Frank Spear: Hi Everyone I’m Frank Spear Gregg Kinzer: And I’m Gregg Kinzer
Frank Spear: And we are here to talk to you about something we are very excited about.
It’s an addition to our online platform.
It’s education, an education product for you to use in your reception room for your
patients.
Adam McWethy: So can you guys start by talking a little bit about kind of what is this product
and where can people find it.
Frank Spear: So for those of you that already have access to Spear Online which would be
our Faculty Club members, Study Club members, online subscribers, if you go to our website
and you go to Patient Education, it is actually listed as a resource.
It says reception or waiting room videos under the Patient Education site.
The product itself is….
you know our purpose really at Spear if you look at why we do what we do here… and a
lot of times people think of us as primarily a clinical educational entity but if you really
look at why we do what we do we really want to help dentists have more fun in dentistry,
be more profitable, have more time off, and then help them grow clinically.
A large component of how we do that is to also help you learn how to communicate with
your patients, how to help your patients become aware of things that they might not have been
aware of, and how to help them become aware of the consequences of not doing dentistry
and so that’s really what the thought process was behind these videos that we’ve created.
Adam McWethy: And so there have been waiting room videos before…
what is different about these?
Or what do you feel are you really proud of that we have done to make this better?
Franks Spear: So Gregg’s going to talk a little bit about sort of how we got the information
to develop these.
I’ll just share with you a bit about what’s different about them.
The classic version of Patient Education from a video perspective was to show patients procedures.
So you could show a patient what an implant is or what a veneer is but the reality is
that tends to not motivate most people to want to do treatment.
So if you really look at what motivates most people to want to do treatment…
why when you present treatment to a patient they actually say yes, most of the time it’s
because the patient doesn’t want the consequences of leaving the problem untreated.
So what we did starting a couple years ago when we were creating our actually Patient
Education videos is we decided that we would have basically two tracks in them.
We would have a very typical series of videos to show a patient what a procedure was like
an implant or a veneer etc. but we would have a track we call conditions and what the conditions
video does is it actually makes the patient aware of what the consequences are of not
treating a tooth.
For example, if your patient had a cracked tooth and you showed them the conditions video
on cracked teeth it makes them aware of the consequences of the crack.
These waiting room videos are wonderful because they’re silent but they really walk the
patient through the entire process.
So it makes the patient aware of what cracks are, what are the things that cause cracks,
what happens if you don’t treat a crack, and I’m using the cracked tooth one as an
example and then it also goes through and so what do you do in terms of treatment.
What are the benefits of treatment?
What kind of things can you do if you do have a cracked tooth?
And so really each of the waiting room videos, reception room videos, are designed to fulfill
both the conditions and the procedures that go along with them in a very non-threatening,
non-sales oriented way.
They’re really trying to educate patients about potential problems that they may have
so that they can then start having a dialogue with you about what you can do about those
things… and we have some very interesting research findings and Gregg I think I’ll
let you report sort of what we’ve found.
Gregg Kinzer: Yeah the key is that what it really does is it gives the patient information
and acts as a dropping off point so they can actually ask questions and very intelligent
questions because they have a background now of this knowledge.
So how did we come up with this?
Well it’s similar to what we do on all of our content is we ask dentists what it is
that they want and then we go and we do some market research.
So we took a example like the cracked tooth and we brought it to 500 people lay people.
Now there were some qualifications for these people.
They had to have been to the dentists in the last 12 months, they were above the age of
25 and they had a medium income that put them all kind of at a similar classification.
And so what they did is they watched the video and then we asked them some series of questions.
What’s interesting is since all of them had previously been to the dentist one of
the questions was if you were presented a treatment plan at your last visit, how many
of those people actually went forward with the treatment plan and interestingly enough
a quarter of them didn’t go forward with treatment and there was no reason why that
was monetarily driven.
There is another reason why they didn’t go through.
Maybe it was a value issue.
Maybe they didn’t see the value in the consequences.
After watching the video 86% of the people that watched the video thought that cracks
were very important, there’s numerous causes, and treating them early can help prevent more
significant treatment that may be needed.
So it’s a really nice way to educate patients.
78% of those patients actually wanted that in their dental office because it provided
such a nice amount of information for them.
Frank Spear: And I think what fits with what Gregg is saying which we learned from our
survey from a couple years ago for the Patient Education videos that we did.
Dentists have it in their head that the reason patients don’t go forward is money and what
we’ve learned in both of these surveys is there’s a group of patients, roughly 25,
30% perhaps where money is the obstacle but for a lot of the other patients that’s not
the obstacle.
There’s something else and I think the real shocking thing for me a couple years ago when
we first did the other survey was to learn that part of why people didn’t go ahead
was they didn’t like how the treatment was presented.
They literally left that office and went to a different office and had the treatment done
somewhere else because they didn’t like how it was presented, but kind of universally
a huge percentage of these patients we’ve surveyed really would love to have a dentist
show them videos like this so they had an understanding of why they needed the treatment.
So it’s been very educational for us to get that feedback in the actual creative process
of these videos to make sure that they serve a need that the patient wants.
The patient doesn’t just feel like somebody’s playing something to try and sell them a bunch
of treatment.
Instead they’re very educational in terms of the nature of the video.
Gregg Kinzer: It essentially gets the patients to want the treatment.
They’re asking you for the treatment if they know they have the issue and they have
a background as to what that means to them they actually desire the treatment because
they don’t want those negative consequences.
Adam McWethy: So how does this fit in with some of the other stuff that we teach here
at Spear and how does this particular tool fit in to say the co-discovery model for instance.
Frank Spear: You know so I just actually walked in from doing a seminar downstairs so we’re
up in our office right now so I literally got here a few minutes before we started this
and I had just walked the audience there through the treatment presentation model that we teach
and really the treatment presentation model we teach is to get patients to ask for a treatment
plan instead of the typical model where the dentist creates the treatment plan and hands
it to somebody especially you can do that with simple cases but in more complex cases
where you start having a lot of problems in a lot of different teeth… our model is a
co-discovery model that was described by Bob Barkely 30 something years ago and the key
is to get the patient aware they have the problem and aware of the consequences of the
problem.
Typically those two things will have a patient ask what they can do about it and really that’s
exactly what these waiting room videos do is they help the patient understand what the
consequences are they’re aware that they might have the problem maybe they have a cracked
tooth maybe they have some of these other issues from other videos but it really it’s
exactly the same model that we try and teach here to our students going through seminars
and workshops but we’re trying to streamline it so we can in fact get the patients asking
you about it instead of you having to bring things up all the time.
Gregg Kinzer: It actually fits in nicely with our overall platform so online we have over
700 courses.
We have courses in there that will help educate your staff, help moderate staff meetings to
be able to educate your team and now we have a big piece for patient education so it’s
kind of the trifecta.
We’re trying to help and impact all of the people that are involved in our dental offices.
Adam McWethy: Great, so now we’ll just take a moment and kind of open it up to the Facebook
audience as a whole so if anyone has any questions that they want to ask Dr. Spear or Dr. Kinzer
they can type those in to the comments now and we’ll answer those for you.
While we’re waiting for those to come in do you want to talk a little bit about where
does this live on the site.
If somebody doesn’t have access to it how can they get it?
Frank Spear: Yes so as I mentioned in terms of actually on our website if you go to our
website and you go to our section on Patient Education there’s a series of the previous
videos we had which are the conditions videos and the procedure videos and then underneath
that is in fact the waiting room or reception room videos.
So very easy to access.
You simply click on that icon and it’s going to give you the menu with the different video
options.
They do have music with them so you have the option of playing it with music.
There’s no narration because what we learned from surveys is most front desk people really
don’t want somebody talking out in the reception room from a TV while they’re trying to interact
with patients.
So they’re designed to be played silently or you can as I said put on the background
music.
We’re going to be doing more and more of them so this is the first group that we’re
releasing right now but I think you’re going to find that it’s a very simple and effective
tool to get patients to start asking you about some of their concerns and problems rather
than you have to try and figure out how do I talk to them and bring up some of these
issues.
Gregg Kinzer: For an example of that there’s a link down at the bottom that you can actually
link on.
It will draw you to the images for the cracked tooth.
It will walk you through it.
If you would like more information and want to see some of the other videos then you’ll
have another link that will draw them in so you can actually see with an advisor some
of the other videos that we have as well just so you can get a better idea of what this
platform looks like.
Adam McWethy: So we do have a question now.
So one of our Facebook followers is asking “Besides competence, what would be the other
aspects of the case presentation that would inspire that trust between you and the patient?”
Frank Spear: You know trust is one of those interesting things in that dentists often
think that the way we establish trust with patients is over time by how many times we’ve
seen them over a period of a year or two or three.
And I’m going to suggest to you that trust is an interesting thing and I always…when
dentists talk to me about this I always tell a quick story.
When I used to live in Seattle about seven minutes from the office there was a Starbucks
right by where I lived.
Every morning I would go into that Starbucks to get my latte before driving to work.
Every morning there was a woman named Linda behind the counter.
Big smile, “How are you Dr. Spear?
You want your normal today?
da da da” It just you know… every day I looked forward to seeing her.
Right down the street, a block down the street was the drycleaners I went to every week to
take my cleaning and I went there for 20 years.
I never knew the woman’s name that was behind the desk.
Never.
Never got to know her name.
Why?
She never put in effort into ever having any kind of relationship with me.
So I’m going to suggest that it’s not just competence, it’s the experience we
create for our patients that has a huge impact.
We have the ability to influence them emotionally so that they connect with us the way I connected
with Linda.
I didn’t reach out to Linda the barista she reached out to me and did that.
And so there’s the competence factor but there’s the whole experience of your office.
There’s the experience of what it looks like, what it smells like, are people fighting?
All of those things go into what the patient experience is and whether they feel like you’re
the right office for them or you’re not the right office for them.
So to me it’s a lot more than just how many times you’ve seen them or not seen them.
Adam McWethy: Great.
So it looks like that… we’ve got about one or two more minutes.
Is there anything else you kind of want to leave the audience with before we sign off?
Gregg Kinzer: I would say that the big benefit of this is we know… I’m in practice every
day when I’m not down here and I know that I’m busy.
I’m torn in a bunch of different directions and what this piece does for my patients is
it gives them something that none of my staff has to address of the bat.
I don’t have to address it so it does make my day easier when patients can see things
like this.
So the only other thing I’ll leave you with is up on the upper right corner there is a
button that you can click that will subscribe you to future live Spear broadcasts so it
will just give you an alert that they’re coming up.
So you wouldn’t miss it if you wanted to see another live broadcast from us again.
Frank Spear: The only thing I would add is you know as I said we’re going to be adding
to this library and so we’re going to be adding in the future things like wear, and
tooth wear, and consequences of not treating tooth wear.
We’re going to be doing just like everything we do we survey our students, our dentists,
to learn what the content is they want but I think this library is going to become very
robust and as Gregg said the nice part of it is you don’t have to do anything.
It’s just playing quietly in the reception room so the patients can observe it, watch
it and if there’s things that they see that they think might relate to them they can in
fact bring it up to you.
Gregg Kinzer: So as we mentioned earlier, there’s a link at the bottom that you can
click to see the video on cracked teeth.
For more information you can follow a subsequent link that will draw you to the other ones
that we have available to you at this point to be able to get you more knowledge to get
you involved with this.
So thank you for your time.
Frank Spear: Thanks for attending everybody.