SUMMARY
In this podcast, our Founder Howie Horrocks, and CEO, Mark Dilatush, discuss the new high tech that you can get for 169 bucks a month, with integrated digital forms software.
Before we get into our latest discovery, let’s start from the beginning. What we do is to look for any way that our clientele can spend as small of a portion of their budget as possible for the most significant impact, particularly in the dental marketing niche, whether online or offline.
Various marketing software tools are available to dentists, and they may or may not know about them. So, if there are eight or nine software products, at Newpatientsinc, we vet them for dentists to give them the best options and alternatives. An example is Localmed â„¢ online scheduling. When we first looked Localmed, it was light years ahead of everybody else from an online scheduling integration standpoint. Now, at newpatientsinc, we have many clients using Localmed, and they’re all wonderfully happy.
These software tools are not ours. We are not software developers. These are the best software packages we resell, having vetted them ourselves. We do the installs and give you the best practices on how all of our clients use them.
So, high tech for just 169 bucks.
You know how taxing it is to file and follow up with various forms for your clients and practice. We run into practices with 12-14 different forms. They have forms for cosmetics, forms for clear aligners, and many others.
Now, our integrated forms product automates the entire process. So, you know if the patient needs a form; you know if the patient gets one. You also know if the patient doesn’t fill out the form completely. The software helps you monitor all these, notifying the patient and the front desk. The front desk person would know everyone that completed a form and also the people that didn’t. The software then drops all that information in a central place where anyone with access to it or the password, including the dentists, has instant access to everything. You can put the forms online or on your scheduler. You can also put them on your Google Local page, on your Facebook page, and you can set access to these forums literally anywhere.
Your patients enjoy more convenience as they can fill a form online from the comfort of their home or office or wherever they are and be done with it. There is no need for them to come down to the office just to fill a form. Your whole dental team also knows when a patient fills out a form, so they don’t ask the patient to fill the form twice. You are also free from HIPAA violations as the process is digitized, and you aren’t leaving any patient information lying around in your office from paper forms. You get quality time to spend with your clients. You can save the time that would have been spent physically filling a form for consulting purposes.
The software also works with Eaglesoft â„¢, Dentrixâ„¢ and Open Dentalâ„¢ users. To learn more about the software, simply visit our website, www.newpatientsinc.com and you can have a member of our team demo it to you.
So, that’s it on this episode of our podcast. Listen to our other podcasts to learn more about expanding and growing your dental practice post-COVID-19. Sign up today to build your customized dental marketing plan and start your dental marketing campaign.
Howie
Hello, and welcome to the Dental Marketing Mastery series. This podcast is brought to you by New Patients Incorporated. I’m Howie Horrocks, the Founder of New Patients Incorporated, and along with me once again, is my friend and partner, and the Chief Executive Officer of New Patients Incorporated, Mark Dilatush.
Mark
Hello, everybody. Welcome to our Dental Marketing Mastery podcast series. We’re so glad to have you here. Hello, Howie. How are you doing Mark? Alright, man, it’s a June. What is it? June 21?
Howie
Yes, it is.
Mark
And we have basically a fairly new subject to speak about, yes. We didn’t have to do 160 of these. We’ll search for unique things to talk about. Right?
Howie
Yeah. And this one’s called high tech for 169 bucks.
Mark
169 bucks. You’re kidding. You can be high tech for 169 bucks?
Howie
Save yourself a lot of trouble.
Mark
I can’t even buy an iPad for 169 bucks. So what do we mean when we say high tech for 169 bucks? So, I gotta take a trip backward. I’m not sure people understand, at least part of what we do. Part of our job, or at least the way we look at our role to serve our client base is to look for any way that they can spend as small of a portion of their budget as possible for the greatest impact. Yeah, right. Exactly, that was like, believe it or not all those things that you would look at and go, Why would anybody buy those? Like, almost every dentist owns them. So it’s pretty amazing.
Anyway, so we set out to find, because reviews are so incredibly important, right? Yeah. And they’re important on your Google Local, they’re important on your offline, they’re important on digital, they’re important on everything. So, you know, how do you automate those in a way that the dentist is not being taken advantage of. And we brought forward, NPI Crusaderâ„¢ so and none of these are ours.
We’re not software developers, these are the best software packages that we resell. It’s kind of funny dentists will say, well, you don’t write the software, I’ll just go buy it direct. And we’re like, okay, that’s fine, you’re not going to get a better price. You know, we have the same price, we can do the installs and give you the best practices on how all of our clients are using them, you know, how you how they’re getting the most from each one. But if you want to go buy it direct, okay, you know, that’s certainly up to you. And to those dentists, I always say well then you must not buy anything from Shiein or Patterson, because neither of those companies ever develop anything. They just resell everything.
So we continue to find the best in class marketing software tools available for dentists and offer them to our client base. So anyway, which brings us to today. How to get high tech for 169 bucks. At least one of us on this podcast has actually sat at the front of a dental practice, answered the phones, booked appointments and his name is not Howie. Did billing, understands insurance and all that other stuff.
Right? And, having gone through that process myself many many years ago, well it wasn’t a struggle to hand the patient a form. Hi, Bob, how you doing? It’s been six months, here’s what you said last time. Tell me what you’re gonna say this time, sign your name and put a date on it. Right? Because you know it was really no big deal back then. I’m not going to tell you how many years ago it was I ran a front desk, but I’ll tell you it’s many a couple decades or more.
Anyway, so fast forward. Well, now there’s a whole bunch of things that matter. Right. There are multiple forms. There’s HIPAA.
Howie
Yeah, absolutely.
Mark
Some of that has to do, obviously, with digital marketing, some of that has to do with offline marketing. And some of it has to do with marketing software. There are marketing software tools that are available to dentist, and they may or may not know about them. And certainly, if there’s eight or nine of them, they may or may not want to try them all, and vet them until they find the one that works, you know, the best for their needs. So we go do that for them.
A couple of examples, like LocalMed online schedulingâ„¢. When we first vetted LocalMed it was light years ahead of everybody else from an online scheduling integration standpoint. I don’t know how many thousands of clients they have. But I know we have many, many, many clients in LocalMed and they’re all wonderfully happy. As long as you keep marketing, it provides a value and it provides a return of a couple 100 bucks a month, and people continue with it. And then we searched out this one was actually not without controversy. We searched out the best automated review system that we could find, that did not exploit the customer with long term contracts and did not take their reviews away, and did not threaten the customer in any way at all. Whether they were still a customer, or they left.
Howie
Or hold their reviews hostage.
Mark
Right! Back when I was at the front desk, HIPAA was from Africa, right, though, who cared about HIPAA? We didn’t, who cares? Yeah. So, and then there’s this whole long digital online thing, convenience. Convenience to the patient, and convenience, because now you have multiple forms. We run into practices with like 12-14 different forms, because they have forms for cosmetics, forms for clear aligners. They have different intake forms, patient intake forms for different things.
Like oh my god, if I was back 20 years ago, running the front desk, I’d made a whole cabinet just with empty form, that I would have to organize by for name, right, and then pull it out when I needed form name and hand it to the patient. And then I thought, Oh, crap, no patient in the history of dentistry ever filled out a form completely anyway. So then you have that whole thing? Well, if it’s on paper, then, you know, did they really complete it? Or actually, what does it mean? Can I understand what they wrote? Right? There’s a million things and Oh, my God, what if the dentist actually writes on with their handwriting?
Howie
Right? Yeah. Then you’re, you’re gone,
Mark
Then you’re toast. Right? So I’m sitting there thinking about this. And we were working on other projects, and I thought, You know what, I’m gonna chase down all the forms. Oh, wait, then COVID happened? Yeah, now you need a form for a form, right? Here’s your patient intake form. Here’s your COVID form. Here’s your HIPAA form. Oh my god. It’s just like, it’s like forms to like the 10th power now. Right. And then good luck, if you’re trying to go paperless. Like, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, now we have this gigantic file cabinet with empty forms that turn into somewhat completed forms, which also have to be what they have to be filed again, right.
So you have all this Oh, my God, it’s terrible. And you don’t even know which one was filled in? Which one was it? And then their standard of care? Like you have to have certain forms filled out with information, disclaimers, right for your patients with certain procedures, like Oh, geez. So anyway, I got to thinking and I got to search. And I said, well, there has to be a way for us. And my angle was actually on marketing, like the same angle as online scheduling.
See, at the beginning of online scheduling, when the original developer of Localmed reached out to me and, we had a real long discussion, it was great discussion, we were laughing at the end, I said, dude, nobody’s, no dentists is gonna allow you to control their schedule. And then, you know, a year later, the maturity of the product got to be such that I thought, well, maybe this is the tipping point where the consumer demand for efficiency and high tech image with dentists reaches that point. Right, And, you know, what, four years later, four and a half years later, you know, put that, they probably have 10,000 customers now, you know, it’s not a fad. I mean, it’s a real thing, right?
So I’m sitting there thinking of that, and I’m thinking to myself, well, how can we improve our clients high tech image, you know, without being a software developer, so I went out into the woods, into the plains of America, and I was scoping out the best forms software. And there’s a few not just forms, integrated forms, because we used to send our website clients type, I forget patient forms.com or something, like generic forms company. And it was just generic kind of vanilla, didn’t really make anything more efficient, didn’t integrate with their practice management software, didn’t put all their forms in one place, which makes it simple for the front desk, didn’t tell you if somebody didn’t fill out their form, didn’t do any of that stuff. It was just a form. And I was kind of embarrassed of all in that solution.
So I went out and I went out looking for the best, most complete, most service oriented so people would actually use it. Forms software, specifically for dentistry that integrates with, you know, the popular practice management software, and we found it and it’s actually really, I think back, you know, 20 years ago when I was running the front desk, and I was multiplying in my head forms times 10.
I was thinking to myself, I didn’t even like forms times one, you know, I mean, like forms times 10, how are you going to deal with that? And, this product, it just automates all of it. If, you know if the patient needs one, it knows if the patient gets one, it knows if the patient doesn’t fill it out completely. It knows and tells the patient and the front desk, the front desk person would know everyone that completed one while the people that didn’t complete one and drop all that stuff in a central place where anyone that has access to it or password has instant access, including the dentists to everything.
You can put the forms online, you put them on your scheduler, you can put them on your Google Local page, on your Facebook page, you can put access to these forums literally on Well, anywhere, right? Except for paper, right? Because they’re online forms and not supposed to be paper forms, right? But, what this does is it gives, first of all the impact on the consumer is, “I’m done”. If you just talk to any busy mom or watch a busy mom, watch her day, the last thing she wants to do is have something hanging that she hasn’t completed yet, she’s already got 94,217 tasks right for today.
And when she’s working on some, like making an appointment, she’d really like to get the forms electronically, boom, boom, boom, get them done, maybe for her, her husband or child, whatever, and be done. Not, here’s another task, here’s another task, here’s another task. And another thing that helps is, if I fill all this stuff out at home, at my leisure, to show up 15-20 minutes early for my appointments.
Right, yeah, I mean, I’m done, I can show up, if my appointments at 5:15, If I want, I can show up at 5:10, 5:12 and, and I’m not gonna miss anything, and they’re not gonna miss anything. And you know, my family is going to be… the doctor is going to have his team or her team are going to have all the information they need to do a good job taking care of my family, I don’t have to worry about that either.
Right. And if I forgot something, or if they need clarification for something, there’s a process involved. It’s wonderful and the whole team, this is another piece that maybe dentists don’t realize. the whole team knows that the patient got the form and filled it out completely. And, and we understand that in other words, it passed muster, so that we’re not asking patients to fill out the same form twice.
Howie
Exactly.
Mark
Nobody listening to this ever. That happens in your practice. Okay. It does happens all the time. Because there’s paper everywhere. So anyway, so yeah, so it’ll reduce the time for patients that have to wait for anything, it will cement the appointment, like if you were, if you made an appointment, and you weren’t really going to keep your appointment, you weren’t really sure yet, would you fill out the forms? I wouldn’t. Yeah, right. So if you get an employment, maybe they call and then they make an appointment for a new patient, and they don’t fill out your forms, you really think they’re gonna show? It’s the first leading indicator of missed appointments. Is a missed is a missed form fill, right?
So this gives your front desk all kinds of information automatically, that they wouldn’t have gotten before, you know, to potentially help, you know, keep your schedule full, or at least keep their eyes out for a possible broken appointment, missed appointment coming up. Right. Another thing with I think back, when we used to have, like we had a desk and your phone and a computer screen, and you’d have charts, and it would usually be, you know, five or six of the charts for the patients who are due to walk into their front door, and probably five or six of the charts that patients that were already here, that had already left, they usually left and right, right and left or high and low, whatever.
However you normally organize your front desk and I’m sitting here thinking to myself, that entire environment is a gigantic HIPAA violation. The whole thing is a HIPAA violation, right. So when I think about video, and I’m thinking about these security systems, that video this stuff, and I’m thinking about oh my god, somebody get a hold of that, there’s patient information literally everywhere,
Howie
Yes, it does. Right? Yes, yes. So huge liability, potentially, right.
Mark
There’s enormous liability. I mean, like you and I, we would never, you know, we would never sue anybody for a HIPAA violation. Right. But everybody isn’t you and I, right. I mean, there’s people who would anyway, so I reduced the HIPAA violations and the front, I tried to figure out. It was hard for me because back in the day, I only really had a couple of forms to deal with.
You have your medical history form. We had an extra form for allergies, we actually had a welcome form. We had a form for treatment plan acceptance, we had a form for medical history, we had like four or five forms back in the day, and we would pull them out when we needed them as we needed them. Oh, yeah, there was another one for guardianship. Yeah, like if a mom was bringing a seven year old or a 10 year old and all that stuff anyway, um, and I thought to myself.
Well, how long did that really take because you never really stop and take. You never take inventory on the little tiny pieces of seconds or minutes that these things, these little process take, you just reach, find. Hand it to them, get it back, well find their file again, refile it, all that stuff, that’s really all you do. You never really count that up. But if you figure maybe what, three minutes per patient, that’s pretty fast, but let’s just say three minutes per patient and there’s what 20 Let’s say 20 patients each day.
Howie
Yeah, huge time savings right there.
Mark
That’s an hour. That’s a whole hour a day, right? Where you don’t have to do that. And you can actually, you have might actually have time to look the patient in the eye. And, and connect with them, which is a bit I mean, besides the high tech side, we joke around with our podcast title, high tech, for 169 bucks, but maybe the real value is just having the time back. Yes. To connect with the patient on a personal level.
Howie
Yes.
Mark
So they actually know you’re there in your name?
Howie
How many times have we heard a dentist’s getting a bad review? Because Oh, the front desk was just too busy to pay attention to me. Okay.
Mark
I felt rushed. How many times? Was that on a Google?
Howie
Yeah, absolutely.
Mark
I’ve seen it a lot a, million times. Anyway. Yeah. So and then there’s one of the questions I had, actually, when I was doing this, because I thought, I thought that these forms companies, they’d have their own forms. And then I thought, well, I know, Dentists. And if you give six dentists the choice of where to go for lunch, you’re going to end up at six different places.
Right. So having just a standard forms library, plus, back in my soft end days, we actually started building forms, libraries, and we basically stopped, because by the time we were done, it was 6941 options. Because of all the input we got from our clients, right, so i said to myself, well, this ain’t gonna work, you know, because I guess that all the forms, companies must have just standardized, you know, form libraries that the dentist has to adapt to. And honestly, that’s wrong. What they do is they take the doctor’s existing form, and they digitize it.
So the form is the same. It’s not different. So, you know, even your established patients will look at it and go, Wow, this is an upgrade. I mean, normally, I had to come in 20 minutes early to fill out all this crap. And now, you just email it to me as as part of the normal routine before my appointment. I can fill it in whenever, it doesn’t matter. That’s cool, right? Yeah. And it doesn’t have to be a new form that they’re not familiar with. So everybody’s familiar with the form. And they get done.
Oh, here’s the other thing. Everybody’s used to these forms. The medical history forms, right? It says, Do you have cancer? Are you allergic, allergic to all this crap, right? And there’s like, 74 of these things. And there’s a yes column, and the no column. And every human being on earth just goes up to the no and just draws a line down the whole frickin column. Does anybody really go check, Check, check, check, check, check, check, check. Nobody does that. They just go, bam. No, I don’t have any stuff. Right. Is that going to hold up in court?
Howie
Oh, boy.
Mark
Seriously, right. Okay. If somebody, if there’s a malpractice claim on you, and you accepted that form, where’s the line? What did the line mean? Did you question this patient? Why didn’t you question this, but you see what I’m saying? See where we’re going? Okay. So it’s not just marketing. It’s not just high tech image. It’s not just efficiency, so you can connect with your patient. It’s actually all those things, and maybe even some legal protection from HIPAA and from lawsuits. Because if you got it, and you got to digitize and you got it locked away, you’re good. So yeah, high tech for 169.
Actually, 169 a month is what does digital forms costs. And it only works well, not only I mean, it’s probably 80% of the software out there. It works with Eaglesoft, Dentrix and Open Dental users. You can just log onto our website, New Patients Inc.com, I think there’s a banner in the middle of the homepage that talks about digital forms, and just have one of our folks show it to you, like a lunch and learn, just sit back with a ham sandwich and let them share a screen and show it to you, then you can make your own decision.
But anyway, I’m not going to call this a game changer. But it’ll catch a lot of dental offices up because a lot of dental offices are still back not being high tech with their patient base and their new patients that are coming in. And I think it hurts them more than they think.
Howie
Yeah, I do too. I do too. Pre digital. It might as well be prehistoric.
Mark
Yeah, I wouldn’t go that far. But anyway, that’s all the hubbub is about. It’s another piece of software that we found, that we vetted them all. Actually on that page on our website, there’s a little graph with other people’s software so you can see the capabilities like in a little chart, a little infographic and I don’t know take a look at it and do what you think is best for your practice. But for those who are on paper, right now oh my god, what a monumental improvement that will be.
Howie
Yeah, there’s help on the way. Well, thank you. Thank you for listening. We’re going to leave you with that today. I’ve got to go fix my broken AC. It’s 114 here. That’s what I’m doing today. Mark. All right.
Mark
Well, I’m sure you’re not gonna leave your house when the office has air.
Howie
Oh, yeah, the office is fine. Okay. Yeah. my house is not. It was 97 degrees inside my house last night. All night. Thank you, my friends. We’ll see you next time. Bye. Bye.
We hope you’ve enjoyed our podcast today. You can get all of our podcasts on iTunes, Stitcher, and Libsyn.com, and on our website, NewPatientsInc.com.
