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.” (09:07—09:31)

“By implementing an Elegant Handoff—this PIT Stop that you’re talking about—really helps to make our patients feel comfortable, and then it propels them to refer the people that they care about—their family and their friends.” (12:18—12:31)

“You can actually over-commit time and beat it. If you know it’s going to be three hours, you might be okay saying it’s going to be three and a half hours. Don’t worry about that, because the goal is to beat it. The worst thing to do is to say to a patient, ‘This is going to take an hour,’ and they’re going to be here for two hours—don’t do that.”  (13:19—13:40)

“Dentists spend so much time—and you know if you’re listening—you get so excited about treatment, it’s awesome, but you talk to patients over and over and over again that you just floor them with all of your information, and you can see they actually tune out. So when you put this system in place, don’t try to tell them everything; instead, get good at asking questions. A good distribution is this: … you should be talking 20% of the time, patients should be talking 80% of the time.” (14:15—15:01)

“Take a look at your entire process from front to back. When a new patient calls your office, what are the steps involved? Checklist it all out, and then create Elegant Handoffs around your checklist. An important piece of the checklist is the PIT, which we call the PIT Stop. Make sure every patient gets a PIT Stop—you’ll be happy you did, your patients will be happy you did, your team members will be happy you did, your lab person will be happy you did, and you’ll look back and go, ‘Wow, things are just getting a little bit better!’ And then one of the items I would add to your checklist around these processes is let’s find some good questions to ask, and let’s just get good at asking questions, because again, the questions are the answers.” (15:30—16:13)

“Involving the patient in that process—in every single handoff within the office—they will learn something. They won’t just forget, they’ll learn something, and then they’ll own it, and you’ll find that even your cancellations go down.” (18:21—18:34)

Snippets:

0:00 Introduction.

01:24 Elegant Handoffs.

03:43 Heather’s thoughts on Elegant Handoffs.

04:53 Over-delivering.

06:33 Benefits.

07:20 “Four-eyed handoff.”

08:58 The PIT Stop.

12:31 Meeting expectations and managing time.

14:04 Asking great questions.

15:22 Summary.

16:17 Role-playing.

18:43 Final thoughts.

Reach out to Heather:

Heather’s email: heather@actdental.com

Heather’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heather.r.crockett

ACT Dental Instagram: @actdental

Heather Crockett Bio:

Heather Crockett is a Lead Practice Coach who takes joy in not only improving practices, but improving the lives of those she coaches as well. With over twenty years of combined experience in assisting, office management, and clinical dental hygiene, her awareness supports many aspects of the practice setting. Heather received her dental hygiene degree from the Utah College of Dental Hygiene in 2008. Networking in the dental community comes easy to her, and she loves to connect with like-minded colleagues on social media. Heather enjoys both attending and presenting continuing education to expand her knowledge and learn from her friends and colleagues.

She enjoys hanging out with her husband, three sons, and their dog Moki, scrolling social media, watching football, and traveling.