienists’ wrists, and condenses the length of hygiene appointments, said Shawna Eury, the south division president of Dental Care Alliance, a dental service organization (DSO) with more than 400 affiliated practices.
3. Deploy periodontal treatment protocols.
Dental Care Alliance also uses periodontal protocol to help providers remember the guidelines for diagnosing scaling and root planning (SRP), periodontal maintenance schedules, and adjunctive services to improve gum health. Similarly, InterDent, a DSO with more than 150 affiliated practices, utilizes treatment plan “explosion codes,” which are built around the various periodontal diagnoses and help ensure patients are informed of associated therapies.
Check out this video as DSO executives and dentists share what they’ve implemented to increase same-store revenue and growth at their practices:
4. Expand into specialty dentistry.
Another way to increase same-store revenue is to increase the number of services each practice provides. “I recommend frequently reviewing the specialty services that each practice is referring outside your network to identify opportunities to increase referrals to specialists within your network,” recommended Shane McCarthy, COO of InterDent.
5. Offer virtual orthodontic consultations.
When COVID hit, Parks Orthodontics started offering virtual consultations where the orthodontist and the patient would talk online. Since then, it’s introduced asynchronous virtual consultations, with a call to action of “start your digital smile assessment” on their website. The potential patient completes a questionnaire and submits pictures through an online portal, the doctor creates a provisional treatment plan, and the treatment coordinator presents the proposal to the patient virtually.
“Since introducing the asynchronous consultation model, 42% of patients come in for records, and of those, 97% start treatment,” said Allison Hale, COO of Parks Orthodontics, which has one location in Virginia.
6. Broaden access to dental care.
“In our practices, we’re looking to expand same-store growth by really looking at what’s happening to the patients when they’re in the office,” said Teresa Williams, chief financial and operations officer of Dental Express, a dental group with six affiliated locations.
“How much care can we provide for them in each appointment. Sometimes that includes expanding the size of our team, expanding the breadth of knowledge of our doctors and the care they can provide, or even adding capacity, adding operatories, adding additional technologies and equipment.”
Dr. Alap Choksey is vice president of clinical services of North American Dental Group (NADG), which has about 300 affiliated practices. The group has expanded services at many of their locations to include dental implants, clear aligners, wisdom teeth extractions, and sedation. NADG also leverages digital workflows including 3D printing with SprintRay for crowns and nightguards, and surgical guides for full-arch hybrid prosthetics.
7. Invest in X-rays with AI annotations.
A picture’s worth a thousand words, and adding artificial intelligence (AI) annotations to X-rays helps patients to see where they may have cavities, bone loss, periapical radiolucency, and other dental concerns.
“Our case acceptance has gone up since we added Pearl to our Apteryx digital imaging,” said Dr. Bradley Dykstra, the founder of MI Smiles Dental Group, which has seven affiliated practices. “The response of new patients is, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen this before and now after you’ve shown me what’s there, I understand.’”
Dr. Choksey also found that adding AI helped with NADG’s same-store growth. “We added Overjet to Apteryx. It’s focusing us on being more efficient. We’re leveraging the AI annotations for insurance claims and getting approvals faster, which minimizes resending claims, frees up our front office team, and allows us to see more patients.”
8. Streamline your dental practice operations.
OMS360, a support group for oral surgery practices, drove 40% organic growth in the first half of 2024 after implementing a new patient workflow. “We literally did a time study of our patient journey, the staff, and even the surgeons. From this, we identified six phases of the patient journey and detailed how long each one took for our highest-performing practices,” said Trevor Maurer, the CEO of OMS360.
Since then, they rolled out best practices to help all of their offices achieve success in the six areas: patient access, scheduling, insurance verification, treatment planning, treatment, and account reconciliation.
Drive Same-Store Growth and Clinical Innovation
From adding additional services such as clear aligners and dental implants, to adding innovative clinical technology such as artificial intelligence for X-ray analysis and guided biofilm therapy, to streamlining operations and providing better training for team members, dentists and DSO executives are finding ways to drive same-store growth even in this tough economic environment.
In part three of this series, we’ll talk to dentists and DSO executives about operational changes they’ve made to increase revenue year over year.