From Reviews to Revenue: Maximizing Patient Feedback to Increase EBITDA

Practice Optimization

The majority of patients will leave your practice after their procedure or appointment without giving you their honest feedback. They will, however, share their experience with their friends and family—especially if it was mediocre or negative.

The fact is that one bad experience is much more powerful than a positive one. Consistently poor reviews deter patients from choosing your practice, directly impacting your bottom line. Lack of consistency in positive reviews can also raise a red flag, sending them elsewhere.

In this week’s blog, we explore how to harness the power of both positive and negative patient feedback to improve your practice experience and profitability.

5 Ways are Reviews Impacting Your Bottom Line

Consumers today value transparency, and reviews have become one the best ways that they can get an unbiased look at products and services that they are considering. In fact, almost 70% of purchasing decisions are made based on reviews alone.

The impact of a single negative review can be greater than you think. Negative reviews can lead to:

  • Revenue Loss. Reports show that businesses with consistent 1-2 star reviews reported 33% less revenue.
  • Poor Practice Reputation. 50% of patients question the quality of a practice with negative reviews and, once you’ve lost the credibility of your practice, it can be difficult to regain that trust.
  • Loss of Patients to Your Competitors. Studies show that a single negative review can drive away 22% of your potential patients—and that number increases with every additional review added.
  • Poor Search Ranking, Making it Harder to Find You. Say goodbye to your SEO investment! Search engines today want to serve up only what they consider the most trusted companies and reviews play a significant role in that determination.
  • Overall Decrease in Profitability. Add it all up and your practice is seeing a decrease in profitability across the board.

Think about it: if you lost 22% of your prospective patients to a negative review, how does that impact you in dollars and cents?

Let’s say you’re generating $1.5M in annual revenue in your practice at present, and this is only 78% of your earning potential. This means that you’re missing out on over $330K in additional annual revenue just because you didn’t invest in your review strategy.

What’s holding your practice back from harnessing reviews to increase your profitability?

Addressing Friction Points in the Review Roadmap

We hear it time and time again: practices that struggle to implement and maintain a review strategy that generates consistent, high-quality positive reviews on the right channels.

In working with oral surgery practices for over a decade, we’ve seen the same themes emerge and contribute to this struggle:

  • Staff noncompliance and discomfort in asking for reviews
  • Not enough time in the day to consistently implement your plan
  • Staff turnover, leading to poor retraining on your review strategy
  • No strategy or plan to address negative feedback in the practice

The good news is that every single point above can be quickly addressed and eliminated with the right strategies and tools in place.

Building a Successful Review Strategy

Automate The Process

Eliminate staff noncompliance and the never-ending feeling as though there isn’t enough time in the day to get it done by automating your review process. Solutions like WUWTA integrate directly with your practice management system to send review requests to patients at exactly the right time in their recovery process. This ensures that 100% of your patients get a review request, as opposed to just the ones that your staff has time for.

Harness the Prescriptive Power of the Doctor

Now that you’ve made it easy to request reviews, take the process of asking for a review out of your team’s hands. We’ve found that harnessing the prescriptive power of the doctor throughout care leads to better care compliance, and the same goes for reviews! In fact, the vast majority of negative reviews say good things about their doctor and poor things about their experience with billing or the team.

Worried about how you’ll make time to do this? Record a personalized video of yourself that is sent to patients with your review request. This allows you to control the narrative, ensuring the right thing is said to your patients every time—video never has a bad day!

Celebrate the Wins

How are you motivating your team to continue to produce great reviews? Sit down with your team regularly to reinforce the importance of reviews and create an outstanding patient experience. In your morning huddle or weekly team meeting, pull up all of the reviews that your practice has received and read them aloud. When your team hears the positive feedback patients are leaving about their experience, they are more satisfied with their work and motivated to continue creating more of the same.

A bonus—high staff satisfaction levels result in less team turnover, saving your practice thousands of dollars in the process of replacing and retraining your team.

Collect & Address Negative Feedback Before It Gets Posted

One way to avoid negative reviews is to make sure that feedback is collected before it ever goes up online. Implementing a patient satisfaction survey in your practice gives patients an outlet to share issues offline and provides your practice the ability to address them on the spot, potentially turning the experience into a positive one. Gather and review negative feedback on a monthly basis with your team so you can put the right changes in place to avoid negative experiences in the future.

Don’t have time to survey patients yourself? Explore services like SIXSTAR Reputation, which will collect every patient and aggregate your feedback data for you.

Invest in the Patient Experience

How are you ensuring that patients truly have a 5-star experience every time? Practices that invest in creating these experiences make it even easier to generate positive reviews that bring new patients in the door.

Practices harnessing the power of WUWTA are creating experiences and setting the expectation for their standard of care before the patient ever walks through the door. Providing patients with all of the information they need at every step of care ensures that they feel confident in their choice, can maximize their time with their doctor to discuss the things they really care about, and enjoy better treatment outcomes.

Take Me from Reviews to Revenue

Are you ready to take action and harness the power of positive reviews to increase the revenue of your practice? We’re ready to show you how!

Click the button below to request a 30-minute presentation of WUWTA and see how this platform can transform your patient experience and dramatically increase your positive review conversion.

3 Ways Surgeons Can Save Time By Creating More Engaged Patients & Teams

3 Ways Surgeons Can Save Time By Creating More Engaged Patients & Teams

Practice Optimization

We’ve all felt it: the burnout from having so many things to do in a day that you’re exhausted by the time you hang your hat at home. The schedule that is so packed that you feel lucky when you get to spend an hour with your family before bedtime. The hobbies you love that you feel you no longer have time to invest in. Managing the needs of the modern oral and maxillofacial surgery practice can be an all-consuming endeavor for most surgeons. Between the patient caseload, the practice team, and business operations, there is little time left in the day.

Today, oral surgeons must do more work to retain the same patient base than they did 10 years ago. Doctors across the country are looking for ways to take their time into their own hands and get back to doing the things they really care about—and, the great news is, many are successful!

If you’re looking to gain time back in your schedule, we’ll explore the three keys successful surgeons do to create more efficiency and how you can start implementing them today.

3 Keys to Creating Schedule Efficiency

Key 1: Engage in Education

In a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, researchers found that 50% of patients walk out of a doctor’s appointment not knowing what they were told or are supposed to do. That is why a patient’s preparation and education BEFORE they ever see a surgeon is so critical to running an efficient schedule.

When patients understand the basics of their procedure and have built trust with their provider ahead of their appointment, surgeons can focus their consult time on what’s most important to that specific patient: this builds a deeper relationship with that patient, which increases their likelihood of accepting treatment.

Oral surgeon Dr. Ben Johnson sends custom patient education videos through WUWTA to every patient at his practice in the Seattle, WA, area. He says, “Our consults go a lot smoother because patients have already watched a lot of the videos online. So, when I walk in, it allows me to have a better relationship-building experience with the patient…It just runs a lot better.”

Providers who apply that same level of education throughout the patient journey see the positive trickle-down effects of communicating the right message at the right time. For example, investing in a patient’s understanding of pre- and post-operative care results in fewer post-surgical questions and a higher likelihood of care compliance. This means fewer questions during post-surgical follow-up calls and appointments, and less time spent dealing with complications due to non-compliance.

WUWTA works with practices across the country to increase the level of education patients receive before their consult. Leveraging video-based educational content, providers can create custom experiences for every patient and gather important information about how engaged a patient is in their educational process. Surgeons who leverage WUWTA consistently get tremendous results: they see more engaged patients and can more efficiently utilize their time at the practice.

Key 2: Automation & Integration

As more and more programs and tools become available to help practices interact with patients digitally, it is important to make sure these solutions save you time and work together seamlessly. If you’re investing in tools that create more work and headaches for you and your team, it is time to reassess your digital strategy.

Smart surgeons who truly maximize their schedule and get time back ensure that their digital communication tools meet two critical requirements: automation and integration.

Automation literally takes the work out of your hands. Surgeons who look for ways to automate the patient experience find that not only do they save time, but they also ensure patients get the same consistent experience with their practice—every time! When automation meets seamless integration, surgeons create a winning system that generates even greater efficiency.

At the Dental Implant & Oral Surgery Specialists of San Diego, Drs. Paul Koshgerian and Jon Shelton were using multiple tools that didn’t speak to one another to manage patient communication and patient records. When they launched WUWTA’s latest integration with DSN, they could automate all of their patient messaging and education through their scheduling software. This decreased the time that their staff spent sending individual messages and increased the time their staff spent on personalized care and experiences.

The result? More prepared patients and faster case acceptance, which ultimately gives more time back to the doctors. Since deploying the WUWTA automation, Dr. Shelton has seen a dramatic change in the way patients arrive for their consults: “Their understanding of the treatment is there, and case acceptance is certainly going up.”

Key 3: Team Activation

Surgeons across the country are struggling with staff retention. The past two years have seen more turnover in practices than at any other time in the history of OMS practices. The process of searching, hiring, and retraining can be extensive, sucking even more time out of an oral surgeon’s already busy schedule.

Surgeons who embrace the current state of staffing affairs rather than fight it are finding new ways to get time back in their schedules. Leveraging Key 2, look for ways to engineer the patient experience that takes the work out of the staff’s hands.

Freeing up the team’s time allows practices to ensure they’re focused on things that save the surgeons time, such as:

  • Phone scripting
  • Proper scheduling protocols
  • Appointment confirmations
  • Patient appointment flow
  • Transcribing dictations

This also minimizes the level of training required for new team members to get up to speed and begin performing their jobs at the highest level for you.

Level up! Practices that incentivize their teams to be top performers are less likely to deal with turnover, providing even greater time savings for the surgeons. Teams united by goals that improve teamwork, create efficiency, and improve outcomes are the most likely to help you get time back in your day.

WUWTA’s team leaderboard and patient dashboard provide practices with real-time data on team performance over a 90-day period. Receive important patient engagement benchmarks, incentivize your team to hit them, and enjoy the new efficiency it creates in your schedule.

Get Your Time Back

Practices that successfully implement the three keys above are seeing tremendous results as they work toward creating a more efficient schedule. If you’re interested in getting your time back and want to see how WUWTA is helping oral surgery practices do just that, we encourage you to schedule a 30-minute presentation.