ORTHODONTIC PEARLS or practice do you and your team need to invest in to improve what we call the Pivotal Patient Touchpoints? 2. Improving on your Pivotal Patient Touchpoints. The Pivotal Patient Touchpoints are your key patient conversations, handoffs, and moments in the patient experience that either build treatment value or diminish it from the patient’s perspective. Some examples of the touchpoints are: a. Telephone conversations. b.Appointment scheduling. • Schedule a variety of procedures throughout the day. This prevents the churn of a full day of small procedures and quick turnarounds, which lead to exhaustion and little production to show for it. • Pre-block your schedule to half your daily production goal. Lock in your primary appointments, new patients, emergencies, etc. This allows for a streamlined day, sets doctors’ preferences for large appointment place-ment, and allows you to work more intentionally. • Be aware of hygiene evaluation flow. Doctors not only have their columns of restorative care to provide, but they must also be able to effectively and successfully execute hygiene evaluations. This is typically overlooked, leading to rushed, stressful, or ineffective evalua-tions. We want 40% to 60% of our restorative treatment to come from hygiene; therefore, it is important to give doctors’ hygiene evaluations the atten-tion they deserve. • Emergencies. Pre-block for emergencies and set aside additional time together during the daily huddle. This way, you are not thrown off course by placing an emer-gency where it doesn’t belong. c. Treatment presentations. d.Financial conversations. e. Patient checkout. Your team must clarify the ideal patient experience and each touch-point, practice each handoff and conversation, and become consis-tent in executing the steps in the patient journey excellently—every single time. 3. Marketing for the right new patients. If you struggle with patient engagement and treat-ment commitment, consider where your new patients come from and how you attract them. Is your external marketing presence focused in the right direction? Does your website, content, and social media presence allow your patients to find you when they look for the treatment you provide? It is even more important to evaluate how intentional and successful you are at internal marketing—promoting services to existing patients, following up on treatment presented but declined, and most importantly, asking for referrals and reviews. About 60% of your new patients should come to you from referrals. If this is not the case, it’s time to be more practiced and intentional about asking your patient family to offer you referrals. Give your ᕢ Low Patient Engagement You likely need to answer some important questions about your patient base. Are you achieving appropriate treatment acceptance and completion goals? Is your patient retention where it needs to be? Are you attracting the right types of patients for your practice and the treatment you want to provide? When patients do not stay active in your practice, accept treatment, or honor appointment commitments, you are typically missing the mark on one or more of what we call the Four Pillars of a Healthy Patient-Practice Partnership: ᕡ Trust. ᕢ Need. ᕣ Urgency. ᕤ Value. How do we build these pillars in our patient relationships? Here are three key ways: 1. Strengthen your overall team verbal skills. Dr. John Jameson, whose practice helped launch The Jameson Group decades ago, says the biggest thing that helped his practice with case acceptance was mastering verbal skills. What is your patient experience process? Does everyone know their role in that process, and is every-one on board? What training 8 Summer 2025 JAOS
Journal of the American Orthodontic Society Summer 2025: Page 8
