Elegant Handoffs & PIT Stops in Your Dental Practice

Episode #389 with Heather Crockett

There’s a great deal of pressure in the dental industry to move quickly and get through as many patients as possible to be more profitable. But is that creating a healthy atmosphere in your practice, or does it instead cause more conflict? Today Kirk Behrendt brings practice coach Heather Crockett on the show to discuss the topics of the Elegant Handoff and the PIT Stop—find out how utilizing these systems will lead to more clarity, predictability, and overall patient satisfaction. To learn why you need to slow down and make a PIT Stop, listen to Episode 389 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

Predictability and clarity help to calm the patient and set everyone up for success.

When you deliver on what you promise, you create trust in the marketplace.

A second set of eyes helps you more accurately assess a situation.

Slow down and make a PIT Stop—discuss the Procedure, Investment, and Time involved. 

A PIT Stop leads to more clarity.

Learn to ask questions instead of talking more.

Practice these systems and they will become more natural.

Quotes:

“One of the challenges you have is creating a predictable, safe environment for your patients where they know what to expect and it actually happens the way you described it. And so there’s two components to it: we call it an Elegant Handoff, and then there’s something called the PIT Stop. Now you as a dentist, you know this; if you can put these things in place, it gives you what you and your team need—you need high levels of predictability. It’s an incredible system.” (01:46—2:18)

“One of the things you have to do is you’ve got to learn how to over-deliver. Now, I say that because the only businesses in the world that are growing, they’re over-delivering, which means they’re making promises and they’re giving people that they serve a little bit more. Now the first piece of this is you’ve got to deliver on what you promise, and we use a formula internally, and we use it in almost everything we do, which is E-R=C…Expectations minus Reality equals Conflict. If you can build your dental practice where expectations are set, and the reality is your patients…what happens to them or happens with them or happens as a result meets their expectations, you have little or no conflict. The challenge for most businesses is we have so many expectations but the service or the experience provided is less than we expect, so the reality is much less.” (04:57—05:54)

“In a dental practice you guys have so many processes, there’s a lot of moving pieces. And so, putting in a system where you can make promises and they’re delivered the way you promise them, it has multiple benefits. Like I said, it benefits the patient, it benefits the team members because they’re doing the same thing every single day, it improves the quality and consistency in which you deliver your care because it’s enhancing the product—you’re going to see, you’re going to become more efficient. You’re actually going to be able to promote more because you’re going to become more confident, and you’re probably going to do it in less of a time frame.” (06:36—07:15)

“Every single appointment, and I do mean every appointment, do a PIT Stop, which means we’re going to slow this down. Even if the patient wants to do the procedure today, we’re going to pause, and we’re going to go through our system, because I know if we don’t have a lot of clarity before we start treatment, that’s where problems happen—that’s where bombs go off, and surprises take the equity out of the relationship.”...