Ep 127: Better Scheduling & Reactivation with Cory Pinegar

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John Meis (00:03.061)
Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Double Your Production Podcast. I'm Dr. John Meis here with my partner, Wendy Briggs. Wendy, how you doing?

Wendy Briggs (00:11.589)
Great, Dr. John, good to see you today.

John Meis (00:13.529)
Great to see you too. We are so excited to have our guest today. Our guest is Cory Pineger, and his company has a solution for one of the biggest challenges that dental practices has. So Cory, do you want to introduce yourself and what you do?

Cory Pinegar (00:29.598)
Yeah, I'm Cory Pinegar. I am our founder and CEO at Reach and we are a dental specific or dental focused patient service company. So there's, you know, immense cracks or immense challenges within human capital for all businesses or staffing for all businesses in the United States today. And so not all phone calls are answered for dental practices, not all overdue patients are called, not all insurance verifications are done and really what that affects, number one, is patient care. Patients in need always don't get the services that they need to live healthy lives. And number two, it causes a lag or a dip in revenue and profit for practices because they're not operating at the true capacity or potential that we have. So instead of being a software company, we focus on being the well-trained humans behind the phones and behind the services to help practices operate well with more peace of mind.

John Meis (01:28.521)
Awesome.

Yeah, we love that, Cory. You're a repeat guest. We've had you before. And so we're so excited and appreciative that you were willing to come back on the podcast with us again. It's been a while. And we just finished up an amazing quarterly practice growth retreat in San Antonio, Texas. And you were there with us. And one of the key topics of this retreat was team engagement. And just about every single practice that was there wrote down on a piece of paper, their top challenge.

And we spent the entire weekend working through some of these top challenges. And one of the biggest challenges that we're hearing still today is the lack of ability to find good team members to hire, right? And so we have these practices that are running lean on team members. And so vital tasks get dropped, things like insurance verification. I can also tell you that we're fairly into the new year. And what that means is a whole host of new headaches because patients come through the door. They have a new insurance plan. We've got to call and verify those benefits. And, sometimes that can take a long time to get through those calls. So there's a variety of reasons we wanted you back on. And I think primarily it's because Reach and the company that you've built solves so many of these common challenges that we heard at the retreat and that we continue to hear even now. So thank you for being here. And I know you've got some great insights to share.

Yeah, no, it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

John Meis (02:53.645)
So Cory, we share a friend in common, Amol Nirgudkar at Patient Prism. And one of the things that Amol has been a guest on our podcast many times as well. And one of the things that he shared with us is how poorly offices, even when they're fully staffed, how poorly they do in answering the phone and converting calls to appointments. And not only are they not very good at it, but they don't have very much self-awareness. So they think they're performing at a high level, but they're actually performing far less than they actually are. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah, and Amol's company, Patient Prism, does a very good job at spotlighting issues or areas for improvement regarding in the phone call. Data that we see or we have greater access to is how many phone calls are rolling into a practice and how many of them are going unanswered. And even in times of good staffing, or I would say easier hiring in the United States, the average number of missed calls is still very high.

And so we've done this for eight years now. Last year, the total number of missed calls for dental practices during open hours was 32%. The lowest we've seen it in our eight years was 28%. And so what we find so interesting is often, and I don't know how you two feel, but sometimes I feel the agenda that's pushed in dentistry is oh, you have a problem, new patients, new patients, new patients, which is good. But I look at it as a funnel within your business. And if you've got a bunch of drill holes in the side of your funnel and you go pour new patients in, and let's just take 30% to make it around even number water is just gushing out the side even before you talk to someone. And let's just be honest, we live in the day and age today where if you have a toothache or you want to get your teeth whitened and you call the practice and you've got great Google reviews, but if you don't pick up the phone, people call the next Google listing. It's we live in this incredibly impatient society. And so you have to be ready to capture those opportunities.

And the second thing that I want to note here, and I wish I could draw it on the screen, but if you look in the ebbs and flows of calls to dental practices, it's not stagnant. It is not you're getting 16 or 24 phone calls per hour or whatever that number may be. There are hot pockets or peaks during the day that isolate around the early morning hours, around lunch hours and around the part of the day when people are wrapping up.

And so from even a perfect staffing perspective, you would be overstaffed the vast majority of the time to truly handle those peaks. And so the reason having a partner on the backend is important is it allows you to be efficient or to be able to handle that volume with a need it with also not having five people at the front desk where for 70% of the day, that volume is a needed. And as we're all aware, staff is more expensive in the United States than ever. And so it's a mix of outsourcing and having great team members within, where I think practices find that happy medium of profit and revenue with a priority on patient care.

John Meis (06:28.889)
Sure.

Yeah, I love that, Cory. And you know, it's interesting because we hear from so many practices that, you know, maybe they've used a call center before or they're worried about a couple of things. The things that I hear most commonly is they're going to mess with the schedule and not schedule people properly, number one. Number two, our patients are going to know that they don't work for our team. And I do see, you know, Dr. John and I could, Dr. John could probably back this up, but a lot of the larger organizations we work with have a call center, they have a support center because they understand that there's holes in the bucket, the funnel of patients is leaking patients out and they're missing these opportunities. So could you share with our listeners today, maybe some of the differences in your approach at Reach, because one thing that I've always been impressed with is how well you understand that you are a reflection of the practices that you serve, right? So can you speak to that, to those two common fears, the fact that, you're going to mess with the schedule and not schedule them appropriately, number one. And number two, that patients are going to feel like they're being served less than or by someone who's not really a core part of the team.

Yep. So there is an aspect that we're never going to replace the front desk. We don't even want our service ever to replace the front desk. We're there to help in the times where staff is beyond the capacity that they can handle. So we don't position our service as the front line. We really position our service as an extension. Number two, and to kind of go to a broader scope, we have all called Wells Fargo or MasterCard or Visa.

And the person that you've chatted with on the phone is just extremely helpless and not helpful. And so what we spend a lot of time doing is understanding the dynamics of the practice understanding how to schedule, but then also making sure that the service we're delivering at the end of the day, we're not the in person practice and we don't get we don't mask ourselves to be but if we can schedule people in smooth experiences, answer their questions in a timely manner and treat them with empathy. It's a much different experience than when you call and you get sorry, I can take a message and pass it along to someone and they'll call you back like, so what we don't want to do is pretend that we're not someone else. But at the same time, we want to intimately know the dental practice. And all we do is dental practice scheduling, we are not picking up for a dermatologist, we're not picking up for a chiropractor, the knowledge around dental scheduling takes years to perfect, not three or six months. And so the investment in having long-term team members who know what they're talking about and simplified systems on our backend to make the scheduling process specific to the practice, but simple to deliver, is what we've spent eight years crafting and we're continually working on making it better so that we can deliver that at scale, being helpful to the patients.

John Meis (09:42.009)
So, Cory, your service, certainly from what I'm understanding now, is that it has a rollover feature. So, if it rings in the office, nobody picks it up, then it rings to you and you guys answer it. And then, does it have after hours answering as well?

Yes.

Yeah, we're open seven days a week.

John Meis (10:03.934)
Okay, very good.

The other thing that I love about what you guys do is we often hear from practices, you know, we're so full, we're so busy that we don't have time to do other vital services. Dr. John and I talk a lot about patient retention and how critical that is to practice growth. And you know, we've seen the data, right? We know that retaining patients is in our eyes, probably even a little bit more important than the new patients. We have other little experts that might want to fight us on that.

I 100% believe that.

But we believe patient retention is really critical to long-term success and growth. And it's stunning to me how often we hear from practices, nobody has time to follow up on recall, make those recall phone calls, work on reactivation, some of those things. So my understanding is that is a service that you guys also provide.

That's actually where we got our start as a business. The business was originally named Recall Solutions and a part or like a sister company to Weave. And the interesting thing is when we've looked at mass practice data, 56% of all patients are overdue. And going back to what John and I spoke about early on, it's the funnel. And so yes, there's 30% of missed phone calls.

But then if you're treating the patient, having them coming in, and then they're not becoming a lifetime or consistent patient, it's another large gap where you're again, having just to pour so much more water in to get the exact same results. So it's having, it's life cycle marketing in a way where you're reaching out. The interesting thing about this as well is patients who are reoccurring or revisiting patients have higher production per visit.

When you initially go into the dentist, everyone or a doctor, everyone is weary. Are they gonna do a good job? Do I trust them? Am I going to have a good relationship? But when you've been your second and third and fourth time, you're adding on whitening. You're getting that root canal that you know you should have taken care of. You're eventually looking at other higher forms of treatment and coming back and getting that unscheduled treatment done. And so it's just such a core part of the practice. And having the hygiene column full, as we're all aware here is the lifeblood two to three weeks down the line of increased production.

John Meis (12:25.281)
Yeah, I love that Cory. Dentists don't, for the most part, understand that 70% of the treatment done in the doctor's chair is coming out of recall hygiene, recall hygiene. And so it's twice as important as new patients. And it's so much easier because the patient already knows you, they already like you, they already trust you. So cases acceptance is higher. So retention really is the key. I love that philosophy.

There's another interesting thing to note, and I think sometimes people look at reactivation when we get calls from practices a little different than we do. The goal of reactivation for us is not filling out the schedule six to 12 weeks out. Re-care patients, you really, from what we see, you don't wanna schedule them beyond three weeks. The show rate of the patients falls off a chart.

John Meis (13:18.434)
Yep.

where it's best. And everyone, we talk to so many practices all the time and they say, oh, my hygiene schedule is full. But if you looked at tomorrow, there's always cracks in the schedule that form 48 to 72 hours out, it's normal. So when we're calling and when practices are calling, it's about filling the gap at 10 a.m. tomorrow or the gap at 4 p.m. or the gap at Friday that just opened up because the re-care patients have higher production per visit because they're usually the most overdue. But at the same time, they have a lower show rate if you schedule them too far in advance. So how you find that perfect toggle is working them almost in an ASAP list form, and then you're actually operating your hygiene at capacity and not just checking the box of, okay, we're full six weeks out when there's two or three openings per day for the next couple of days.

John Meis (14:12.373)
Yeah, love that. We've had the same philosophy for years. We don't care about three weeks from now. We care about today and tomorrow. You know, today and tomorrow full, we're feeling pretty good. We don't look out that far. Because as you said, the farther out you schedule people, the more cancels and fails that you have. So your schedule looks full, but it's not full. And the systems that we teach to deal with that are a little more challenging to put in place than to just make sure that we're really focusing on today.

Wendy said something I think it was you or John said something interesting as we dove into the subject to of most staff members when they do have a second to breathe. No one's eager beaver to go print the hygiene re care list and go place calls like to look into the data behind it for a practice takes them 21.4 calls to actually schedule a patient because a lot of people don't pick up during the day. That's tough.

John Meis (15:00.289)
Yes.

That's like cold call sales. It's not picking up the phone for a new patient where they've got a question they want to engage with you. So it's just a task as much as people say, Oh, we just don't have time to get to it. Emotionally, we want to put it on the back burner, because it's a very heavy lift. And a lot of no's for infrequent results.

John Meis (15:38.337)
Yeah, about the only job in front office people don't want to do more than that is call people who owe you money, right? Those are the kind of at the bottom of the list. About the same results, one in 24 too, by the way.

Yeah.

Yes! That will be the next service for three of us we'll open.

Yeah, and I can also tell you as well, you know, I think there's a lot of well-intentioned, well-meaning people at the front desk, but like you said, this is not something high on their priority list. They don't really like to do it. And so we often see that it's put off and it's rarely ever completed, right? Especially for a practice that is full, because I've heard from team members that say, we don't even make the phone calls because where are we going to put people? But then they're also the ones, like you mentioned before, that the schedule efficiency is poor. We call that schedule efficiency when the day before or a few days before it falls out. So we have openings in the schedule, even though the schedule was full a few days before. So we have well-intentioned, well-meaning people that get to it when they can, but even when they get to it, they don't necessarily have a super strong skillset here. So when we look at the data, as you mentioned, it takes them a lot more calls than I'm assuming your team. So you talked about the average for the dental team, 21.4 calls before they actually get somebody scheduled.

My guess is your team that really focuses on these skills, my guess is your conversion rates are higher, right? And we need to focus on not just how many calls are we handling, but are we converting these calls into an actual appointment because that's where the magic happens. So can you talk to me a little bit about that, like data that you have on, you know, how many calls you guys field and your conversion rate compared to the average practice? I'm putting you on the spot. You may not know some of those off the top of your head, but I know you probably have an idea of what's happening.

Yeah, there's two things and our my goal of being here today is we're a pretty open book. There's nothing you know, there's no Chick-fil-A sauce to what we do. It's a lot of manual work and then looking at data and making that process better. There's two things that allow us to book more patients that practices can also do. It's calling at the right time when our patients going to be able to pick up the phone. So the vast majority of our calls head out in the early to late afternoon and early evening hours when you're on your drive home from work and you can actually someone were to call my phone right now it's on do not disturb i'm not even going to pick up but if someone calls me at 5:45 there is that opportunity so that's number one number two it's just being really trained around the empathy and scripting I don't like the word scripting but walking a patient through why this appointment is important

And two things that have really made a difference is when we reach out, Hey, this is Cory from, you know, Dr. Smith's office. The doctor asked me to reach out today because he or she noticed that you're overdue. There's a level of care driven there where it's just not, Hey, we want you back in, or we just have a gap open tomorrow, But the doctor noticed and he or she asked me to reach out.

Number two is it's not, Hey, Wendy, do you want to schedule? It's, Hey, Wendy,I have availability tomorrow at 10am. And then I also have an opening Friday at 4pm, When works best for you. Why that last sentence is so important is I'm not saying is a yes or no, it's a yes or a yes scenario, which drives the mind to say, Oh, those two don't work. But I could actually do Monday of next week. But humans naturally feel it is okay to say no when that option is presented. And we're presenting an option of we care and it's so important to us and you from a clinical and health Standpoint that we want to present you with a yes or yes. We're not selling a used car, but we're trying to drive them down the street to help them get better health care in the long term

So when we speak to a patient, we're able to convert about 35 to 40% of them. And then practices during the day get about 11-- and post-COVID's a little different, to be honest. Answer rates are slightly higher, more people work at home, but we're able to get about a 19% answer rate after hours, which used to be about twice as high, now it's about 50% as high, because more people do pick up during the day.

John Meis (19:34.561)
Yeah.

But again, going back to those two factors, calling it the right time, and then using the right training and vocabulary drive not only people to schedule, but people to understand the importance around going to the appointment. Because it's great to say put names on the schedule, but going back to that scheduling efficiency, did the butt show up and get better healthcare? That's what matters.

John Meis (20:26.381)
Far worse to have a name on the schedule and no butt in the chair than no name on the schedule, right? Because if you have no name on the schedule, at least you know you can take action to fill it. But if you have a name there, but there it's an appointment in your book, but not in theirs, that's a problem. So, do you have some super success stories? You know, kind of the impact that this can make if we're losing, so let's say a practice. Well, I'll let you tell a success story and I'll do the math while you're telling us.

Um, I actually was looking at one, I couldn't sleep last night. So I was looking through old documents. So I'm actually just going to open. I was so eager.

John Meis (21:06.561)
You were so excited to be on the Double Your Production Podcast you couldn't sleep. That's what all our guests have said.

(Laughs) Uh-huh. I was going to tell you that, but you're taking the words out of my mouth. One of the... So, we've done this for eight years now, and I was feeling nostalgic going to bed last night. So, I was looking through some of the original documents that we built, and I found the original case study that we did with a practice out of Indiana. And I'm actually just going to pull it up here. Where is it?

John Meis (21:47.949)
So while you're finding that, what we mostly find is that in calls coming into an office, roughly about one in 10 is a new patient. So if we're missing 30 to 40 percent of the calls coming into our office and we make a 10 percent improvement, you can imagine what that's going to do to new patient flow.

John Meis (22:15.601)
So if we're getting 100 calls, we're answering 60, we go from 60, even with the help going to 70 or 80, you know, now we're talking about two additional new patients per day. And in many practices around the United States, the value of that new patient, somewhere between $1,600 and $2,000. And so we're talking two times two, $4,000 a day, times 200 days. Okay, well now we're talking about bigger than an entire practice. That's the size of impact that this can make.

Yeah, it is really stunning when we look at the data. And that's another thing I love about Cory's company is they handle so many calls. They've just got really, really great data as you've heard him spouting out. So what do you think Cory, did you find the data you're looking for on that case study?

Yep. So there was one of the original practices that we worked with out of Merrillville, Indiana, over a 60 day period. And early when we get started, there is a higher rate of returns because there's more people who are open to scheduling. We were able to reactivate 132 patients. And when you compared the spend of the patients that we scheduled versus our spend, there was an 8.6x level return. So when you actually looked at the real revenue that was brought in, so we go into the ledger in the practice management software and are saying, here's the treatments, here's how much the practice collected and comparing it not to just an average ADA value. But what's so interesting about that is it's not the value of the hygiene appointment, as John noted, it's driving that doctor's chair production down the line, tens of thousands of dollars of additional treatment per month, but not adding staff members, not adding significant more spend because we charge per appointment that we book.

Yeah. That's another thing that I love about what you bring, Cory, is I think a lot of people are assuming when they hear you talk about the services you provide that it's going to be expensive. And I love your pricing model because you don't have like a subscription. They don't pay a set amount per month. They actually pay you for the work that you do. Can you tell them a little bit more about that?

I'm a big believer that if we're good at something, we should be able to put our necks on the line for it. And our area of niching is scheduling dental appointments. And so we should get paid for delivering results there. And we operate on month-to-month agreements, where if we're not producing a good ROI or filling the schedule in a quality and helpful way, we should have right to lose our job. Why I think that's important, not because it's fun, but then it allows us to look in the mirror and say, how do we deliver value better? For the front desk team members to alleviate pressure on them and drive better results for patients and practices. And so ultimately the sign of us delivering value is practices continually sticking around. And if we're not, they should have the right to walk away because it allows us to improve and own where we're at.

John Meis (25:26.453)
Yep, I love that. And by far, that greatest value goes to our patients, right? Because now they're able to be in, they're able to improve their dental health. And if they're not coming in, then their dental health will continually slide. So the biggest winner in all this, obviously, is our patients. And this is just such a great tool to help us, help our patients on that journey to being more healthy, more stable, more attractive.

Yeah, and you mentioned the 132 patients that you're able to reactivate. And you probably only looked at the data from that first initial visit, but keeping them engaged in the practice long-term also is tremendous, right? We know that the longer they go unscheduled, the less likely it is that we end up reactivating them at all. So over the long run, the life cycle of the patient, life cycle of the practice, you bring tremendous value. So we really appreciate you joining us here today, Cory, and sharing some of these insights. Hopefully everyone that's listened has gotten something of value they really, really should have.

Thank you, it's been an absolute pleasure.

John Meis (26:33.661)
And Cory, yeah, Cory, if people want to learn more about you, what you do, what should they where should they go? What should they do?

Yeah, so people can go to our website to learn more. It's www.getreach.co. And then my email is just Cory, C-O-R-Y, at getreach.co. And people can always email me. Talking with practices is one of my favorite parts of the job because it allows us to truly solve the problems that they see, which is why we partner with them.

John Meis (27:05.921)
Yeah, that's awesome. Well, Cory, I want to thank you for being with us today, sharing with us what you're doing and the and gosh, the progress that you've made since you were on our podcast before is amazing. So proud of all the great work that you're doing. Well that's it. That's it for another episode of the Double Your Production Podcast. We'll see you next time.

Thank you, John. Thank you, Wendy.

Ep 127: Better Scheduling & Reactivation with Cory Pinegar

Ep 127: Better Scheduling & Reactivation with Cory Pinegar

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