"Your Practice's Most Important Asset" - How to Leverage Patient Databases (feat. Samad Syed)

In this episode of "The Dental Domination Podcast," Dan Brian of DentalScapes interviews Samad Syed, founder and CEO of mConsent, a patient engagement company. They discuss the importance of patient databases for dental practices and how leveraging these databases can lead to growth and profitability. Samad emphasizes that the patient database is the most important asset for a dental practice and shares strategies for reactivating and engaging with patients. He also discusses the role of social media and AI in patient engagement. Check out the show notes for more details.

Transcript

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All right, welcome back to the Dental Domination podcast. I'm so excited to be here after a few weeks off. My name is Dan Brian, I'm the co -founder and VP of marketing over at DentalScapes. We're a full service online marketing firm for dental practices specifically. So we work primarily with general dentists, pediatric dentists, as well as orthodontists. And I am not here to sell or talk about our company today. I actually want to learn a little bit more about another cool company. that's doing great things in the space. And in particular, we're going to dive into patient engagement today and also the importance and power of patient databases for dental practices. So I'm really excited to have a special guest here today, Samad Syed. Samad is the founder and CEO of Consent. And the company is based in the Twin Cities where I actually was born. So it's got a special place in my heart there. But Samad, you're actually living in Dallas now. avoiding the winter, which I can't blame you for. So if you don't mind, could you just take a few minutes here up front and tell us a little bit more about who you are and what your background is? And in particular, how did you get involved in the healthcare space and in particular, patient engagement? Love to hear it. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Dan. Thank you for having me on your podcast. Heard a lot of good things about your podcast and, you know, can't wait to share the experiences here. So, yeah, my name is Samad Sayed. I did live in Minneapolis for 14, 15 years and, yeah, I was, let's say I was there, but... I didn't knew the outside world and it was so good. So it was good. I mean, Minneapolis is a beautiful city. I miss the summers there. It's beautiful lakes out there. And it's amazing people there. I'll tell you one of the best drivers I found is in Minneapolis. That's what they say is they got very good drivers. So yeah, my background is that I got involved in dentistry in a, there's an interesting story. My brother -in -law is a dentist and He invited me to his practice a few years ago. This is early 2013 -14 and my background has been always I worked in the corporate world to look at the processes and improve the processes and find out where we can save some money and improve the bottom lines. So that's what I used to do as a Six Sigma master black belt, you know, I have an engineer engineering background and so belt here. can think of that as a martial arts, but I have nothing to do with martial arts. It's a product improvement tool and that's what productivity and improving the bottom lines, that's what I did. So I trained about. I'm familiar with it. That's really cool. Yeah, so that is something what I did. And when I visited my brother -in -law and he was like, hey, I'm struggling with this paperwork, man. I need help here. And he showed me, he took me through the wall and he showed me his wall of all the paperwork that is there. It's like, it's not wall of fame, it's wall of shame for me because it takes so much time for us to... Yeah, it takes so much time for them to just check in the patient is like, fill this out, fill that out, consent forms. And it's not a very good start to a relationship when you have a new patient. from the patient's end either. Yeah, I was going to say. Yeah, and patients is like, dude, I got to do all this work just to see the doctor first. It's like, yeah, you're in pain, but just fill this out, you know? So that could be the possibility. So that's where we started. And I said that, you know, I took that as a project and we built that. We started with taking an iPad and converting that into a tablet, to a clipboard, basically, where they can fill it out and submit it and everything goes in. It took us a couple of years just to build that product. and then got integrated with the big names out there, Patterson, Andreshine, Open Dental, and since then we serve about 2,500 plus offices now, and it's just been great. So five, six years, and we're known to have best intake processes in the market right now. Proud of that. such, there's such a need out there. Yeah. You know, one of the things that you really stand behind and your company stands behind that I think is so spot on is the importance of the patient database. And you actually say that the patient database is the most important asset for a dental practice. So I'd love to get your take on that. Why do you say that? I think I know where you're going with this, but I'd love to hear it. And how are you actually leveraging? or helping dental practices leverage their databases for growth and profitability. Great question. You know, we did a survey a few months ago and we asked in the survey with the dental practices that we have in our database is that, hey, tell us what is the most important asset that you have in your practice? What is the most important asset that your practice owns, right? So we got answers like my location, my... you know, my equipment, my staff, all those good things. But I'll tell you that Google reviews and all that stuff, reputation, I get it. But I'll tell you that the number one asset that you have in your practice is your patient database, and I'll tell you why. What is the difference between having a patient database of 500 patients versus 5,000 patients? It's huge. Yeah. that you do have a database that whenever you want, you can reactivate them by connecting with them in a good ways and bring those patients back into your practice. So I'll give you an example of a dental office that we work with in Chicago area. And, you know, as usual, hey, Samad, good friend of mine, dentist, I need help. I need to get lot more new patients into my practice, I'm struggling, what can I do, how much do I need to spend, help me out here. So I ask him one question, is like, how many patients do you have in the database? It's like, what do you mean? Like, okay, let me take a look at it. And we connected with this, what database, right? So we connected with this EMR system, to see how many patients he have. in his database and we found out he has about 2800 patients that and ask him like, okay, how do you keep them connected with you? How do you keep them activated? How do you keep them interested in what you're doing? He's like, all right, there's no answer there, right? So I get it. So we started a campaign and we designed this campaign for this practice. And we said that, okay, we need to reconnect. And a simple message and a simple message like, Hey, Dr. Khan is looking to see is everything okay? He hasn't seen you back for past 12 months or so. It's been a year we haven't seen you back. And that one single email to his database got them 40 appointments. 40 appointments, he didn't realize that. And then we designed a six month strategy and he would get 40 to 60 patients every month just. going back and connecting with them, telling them their stories, having a newsletter in place. This is all important stuff. And just, right, and you're in the marketing, you know what is the cost of patient acquisition. One new patient acquisition, trying to get in, how much does it cost?$400, $600, but this is something that's sitting in your database. And all you need to do is just reactivate that. So that's what I say, people make a huge mistake. of ignoring their patient database. They need to find tools, they need to connect with their patients in what are ways. And for that, I wrote a book and I'm gonna shamelessly advertise here. It's called the Art of Patient Re-engagement. And so I wrote a book on that. link to that book in the show notes as well. Yeah, so it basically tells dental practice owners, dental managers is that do not, do not, do not ignore. That's a sin if you ignore your patient database because you're leaving money on the table. I mean, obviously it's a mistake number one, as you said, to ignore the database and do nothing with it. But what are some, let's say you talk with a practice and they're engaging with you early on and they are leveraging their database to a certain extent. What are some of the common mistakes that you see practices making when they're using their database, even to a limited extent? love that question because you'll hear this answer. I do recalls, right? I do recalls. And I'll ask you that what is the open rate on those recalls usually. It's like you got general messaging and people respond, people don't respond. It's pretty low. I'm telling you based on the survey that we did, it's pretty low. So what has happened is that people's attention span has decreased over the period of time. What's working right now is that you got to use multiple channels now to remind patients about your practice, right? In different ways, in a smart ways. So you use email, yes, you got to use email. You got to use text messaging. You got to use the social media platforms out there. And you have to, people don't talk about direct mailing, but direct mailing still does work. But you have to mix it with like three, four different channels together. So. and you can mix in the occasional outbound phone calls as well, phone calls and voicemail. absolutely. And good phone calls. And after doing all that stuff, and you'll love this, what I'm going to say, is that they have to make sure that there's somebody who's answering those phone calls to book the appointments. Yeah. And you also have to have a process in place in case that phone call is missed because some, sometimes that does happen. You have to have, you know, maybe a missed call text, an automated text message or, or whatever it might be. Yeah, and one policy, one thing that I've seen that works is that if you make a policy within your practice that we are going to call back our patients within seven minutes of they calling us, within seven minutes if you miss it. And if you don't have that capacity, outsource it, find somebody who can do it. And that's the way that you're going to make sure that you don't have a leaking bucket there that's leaking all the work that you're doing. So I'll... put a little bit more emphasis on patient database. The patients that you have in your database, there are other dentistry in your neighborhood that are willing to pay four to $500 to get them in their database if you're not reactivating them or if you're not connecting with them on regular basis. So, that's an important message that I want to take home. If nothing out of this podcast, I'm running this as a campaign to tell all the dentists, dental managers, dentists out there that do not ignore your patient database. That's the number one asset that you have in your practice. And from this podcast, if they take this one message home, I think it's a success for me personally. Absolutely. You know, and so you mentioned 40 new appointments from that one campaign and you obviously implemented some kind of ongoing, maybe automated or even kind of a drip campaign that way as well. And there was, you know, untold new appointments associated with that, I'm sure. But what are we talking about when we think about the cost associated with better leveraging your database? And what sort of ROI are we talking about for your average, you know, maybe solo practice or small dental practice? Because I think let's get down to nuts and bolts here. What are the numbers we're dealing with here? Yeah, so what we did is that we saw this as a challenge that most of the dental practices don't have as a tool in place. How do we reactivate them? What do we do to make sure that we are able to do what's being said here? So we have a tool within -Consent that we have built in, which can, where the practice can pull their patients. and we can automatically schedule their text messaging, emails, and we can help them with messaging and all that stuff. We do help them with setup, right? So that's included in their monthly subscription. And then what we help them with is that building this social media campaigns on what that can be put out there. So an average practice, a small practice, single owner, one single owner practice can... if they spend $500 a month on reactivating their database as a subscription fee, and I would say another $500 they have to put in social media campaigns and paying for the ads, remarketing and all that stuff. So those are the, you know, that's what I would say would be an average cost for a practice. Yeah, absolutely. And so what are we talking about when you work with your typical practice, say solo practitioner, when you're talking about working with a new practice and you start leveraging their database, let's say they have like in your example, 2 ,500, 3 ,000 contacts in that database. What kind of return on that investment do you typically see within say the first year of running these campaigns, provided they're following your blueprint and they're using the templates and they're checking all the boxes, so to speak. What do you see with that? Sure, so what we see is that between three to 5%, depending on what kind of quality of database you have, meaning that are you collecting emails, are you collecting cell phone numbers, do you have addresses on file? When you have all those things in place, you can say that if I start a campaign, in six months you're going to see at least 90 to 120 patients coming back. assuming you have 3 ,000 patients in your database, right? So you're going to see between 90 to 120 patients start to come back within that six months of campaign. So at least 20, 30 patients starting to roll in every month. Depending on, as I said, how good is your database? Do you have good email addresses? Do you have phone numbers, correct names, addresses, all that stuff? And when you run that, now, ROI, you probably would be What is the cost of, what is the revenue from 90 patients you're gonna get in six months? If your average production is $600 to$1000, you know, between $70 to $90 ,000 in six months. That's what you would say. Mm -hmm, yeah. You know, you've talked about text messaging, obviously super important. It's got a huge open rate or read rate relative to email, but email, as you said, still effective, very viable channel for dental practices. We've talked about outbound calling, voicemails, and even direct mail, like you said, can still be effective if done the right way. But I want to talk about social media really quickly because that is something that I think a lot of practices are also overlooking or maybe they post once or twice a month and call it good there. What is the opportunity in social media for practices that you see from a patient engagement and in fact, re -engagement, reactivation standpoint? I'd love to get your thoughts on that. if it's done right, it's a very good strategy. What I mean by that is that if you take, let me get into nitty gritty of that, right, so on what we've seen. If you take like a general picture from some, buy a picture from somewhere from the market and put it on social media and put your logo on it and say, I have this coupon and then advertise. Attention is the number one thing on social media that you have to grab. And I'll tell you, people want to see who are the actual folks that they're gonna work with. Right? They have to see the doctor, they have to see the staff, they have to see who they're gonna work with. And the moment you start... know whose hands are going to be in their mouths. Absolutely, absolutely. And when they start, when they see this personalized information and when they see who they're going to work with, that connects, man. I'll tell you that 100 % connects. And same thing for me. If I see somebody who that, that's a doctor. Okay. Looks like he's a decent guy. I got to go see him. Right. And when you celebrate your birthdays, don't be shy about that. Put that on social media. Yeah. celebrate your staff, baby showers, share with everyone. And those are small steps, but that have a big impact. And you don't have to spend a lot of ad money on that if you just start doing that stuff. You gotta build your community out there. Yeah, absolutely. I want to, you know, backtrack a little bit at the outset of this conversation. You were talking about, you know, how this all started, how this journey started, you and your brother, brother -in -law, I forget, but the consent forms. What is that process? You mentioned you developed the iPad app and that experience. What does that process look like now through Consent and how has that progressed and what do you recommend that practices put in place? to manage that a little bit better and make the patient experience better as we were talking. Absolutely, so right now, consent have grown just from being a patient intake, streamlining patient intake to complete patient engagement software, right? So what does that mean? We help people in three different segments. The number one, we help with patient intake, streamlining their patient intake process so that... patients have great experience and also your staff is not spending hours just entering the information into their practice management system. Number two, we help them with patient communication. So if you want to send a text message to a patient, you don't have a text message in the system but still using your personal phones, that's not a good, that's not HIPAA compliant, right? So you need a patient communication system. And the third thing is that we help with patient growth. Patient growth is like we have, we help with Treatment plan reminder, it's so important. If your treatment plan acceptance rate is less than 35, 40%, then you got to see what are you missing. And number one thing that you can implement immediately is that you remind your patients, just reminding them that, hey, we talked about this treatment plan. I know that you're working on your deciding on getting your root canal, but just so you know, procrastination is not going to improve your root canal. automatically. Having smart messaging like that within your treatment plan reminders is going to help your treatment plan acceptance rates go up. And that's what we're talking about is like we help in being productive, we help with patient communication and we help with patient growth. And also we have like terminals, text to pay, improving collections, improving cash flow for the practice. So these are, you know, three different areas and we got a lot of tools to help with that insurance verification, online scheduling, and there's a bunch of tools, but it's not like everything is gonna work for everybody. We just want you to come and see what works for your practice. Where are you struggling? Let's understand that first before we tell, hey, this is what I have for you. No, I don't have anything for you unless you tell me that this is where you're struggling. Yeah, absolutely. Well, y 'all have a lot going on and have developed a lot of cool products. But going forward, looking to the future, what sort of trends and innovations in patient engagement do you see on the horizon? Are you experimenting with and what should dental practices be aware of as we enter the wild wild west here with AI and all sorts of things? AI is coming and I'll tell you that the one thing that I have seen that is and we are actually playing with it right now is the patient notes. So notes taking and ambient. So the doctors that spend time in taking notes with patients hours and hours just sitting down to what did they talk to the patient? The help is coming. It's coming. And the AI is going to help them with voice notes and dictation and I tell you that. And that's what's coming. And I do see a positive impact of AI coming into dentistry in those couple of places for sure. It's patient notes taking and patient charting. Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, this is all amazing. Samad, I want to thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your insight. Now, -Consent, obviously, like you mentioned, this is a full suite of services for patient engagement. And, you know, if folks listening to this podcast are interested in learning more, connecting with you, where can they go? What's the best place to connect with you at? Number one is mconsent .net. So if you go to mconsent .net, just connect with us. You can connect with us on the phone, email, there are forms on the website. We have somebody on staff that's gonna get back to you. very fast. And if you want to connect with me, I'm on LinkedIn. I'll give you my LinkedIn link. You can post it and people can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Try to answer any questions people may have and faster than usually I do it on other platforms. Sounds good. Well, we've covered a lot of ground here today. What is the one thing, and I think I can guess this based on your intro, but what is the one thing you want to leave dentists with or practice managers and administrators with today going forward? What is the one thing that you think can change their practice if they put into place? I'll tell you practice owners, administrators, if you're listening to this, the number one asset in your practice is your patient database. Do not ignore that. And I'll tell you that people like Dan can easily help you out because marketing companies can easily help you out. You just have to ask them. And we do partner with a lot of people who use our tools to help you guys out. So there's definitely a... that there is definitely a need for everyone to look into their databases. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, Samad, thank you so much. mconsent .net will definitely include that in the show notes. If folks listening are interested, check that out. Check out your book. I'm going to put that in the show notes as well, as well as your LinkedIn profile so folks can connect with you on there. Anyhow, I can't thank you enough. I really appreciate you dropping by today. And let's stay in touch. If I have my way about it, I would love to drag you back on the podcast here. Gently, I might add, but I'd love to drag you back on. So thanks so much, Samad. If you are listening to this podcast and you enjoyed the show today, please take a moment and leave us a five star review on Apple podcasts or Google podcasts or Spotify, wherever you get your shows. We would really appreciate it. Your review is the best way for us to reach other dental practices and we would love to help them as well. So thank you so much for listening. We are back at it. We should be back at it with another show here next week. And in any case, thank you all so much for listening and thank you Samad as well. I really appreciate you dropping by. Yeah, take care.