Mastering Case Acceptance: The Question is the Answer

Episode #414 with Jenni Poulos

Your practice is built on one thing: your patients’ trust. So, how do you get your patients to open up, listen, and engage with what you are saying? To help you master this area of case acceptance, Kirk Behrendt brings back Jenni Poulos, one of ACT’s lead coaches, with expert advice for building trust, rapport, and understanding so that your patients say yes to treatment. Removing fear is the first step! For easy-to-implement tips to increase your patients’ comfort and connection, listen to Episode 414 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

Make patients feel safe, heard, and understood.

Understand patients’ brain function during stress or fear.

Be aware of patients’ verbal and body language cues.

Recognize when you have rapport with your patients.

Ask good, open-ended questions to engage your patients.

Quotes:

“When patients sit in your chair, they're nervous, oftentimes. It doesn't matter if it’s the first time the patient has come in to see you or if they’ve been there five, 10, 15 times. If they're experiencing an issue, if they're experiencing pain, or if you're sharing with them something that's new, if they don't trust you, if they don't feel comfortable with you, they're going to have a hard time hearing what you're saying, understanding what you're saying, and engaging in their treatment, being an active partner in their treatment.” (2:42—3:15)

“How well you communicate determines how far you go in dentistry.” (4:26—4:29)

“The success of the practice really relies upon your ability to have patients say yes to treatment. So, we want to know how we can get them to say yes, build trusting relationships, and really beyond that, we want to create long-term, committed patients that will refer to the practice.” (5:19—5:39)

“Rapport is about building relationships that get us to some level of mutual understanding that makes communication easier. We don't want to run right into our ops, sit down next to our patient, and spend no time establishing relationships, building connection. Because if we do, we are not in rapport with our patients. We are not creating an environment in which they are open to communication, open to hearing and engaging. So, I really want you to always be asking yourself, before you begin telling a patient anything about the treatment that they need that you're proposing, I want you to think about, ‘Am I in rapport with this patient?’” (8:21—9:12)

“You want to be good at paying attention to and reading patients’ body language. Body language does not lie. Nonverbal cues are 55% of communication. By language is 38%. Only 7% is what we say. So, we want to pay attention to, ‘What does the patient’s body language tell me? What is their eye contact telling me?’ And we want to be attentive to the tone and pace of our patients’ language and how our tone and pace is in alignment with that of our patients. This is going to help us build relationships. It’s going to help us get in rapport if we can pay attention to some of these things.” (10:11—11:02)

“If you don't read cues and body language, you can inadvertently scare and confuse patients. If someone comes in and they're very closed off and nervous, and your energy levels are too high and you're too excited, you're going to set them off a little bit. They're not going to feel comfortable. They're not going to feel like you see them. So, these are things that we need to be attentive to when we walk into a room.” (11:03—11:31)

“When we’re looking at body language, really, what we’re asking is, ‘Is a patient open to me, or are they closed? Are they open to hearing what's going on, or are they closed off?’ There are some really easy cues that you can look for with your patient, even just identifying a...