Elite is the health care industry design, build and fitout expert. With 30 years’ experience, the staff at Elite understand how to create dream practice environments that are aesthetically alluring and exceedingly functional. An intensive consultative process and precise planning translates your vision on schedule and on budget every time. Our project scope covers town planning, design, fitout, refit, retrofit and complete build. Elite can even assist you to find and develop the perfect property.

There is no cookie-cutter approach. Every project is unique and we approach each project with a high focus on listening and understanding your vision as well as the day-to-day practicalities of how you work. Our mantra is service, service, service. These factors, coupled with the incredible depth of expertise in our staff, has made Elite a leader in the healthcare fitout industry across the Australian Healthcare sector.

• The highly qualified and experienced staff at Elite is here to make the process streamlined and efficient. We understand specialist client workflow and functionality and merge that with cutting edge design to deliver your dream practice environment.
• Creating the ideal practice environment leads to increased revenue, greater productivity, higher client and staff retention and increased referrals. Not to mention the wow factor that will ensure both clients and staff enjoy the perfect environment you have created for years to come.
• We pride ourselves on scoping out your project so there are no unexpected or unwanted surprises.

Our specialty is practice design for:

• Dental Clinics
• Medical Clinics
• Veterinary Hospitals and Clinics
• Surgeries
• Sessional Suites
• Consulting Suites
• Operating Theatres
• Radiology Rooms
• Ophthalmology Clinics
• Laser and Skin Clinics
• Super Clinics

Looking at purchasing your first practice or expanding your business? Let us do the hard work for you with Dental Prac Sales ‘Search & Select’.

Dental Prac Sales ‘Search & Select’ provides comprehensive suburb and dental practice reports, essential if you are looking at buying a practice in your chosen area or suburb. Simply contact us, complete our acquisition form stating the type of practice, size and location you are seeking and we will provide information on what the suburb looks like in terms of your likely competition, population demographic and number of chairs each practice has in the area.

Once targeted practices have been identified, our consultants make contact with the practice principals on your behalf to assess whether they are looking at selling their business or would consider a sale.

All our enquiries are made confidentially with complete anonymity given to you, the purchaser.

The best practices are rarely advertised publicly.

Such is the confidential nature of the sales process, most practices through a business broker are sold to their registered buyers. Much time is wasted by dentists viewing advertised practices for sale that are either not profitable or commercially viable.

The Cost

Search & Select – $1295

• Comprehensive practice and suburb report
• Direct enquiries made to practice principals for your targeted businesses
• Personal buying consultant
• Priority access to available and upcoming sales (12 months)
• Regular updates on the general dental marketplace (12 months)

Contact Alex Barritt on 1300 880 243 or email sales@dentalpracsales.com.au for further details on how we can get that practice you are looking for and deserve.

Most dentists are losing $100,000’s in productivity from poorly performing hygiene programs. Are you one of them?

For those of you who don’t currently have a hygiene department, or are toying with the idea of creating one, the potential revenue is much higher than this figure.

When managed well, a hygiene department not only can be a highly profitable income centre, but can drastically improve the health and wellbeing of your patients. The hygiene department is not just there to “move cleans off the dentist…”

There are many factors that contribute to the poor performance of a hygiene department. In this article we are going to take a look at one of those reasons: downtime.

Unfilled hours, failure to attend, cancellations and patients “avoiding” regular “recalls”, are just some of the common frustrations we hear from dentists who contact us for help with their hygiene programs.

So what is it costing you to have only 4 hours downtime per week over a year in your hygiene department?

Approximately $154,768. Click here to find out how those figures were derived.

What actually causes downtime?

Unfortunately downtime in your hygiene department (and even your dental practice) isn’t caused by your patients repeatedly having car issues, being sick or having to suddenly go to work. While some of these reasons are valid, downtime that equates to, on average, 1 hour per 2 days of hygiene is considered to be a serious “leaky bucket” in your hygiene program.

The real reasons why you have downtime

1. The dental team is not singing the same message of hygiene importance.

Patient: I’d like to cancel my session 
Receptionist: Sure not a problem. Thanks for letting us know. Would you like to come in another time?
Patient: I will get back to you when……

Dentist treatment area common scenario

Dentist: “You should probably have a clean as well….” (often mentioned at the end of the restorative treatment plan…)

If hygiene is seen as an “add on”…it will be considered as an optional extra and perceived as a low priority.

2. The patient does not see the value or urgency in committing to preventative care or a periodontal care program.

Put yourself in your patient’s shoes. If you do not see the value in something would you commit to regularly paying the fee for what you consider to be an unnecessary treatment?

People need to know “why…what’s in it for me?” We often take it for granted and believe that the patient understands and accepts the need for a clean.

If the message has not been communicated in a way that the patient can grasp easily, take ownership of the process and see the dollar value inherent in the treatment, then how can we expect them to value hygiene?

Even if your hygienist spends the entire hygiene session scaling, don’t confuse this with the patient’s perception of value!

3. The hygienist did not check in to ensure that the patient understood what was going on.

Don’t take a “yep” or a nod as confirmation that the patient understands or accepts what you are saying. Building trust, rapport and well-orchestrated communication will provide an environment where the patient feels comfortable to share with you the necessary insight to their knowledge and understanding.

4. Systems and processes that create an inconsistent patient experience.

Consistency is the foundation of trust. If the way the service is delivered from the moment the patient calls the practice to the moment they leave are leaving seeds of doubt in their confidence in you and your team, then there will be inconsistencies in the patient’s commitment to attending.

Downtime is costing your practice in lost productivity and peripheral revenue that comes from the hygiene department.

So where do you start? Want a deeper insight into your hygiene department? Here are your action steps:

1. Start tracking statistics – you’ll get to see exactly how much downtime is in your hygiene department. Click here for a simple hygiene tracker to get you started.

2. Download the 8 questions that patients must be able to answer when they leave your hygiene department to know that they have been well educated and understand the value of their hygiene treatment.

Have you ever wondered whether your hygiene department is performing as well as others in a similar situation? To take part in this research, and receive the collated results, click here.

Contact Fiona on (03) 9042 4899 or via info@peakhygieneperformance.com.au to discuss.

By Carl Burroughs, Integrated Dental Marketing

When you really impress a patient you often find out about it as they may have written you a note or sent you some flowers or a bottle of something nice or left you a good feedback. Equally, if someone is really unhappy the chances are you will already be aware of this. But most of your patients are somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, and what this group of people think about the services that you are providing is the true test of how healthy your practice is.

Surveying your patients has always been a great idea, but before digital platforms came along conducting surveys was a cumbersome process. Today however, it is as easy as automating an e-mail to be sent directly to every patient after they have attended an appointment with you.

Creating a patient survey is now easy to organise, but in order for this exercise to give you meaningful data, it needs to be the right survey. I think we have all experienced completing a ‘dumb’ on-line survey where all the questions are weighted to give the answers the company conducting the survey wants to receive. When Bill Gates was busy building Microsoft, he was famous for starting every team meeting by just asking for the bad news and problems, as it was his belief that you only build a world class company by working on the issues and not wallowing in the glory of your successes. Your practice surveys should take from this approach.

Don’t get me wrong, it is fantastic to receive great feedback as it confirms the things you are doing well and allows you to congratulate outstanding staff members. However, it is the negative feedback that you receive which truly allows you to improve the services you provide whilst also enabling you to future proof your businesses.

Gaining meaningful feedback also creates opportunities to expand and adds additional income streams. For example, if 30% of your patients state that they would like weekend appointments, it allows you to expand your hours with the knowledge that there is a demand for these additional hours. A favorable response to a question such as ‘would you like to see us add anti-wrinkle treatments to our suite of services?’, means you can add these services with confidence and they will be successful.

Adding a survey function to your marketing is a simple yet effective way of improving your customer service as the public likes having a way of providing feedback that is easy, discreet and at a time that suits them. Also, no patient will be upset if you ask them for their opinion. They will either delete the e-mail if they don’t have time or don’t want to participate, or will undertake the survey in the same way we all do.

So the key is to have an easy to use platform, which asks meaningful questions, is intuitive and not too long.

The team at IDM have been working with one of the major survey providers to create such a platform. The platform had been developed specifically for the Australian and New Zealand dental sectors with the questions developed by a practice management expert in conjunction with a psychologist. Not only are the core questions developed to give you the information you need, but the platform is intuitive, meaning it will ask the additional questions you might want to know from a particular answer to a question. The IDM survey is also totally customisable allowing you to add specific questions that you want to know the answers to.

The platform allows you to login at will to see the results and the IDM service also comes with the option of having the results analysed by a prominent practice management expert, should you want.

If you would like a free demonstration of the IDM dental survey platform, simply email surveydemo@idm.com.au or call Sonia on 02 9211 1477. You can also visit www.idm.com.au to know more about the services offered by IDM.