Best Dental Softwares for Principals and Associates? – AJ007

Jaz’s Introduction:
You can also create letters to referring dentists and patient report based on that consultation as well. So it’s using the latest tools in AI and audio recording to reduce the stress of your nurse and the dentist. But then you guys started messaging me saying, Jaz, which other softwares are you using? And I was like, wow, okay, there is a couple that I use, and a couple that I’ve seen and tested, and they’re great, and I’m happy to talk about them.

But because I’m not a principal, I am an associate, I think there will be an injustice if I did this episode alone. So in today’s AskJaz, we’re covering which are the some of the best softwares out there in, in various different domains, communication, CRM, which is a new word for me. So I’ve got our guest Prav Solanki on, and I’ll explain what that means in a moment.

But also what are we doing for like a smile mock ups and of course, our patient management system, which I don’t know, I’m not a buyer of that, your principals of practice supplies, your practice management system that could be dentally SOE exact care stack, whatever it is.

So we talked a little bit about that. So the kind of themes that we discussed today are the different softwares that we’re using that you can use some that I tried some that Prav has tried. And so I totally appreciate that. We haven’t covered every single software out there, but this is just based on our experiences.

And I’d love to hear more from you. So if you’re on Protrusive Guidance watching this, comment below. If you’re on YouTube, for example, if you’re listening on Spotify, then maybe just reach out and say, hmm, have you tried this software or that software? And the best place for that would be Protrusive Guidance, our own community, the home of the nicest and geekiest dentists in the world.

So just to give you a little flavor of what we’re talking about today, CRM, which is a Customer Relationship Management software, which for me, like when Prav told me that he owns a CRM software, it went way over my head. I had no idea what it meant. And so he explained to me, it’s like a patient growth machine or patient nurturing machine.

Because what I learned was, and I learned this a few years ago, but even then, I say, I think lots of associates, when I say lead, what is a lead? It’s like, a lot of associates who are so into their clinical dentistry, they’d, I don’t know, get some sort of a wire and be like, Oh, this is a lead. A lead is someone who’s inquired, but not yet a patient.

Do you see what I mean? So as associates, I sometimes think that we don’t know about this business side. So that’s why we wanted to cover a software that people use, practices use to manage and nurture leads. So these are inquiries who are not yet a patient. And so Prav’s the expert in that. He owns and runs lead flow.

So he talks about that. Then we talk about the different patient management softwares. And then my favorite software at the moment, which is Digital TCO. We talk a little bit about how I’m using it in practice. And then a favorite of mine and Prav’s, not specifically a dental software, but we love using Loom.

Like we previously spoke about this, the power of using Loom in the videos that you send to your patients, videos that you send to your team members. So we’ll talk a lot about that as well. And some of the latest softwares like Pearl AI, which is like for radiographs, your radiographs in color, which I think is a great communication tool.

There’s also ChairSyde, which comes highly recommended. I’ve seen a live demo of this. This was pretty cool. Again, some of these softwares I use, some I don’t, but between me and Prav, we have enough to talk about it. And a recent one called SmileCloud, which my prosthodontist friend, Ricky Bhopal, ex guest on the show, the episode we did with Ricky was Productivity with a Prosthodontist.

And I’ll tell you, Ricky’s a very productive guy. So there’s all sorts that we’ll be covering today. And usually on these Ask Jaz episodes, I don’t give a Protrusive Dental Pearl, but I’m still going to give one in this one anyway. And this is a non clinical one. This is, if you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.

Let me say that again. If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. So really, if you listen to this entire episode, and you think that actually I could use that in my practice. Actually, this makes sense. Or I would like to use Digital TCO. I would like to try a CRM system or patient growth machine, but then you just leave it, you leave it as a thought, then whatever results you’re getting at the moment, that’s what you’ll get.

And if you’re happy with that, great. But if you want more, if you think that your life could be enhanced, if you think that your workflows, your systems could be enhanced. Then I challenge you to pick one of these softwares, pick a few of these softwares, and see if it can actually add quality to your life, actually give you more time, give you more results, give you more bottom line, wherever it could be that you’re seeking.

So don’t just be a passive listener, be someone who takes action and tries to better themselves or their practice. Just before we join Prav, the choreography of this episode ends up being so that half, the first half of the episode, we’re talking about Leadflo and a patient nurturing machine. And then the second half, we talk about all the other different software.

So see where you are and what you want to gain from this episode and feel free to navigate around. I will be putting the links in the show notes. And as always, I’ll be very clear about any financial interest I have in any of the softwares and which ones I don’t have any financial interest, you can always expect that from me.

And what I mean by financial interest, like things like Digital TCO, I have a small financial interest because it’s an affiliate link, but it’s an affiliate link that gives you 50 percent off. So if you prefer to pay full price and not get the extended trial, be my guest. Right. So I’m trying to help you here as well.

Anyway, let’s join the main episode. Let’s hope you learn about some softwares that we use.

Main Episode:
Prav Solanki, welcome back to the Protrusive Dental Podcast. How are you, my friend?

[Prav]
I’m good. Full of beans.

[Jaz]
This is way past your bedtime, man. This is way, way late. You are someone who, those who don’t know, like you are like for me, I see like if it’s 9 PM, like, Whoa, I mean, I can’t message Prav.

He’ll be asleep. He’ll see us in the morning kind of thing. But I know you wake up mega early. And I just want to say again, I say it’s 9 PM. Time and time again, when I see you in the podcast, absolute inspiration to me, my life all the way. I think you’ve molded so much of it. So for those few people out there who, for some reason, don’t already listen to the dental leaders podcast, please do. If you don’t already have good friends, Payman and Prav and who haven’t heard about all the wonderful things you do, tell us about yourself, Prav.

[Prav]
So I think I did a summary last time, right? But just a little bit about me, I guess we help dental professionals, dental businesses on the business side of things, just grow both personally, professionally through marketing, through consultancy, through advice, through web tech stuff or whatever.

So that’s one hat I do like this year, I said to myself, I want to develop my public speaking career more. So I’ve been doing a lot more of that. And even though at the beginning of this year, Jaz, I set myself one of these goals that I said, I’m going to say no more.

[Jaz]
I remember having this chat with you about just saying, no, I remember, I remember vividly.

[Prav]
And I said to myself I’m going to say no more right, but I feel like I just keep saying yes and I’m saying yes to the stuff that I want to develop from a skill set point of view, right? So any public speaking gigs I’ve got whether they’re here or overseas and stuff I’ve just said yes and then and then we’ll just figure it out, right?

So there’s that and then the other side of things is the software side of the business. So I’ve been sort of doubling down deep on developing lead flow, which is my, I’ll say it because you’ve said this to me once before Jaz, you once came to me and made this wild statement and I thought you were talking, but you proved me wrong.

And you came to exactly what I’m going to say, but you came to say I’ve created OBAB, which is the best occlusion course on the planet. And then when I had other people verify it, like the Tif Qureshi of this world and other clinicians whose opinion I respect as well as yours, Jaz. And they were like, this is the real deal, man.

This is amazing. And then we’ve just gone on to prove it, right? Delegate after delegate after delegate, the feedback, it’s phenomenal. So as well as you saying I’m an inspiration to you, you’re a massive inspiration to me, mate. And to see what you’re creating out there. And the community and the mentoring stuff and you just don’t seem to be stopping.

And being surrounded by like minded people who are just sort of growth mindset motivated is an amazing thing. Yeah. So when we’re sat here at 9.30, it feels like I’m burning the midnight off cause I’ve been up since the morning. Yeah. It’s great to know that we’re sharing that. So it’s the best dental CRM software on the planet.

Yeah. And I truly believe this. I’m incredibly biased, but for me, the patient journey and every step of that patient journey from the moment that patient experiences some marketing and inquires to the individual communications that happen along that journey to the point where that patient says, I want to think about it or they respond or they don’t respond and how we get them to respond.

The psychology of all that is what I built within the best dental CRM system in the world, right? When a patient comes to you, right. And you try and you let’s say you sell them a 3000, 5000, 10000, pound treatment plan, whatever that value is. Often, in many cases, patients need to borrow money to buy our stuff, right?

And so if we have to borrow money to buy stuff, whatever it is, a car, a holiday, some fancy items, whatever that luxury item is, yeah, thinking process takes a long time. And for some people, some of us, we’re impulse buyers, we’re fast lane buyers and we will buy today, right?

[Jaz]
That’s me. And probably you.

[Prav]
Yeah, yeah. No, in some cases, it depends. It depends on the item, right? It depends on the item. But some of us will take months, if not years, to make that decision. And a lot of our patients do. And for those of you who’ve had a consultation with a patient and that patient came in, and then a year later, the patient just pops up out of the woodworking, the hell did you come from?

They just needed time to make that decision. So what I’ve done is I’ve taken a piece of software and baked into it that entire patient decision making process. And appreciated the sales process for what it is. So what we need to do is increase the probability of the patient picking the phone up post inquiry.

You could be anyone, right? So when I say do the telephone follow up and I run the phone school course and my TCO course, right. And the core principles of what I say here is this. Half your follow up calls do from a landline. The other half do from a practice mobile. You increase the probability of getting hold.

[Jaz]
I never even thought about this, but obviously this is the kind of stuff you do with day in day out. I never even thought about this, but it makes so much sense. And obviously this is what you baked into to lead flow. Now, embarrassingly again, when we started talking about, so the whole origin of this episode is a lot of people ask me, Jaz, you’re into your software, that kind of stuff.

I’m like, yeah, of course. And I just, because I’m not a practice principal and you own practices and you are so like in the software development and the website development space, and you guys do websites and stuff for dentists. And here I am, I can talk about some clinical softwares that I like and that kind of stuff.

But I feel as though what we wanted to cover was starting from the lead, not a patient. So, you know, a lot of dentists don’t even know what lead means. I didn’t know what lead meant until like four years ago or something. And that I learned from Hap Gil at Richmond. So lead is someone who inquires as a potential patient saying, hey, you know what, I’m interested in invisalign.

So then I learned, okay, what a lead was. And so that’s it, basically. As an associate, I’m like, I’m busy doing my dentistry, I want to get patients in, but I don’t think of it as leads, but when you’re a practice owner, you really have to see, what, who is a lead, who is a patient, what about, what happens after the patient finishes the journey? There’s a lot of learning to happen as a practice owner, which I think associates perhaps lack sometimes.

[Prav]
Do you know what? There’s an interesting point you’ve just made there, right? And you’ve totally dehumanized the patient. Yeah. And that’s something that I like to try and bring back into our communication. Because often we think of patients as leads, as inquiries, as whatever. But actually these leads are human beings who’ve got these problems, whether it’s crooked teeth or missing teeth, and they may have aesthetic or functional problems or whatever. It’s okay from a business point of view, we think about it and we’re like, okay, we’ve generated 50 leads this month.

How many of these leads converted into consultations? How many of these consultations converted into active treatment and how many of these consultations didn’t convert and were lost, right? But at no point during that journey, have we humanized it, right? When we’re thinking about leads, I need to understand from a clinician point of view, what do you offer?

What’s your patient journey? So you want me to market implants for you? I’ll ask you this question and a dentureless patient walks in or loose denture where it walks in, right? What’s your offering? And you know, some people will say this to me and I might be quite rude about it, but some people say this to me, all I’m for full arch implant dentistry, a dentalist patient walks in.

And you know what that means to me? If a loose denture walks into your practice, loose denture your practice, my offering to you is 30, 000 pounds or get the out of my practice, it’s that or nothing. And so I look at that and think, well, there’s this, at least in my practice, there’s two stages before that.

And the first one is, hey, that denture you’ve got. We can make that look more like real teeth and we can make it fit better. And so we can replace your current situation with a better current situation, but it won’t solve every problem you’ve got, then we can take that loose denture, you can fire some bolts in it and it can clip in and clip out and you’d need to remove them at night, but now you can chew into your stick or we can give you something super fixed and permanent.

And you don’t need to take them out and clean them like your own teeth. And it’s five grand, seven and a half grand for the upper and lower, for the implant retained or 30k for the Rolls Royce, right? Now you’ve got choice.

[Jaz]
And you’re also able to help and serve a greater percentage of the population.

[Prav]
More people. Yeah. And what’s really interesting about that, Jaz, that the people who don’t do the dentures won’t do the middle bit. In our clinic, the ones who buy the dentures, Come back later and upgrade to the bolts, right? So you see a building. So that lead that we were talking about was a lead for a better denture and then that lead their lifetime value ends up becoming an implant retained denture, or eventually maybe a full arch fixed bridge solution, right?

Because you’ve built that trust in that relationship, but patients make decisions over a long, on the whole. The vast majority of our patients are making that decision over a long period of time. And what I mean by that is there is a point in time when that patient inquires the lead, where they may be thinking about treatment, maybe not totally aware of what the options are, the costing or everything. And they find that out and they go away and think about it. And they may think about six months, 12 months, 18 months.

[Jaz]
And again, I’m always been learning and I have so much to learn in business stuff, but you already use some words like lifetime value. Like most of the geeky and clinical dentists who listen and watch the protrusive podcast are like, what does that even mean?

Like all these things, when you start speaking to business owners, people who run practices and stuff, there’s a whole different world out there. And so you’re right. It all comes back to that kind of a mindset.

[Prav]
And Tif Qureshi taught me a lot about lifetime value of patience, right? Which is the, in his practice over 15 years or 20 years, I have a long, he’s been at dental elegance, right? He’s been seeing patients for checkups and talks to them about the envelope of function and continual tooth movement, and all that Jaz. And his cohort, his pipeline, his leads are sat in his practice all day, every day, and he’s just educating them.

But that first patient he saw five years ago came in and maybe paid a hundred quid for a checkup. Let’s just take an arbitrary ticket. So that patient was worth a hundred quid and then three years later, for some reason they listened to Tif and they spent four grand with him on some ortho.

And then they came in and said, hey, tidy the edges up or whatever. And he does some etch bonding and maybe that’s another couple of grand. And so where the lifetime value of that patient, right, when he first came in, you think a hundred pounds, right. But the lifetime value of that patient, if you look after them is the multiples of the hundreds, the four grand they spent on the ortho, two grand they spent on this. The friends and family members they’ve now referred or dragged into the practice because they’ve had a great experience, right? And they’ve multiplied themselves.

[Jaz]
But all of this was going to come to, I didn’t interrupt you actually, about the whole thing about when patients say, no, we think that, oh, they can’t afford it basically. There’s other factors behind it.

[Prav]
Now imagine you put yourself in the patient’s shoes and they don’t know, can you get me there? Or worse still, I was speaking to a dentist this morning. We said, look, I need some help with my practice, but my practice is unique. And I said, what do you mean? He said, look, a couple of the clinicians in the practice, their teachers in the dental world, and they do really complex treatment plans.

And this is like, you go and see this person for your perio, you go and see this person for your restorative, you go and see this person for this,, I’ll chuck an implant in blah, blah, blah. It’s a really complex thing. So when we present the treatment plans, there’s a ton of different options.

And the problem is we do the marketing, we get them in. Not many people go ahead. So see, you don’t need a marketer. I said, I’ll fix you. I will literally fix your problem in a couple of hours. If you just listen to what I’ve got to say. Simplify the choices. I’ve had dentists present to me treatment plans and it’s got UL3, blah, blah, blah, this tooth, this will do this and crown and material in this.

And it comes out like a Chinese takeaway menu, right. With numbers and prices against it all. And I just say to the guys, look, can we just break this down and say, look, we’ve got to do some work on your upper set of teeth. And we’re going to do this bit first and this bit, which includes all of this teeth is going to be 3k, right?

And then two months later, we’re going to come back and do this one. And that lump there is 5k. And this lump here is this, right? Now you can pay each one at a different stage. You can pay for it all up front. We can do some kind of a deal, right? This is what it looks like, right? You give them that whole menu, yeah, they get to decision fatigue.

They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t understand. They’re unaware. Perhaps there’s some mistrust. Perhaps that patient thinks, do I need all of this? Yeah, do it. Do I need every little bit of this? Can I go away and just have a think about? You know, A, B, C, D, and not E, F, G, can I get away with that piece? And patients walk away confused.

[Jaz]
And so what makes LeadFlo compelling for you in terms of comparing it to other patient nurturing machines out there? So for me, I guess the key thing is that what we have done is we’ve essentially baked in a follow up system that will follow every patient on for two years.

Okay. So that the conversation I have with principals or marketers or TCOs. And the first question I’ll ask them when we talk about marketing, because as you know, and I know, right, marketing and sales is one unified thing. And when people say, hey, Prav, can you do the marketing thing for me?

I say, haven’t got a silver bullet, right? We can deliver marketing campaigns. We can deliver leads or patients that have certain interests, but unless you’ve got your marketing A game on, what I do is not going to change your game.

[Prav]
Do you mean sales, a game? You said marketing ready, but then unless you’ve got the sales on.

[Jaz]
Sales, unless you’ve got your sales A game. Did I get my words mixed up?

[Prav]
We got there in the end, mate. Marketing and sales, you have to be hand in hand rather than just going for one. I, in most evenings I’d have been snoring for at least an hour by now. So yeah, slip of the tongue guys. So be glad. But yeah, yeah, sales and marketing work in harmony. Right. And unless you’ve got them both together, and I feel actually the market to the sales piece is more important.

[Jaz]
Okay. I mean, did you want, because we’re doing this whole thing about LeadFlo for those listening, they can see, but do you want to just maybe load up the, share the screen, show the website for LeadFlo?

[Prav]
Yeah, let me see. Okay. So imagine you’ve got some marketing activity going on and a new inquiry comes in, right? Immediately, what we want to do is for that patient to get a welcome email and an SMS. And following that over the next 10 months or so. We’re going to be following up with automated communication, emails, SMS, reminders, sharing before and after pictures, reviews, video testimonials, asking them for a selfie of their smile, and then even sending something called a breakup email, right?

So what Leadflo does is it takes any inquiry. That has been generated through a Facebook ad, a Google ad, through your website. It integrates with all of those platforms and pulls all of those patients into one central place.

[Jaz]
And that’s like a website, right? It’s like a website. It’s like a dashboard.

[Prav]
It’s a dashboard. Yeah. It’s a dashboard where every patient comes in individually. When you look on that dashboard, you’ll say, hey, Sam Smith came from Google. He inquired today and you can see the details of his inquiry. You’ll have his name, email address, phone number. And you’ll be able to see the source of the inquiry.

So if you were to click on like a patient in the dashboard, you’d have the first name, last name, type of treatment they’re interested in, what the lead source was. So website, Google, Facebook, et cetera. And then the nature of their inquiry, right? You will automatically send them an email. You will automatically send them an SMS. And from the same dashboard, instead of going to your inbox or instead of going to your inbox or your phone, you can just click here and send an SMS to the patient.

[Jaz]
Yeah. You have the option and then dashboard to switch between like within one click switch from SMS to email.

[Prav]
Or send them a note. Yeah. So you send them an email, send them SMS to email. And you can pre make some templates. If you’ve got some stuff you regularly just click it, boom, send it in. And away it goes, right? So you’ve got the ability to do that. But the beauty I think is the ease of use when it needs no training. So this says call Jack, on the dashboard will say call Jack about Invisalign treatment or general treatment on this number.

So you ring them, you click a button and you have to tell LeadFlo what to do next. So what happens? So if you say they did not answer the phone, for example. So you press next, it double checks with you. Hey, you said this guy didn’t answer the phone. We’ll try and call him again in five days time on this date.

Confirm. As soon as you do that, that task is complete. And the patient gets an email saying, hey, Jack, I just tried to call you. Couldn’t get through. I’ll try you again in a few days time. Alternative, feel free to call me at any point. And then that patient will go into call attempts and then you are prompted to call the patient a second time or a third time or a fourth time.

So we set up these sequences so that the team follow up. And during that entire journey, until that patient books in, we They will be receiving automated emails that will feel and read like they’re so human that they’re not written by a machine. And that’s the key thing is that we’re staying in touch with this patient on the whole minimum of two years.

And I think one of the key benefits of having some kind of lead nurturing or management system like this. All the communication in one place. If the patient replies to an automated email, the response comes back into here. You don’t have to go hunting for it in your inbox. If the patient responds to the text message, it comes back in here.

So you can have a two way text message conversation with the patient. Here’s a really interesting one, right? I didn’t know this until it actually happened. So a lot of patients who you text, guess what their response is to the text message? Have a guess. Have a guess.

[Jaz]
Like they actually text back?

[Prav]
Give me another response.

[Jaz]
But were they text back or not? Or just what they would do?

[Prav]
They do. They do. They text back. Well, what do some patients do?

[Jaz]
It’s like, can you call me or like, can they request a phone call from there?

[Prav]
No, but so that includes texting back. Well, what else can they do?

[Jaz]
Just pick up and call that number.

[Prav]
Call that number, right? Call that number. Yeah. And we only discovered this. We didn’t even think about when we designed the software. But we realized with the Twilio numbers that we buy on behalf of the client and they get programmed into this, is that we’re getting a lot of missed calls on these Twilio numbers.

And we were missing all these patient calls. So what we do now is we actually divert that mobile number that we use for texts to the practice number. So if they call that number, it gets diverted and it shows on the dashboard, this patient called at this time. But it’s really interesting because I hadn’t actually thought about nobody on the team, none of the software development team had thought about that problem.

So we realized we were getting, this was early on in development, right? We were getting missed calls and we thought, well, it just makes sense. Have it seamlessly divert to the practice. Just those tiny little things. I think one of the sort of, we call it genius things or whatever the platform does is it doesn’t matter when you inquire, right?

Even if you inquire at 10 o’clock at night. Leadflo is going to send you a text message. Okay. So let’s say here, a patient inquires at 9 35 PM on a Sunday. They’ll get a text message back saying, Hey, it’s Sarah from Harley Private Dental. Thanks for inquiry. I’m packing the practice on Monday at 9 AM. Is there a convenient time to call?

9 35 PM, patient texts back within two to three minutes saying, hey, I’m looking for a quote on implants in the lower jaw to adjacent missing teeth near the molar area. Now, had we not engaged with that patient at 9 35 PM, that patient would not have engaged with us. We’d have come in on Monday morning.

You’d have tried to call them, from a number they wouldn’t recognize, I knew they thought they were a time waster, right? Whereas instead, this patient has almost booked an appointment with you, right? We get so many immediate responses to instant text messages, automated text messages.

[Jaz]
It’s the mindset of the inquiry, the lead, let’s call them, they’re in that moment. They’re obviously researching, they’ve already made a decision. They’ve now made a decision to give you their phone number. That’s a big transaction right there, right? And to do that, they’re in the mode. And so to have something automated and something quick like this, they can reply to. This is where I think it’s genius. So is it fair to say that in 2024, it will be ludicrous for a practice, not to have some sort of CRM, patient answering machine?

[Prav]
Yeah. Like insane, right? A bit, because here’s the thing. If anyone is spending any kind of money on marketing, even if you’re not spending any money on marketing and you’ve just got organic traffic coming in and organic leads making their way through your website and whatnot, yeah.

Not following patients up for two years. If you believe me on the thesis that human beings take a long time to make decisions about buying expensive stuff. If you believe that not having a robust structured system to follow patients up for a period of two years. Yeah. It’s insanity because if we look at it from purely a business numbers and money point of view. Leaving cash on the table

[Jaz]
I mean, I don’t even know the practice I work at, if they use a CRM or patient answering machine. So I don’t know. So it’s worth a conversation. But interesting thing, how I see it as an associate, right? As very much in my dentistry, and I don’t have to think about these things, the practices that they just do in the background is when I have forwarded them like information for a lead that maybe I get on Instagram or something, I send to reception.

And I was like, oh, can you make a note about this or that, basically? And their standard response to reception is, well, I can’t do anything until they’re a patient on our system. Where do they store that information, right? So they’re probably, I don’t know how they do it, right? Maybe have an Excel sheet or whatever, how they do it, or an old notebook, little pad. But that’s very archaic.

[Prav]
But it goes right. And interestingly, you mentioned that, right? So the whole Instagram piece, do you get a lot of Instagram inquiries from patients?

[Jaz]
Honestly, I took a sabbatical from DMs. I’m just recently I’ve been replying back to the dentist on DMS, but I have probably over a hundred, I have over a hundred requests that it gives me anxiety just to open it up. So I don’t, but yeah, it’s patients. It’s patients. TMD, all sorts of stuff, but I’m just so booked up that it gives me anxiety to even open it up.

[Prav]
Wow. Nice problem to have, mate, because most of the time I’m speaking to dentists who would love that problem.

[Jaz]
Yeah. I appreciate that.

[Prav]
But the reason I mentioned that, is we do a lot of work for Rhona Iskander, right. And her DMs are blowing up every day. And she had this problem whereby ton of patients inquire with us every day. I want treatment with you. I’m interested in this. I’m interested in that, blah, blah, blah. And she just to have the time or the bandwidth to communicate with these patients, right? She’ll screenshot it and send it to a team, but it’s an incredibly inefficient process.

So what we did is we created a landing page with a chat bot on it. And the chatbot was Rhona and it would say, Hey, I’m Rhona. Thanks for inquiring about treatment with me to take your inquiry further. Please give me your name, email address, treatment you’re interested in. Are you aware that treatment with me starts from this price? Blah, blah, blah. So you send a DM to Rhona, she’ll send you a link. And she’ll say, thank you for your interest in treatment with me.

[Jaz]
And that’s automated within Instagram. Like, that’s an automated thing. Yeah.

[Prav]
Automated now. So this is all anxiety is gone. Right. But then what happens is the machine then filters that patient. Because a lot of these people who are messaging you off Instagram, some of them may be trying their luck and say, can I get a deal or a discount or get it free or whatever? And so what the machine does is it asks a bunch of questions. It then filters them into lead flow. They then receive a welcome email from Rhona saying, hey, thanks for your inquiry.

I’m looking forward to blah, blah, blah. If you would like to book a consultation with me, it’s 180 pounds, blah, blah, blah, for an assessment, there’s a waiting list. And then a member of the team calls and tries to get them booked in. Okay. But what we’ve instantly done is taken that whole barrage of inquiries.

And the machine has filtered them into what I would call serious action takers. Yeah. So it’s amazing what we can do with software, right? Either independent of CRM systems or utilizing some kind of a chatbot or something like that, that can then push that inquiry maybe to a receptionist. So maybe an easier route, even for you, Jaz, would be just to have that kind of filter automated filter. So you never have to open your DMS and then the patient gets filtered based on whatever price, timescale, type of treatment, right, modality. Maybe there’s a certain type of patient that comes to you with a certain type of problem.

And maybe in that filtering process, you can educate the patient and say, Hey, I am for you. I’m not for you, whatever. It’s really interesting that that all that part of the journey is really, really interesting.

[Jaz]
That’s totally untapped, but all these things I’m always learning. And this one would bring you on because it’s all new ideas for me. And I think lots of people listening, oh yeah, that’s clever. I could do that on my Instagram. So I’m sure people have given those ideas, but if you’re in a position where you’re in a practice, maybe a squat, or maybe you establish practice and you think, okay, maybe you need a way to manage all this, then thanks for sharing.

LeadFlo, I’ll put the website for LeadFlo. So that’d be good. Now, then the next thing I want to talk about is, okay, when you actually, the patient comes in and you actually input the patient data on the software that you chart their teeth, you do the whole consult and stuff. So what are the different softwares people are using now, we have a very international audience and protrusive, which is, which is amazing in the UK, I think the lead player is software of excellence.

Yep. So that they, I don’t know how much market share they have, but it’s pretty big. Do I like it way better than R4? I think I’ve never, I’ve only used R4 a few times and I hated it. CareStack I’ve never used, but Adrian and Abby and all these guys from the state are making a big hoo ha, which I, from what I’ve seen is it seems pretty impressive, but again, as an associate, I don’t know, but you’ve had more insight.

I know, obviously dentally. You, I know you’ve played around with all these. I know you’ve liaised with all these guys. What’s your take on the best software that you know of? Obviously this might be a bit UK centric in terms of actually patient management system.

[Prav]
So my answer to that question is it depends and it depends on who you are. Are you an associate?

[Jaz]
Well, you have no say then, really. You can have to suggest.

[Prav]
Yeah, but if you ask the question, what’s the best, right? We’re not, so if you’re saying to me, what’s the best, right? As an associate, it’s whatever makes your life easy and it’s the easiest to use. And it’s what you’ve always known. And then it depends on what type of person.

[Jaz]
It’s more clinical when you’re an associate. It’s more the clinical stuff. How easy is it to chart? How does a treatment plan look when you preview it? All of the things that we use day in, day out.

[Prav]
As a business owner, what I want from my dental practice management software is okay. Easy life for the associates. The clinical stuff is all sorted fine. Reporting is really important, right? So pulling the data out, that’s important to me. Okay. And then also opportunity mining. Being able to find opportunities within the data that comes to the surface.

Look, from my experience, like I’ve heard that the reporting on SOE and the reporting on SOE is amazing. I’ve never had SOE in any of my practices, so I wouldn’t know.

[Jaz]
What do you guys use?

[Prav]
So we’ve had Dentally, Dentally in our practices, cloud based work, been using it for years. It’s excellent. And then, just when you think that that is the best thing on the market. Somebody asks me to go and meet this guy from India in central London and just meet him for lunch and say, Hey, come and meet Abby. And he goes, Hey, Prav, how you doing? That’s my Indian American accent, right? I won’t carry on. I’ll just embarrass myself. But anyway, I meet Abby.

Super passionate. And he says, I just want to show you CareStack. Didn’t want anything from me. Didn’t want me to mark and nothing like that at all. He just, hey, I want to show you this. So I look at it and say, hey, can CareStack find me open treatment plans that have got a value over X? He goes, what?

Like this and presses two buttons and they’re all there and the value and all the rest of us, this is brilliant, right? So anyway, without going into too much detail, I proceed to ask him about 20 similar questions, yeah? Trying to trip him up, but instead of like saying, yes, it can do this. It’s a show and tell kind of guy. So he’s literally demonstrating one after another. Then he shows me the AI that’s built into it and how he’s recording the patient’s conversation with your conversation.

[Jaz]
So I was there, the AI day was presenting and then he was there to do a demo. And so they did a thing where someone from the audience called him to pretend to be a patient and it was cool how it was just transcribing and making it just have a nice record of that, basically.

[Prav]
And then what you can do with that data, right? Opportunity, hunting, keyword spotting across numerous data sets. It’s got to be insane, right? What you can do with that, right? And it’s got its own built in dental plan provider. So you can hook it up to GoCardless or Stripe or whatever and set up your own plan and away you go. There’s just so much in it.

[Jaz]
It’s a dental plan killer or a practice plan killer, basically.

[Prav]
Yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think this is the exciting thing about the software world, right, is there’s killers. Around the corner, right? And so I think the perfect thing, I think I saw a post from you and maybe I’m jumping ahead here, Jaz, but I saw a post from you about Digital TCO, right? Never write notes again. Take the pain away from writing notes.

[Jaz]
So good.

[Prav]
So I looked at it and I thought, look, if you’re waxing lyrical about this, it’s got to be game changing, right? Like it has to be. So I signed up for the free trial. Bearing in mind, I’m not a clinician. And I start mocking about with this and I go, hey, he had a patient in, came in, dentures, blah, blah, blah, recommended this, that, and the other.

And then boom, it spits out this letter for me, et cetera. All the dental terminologies, right. Patients presenting complaint, all this brings back like med school memories, whatever. And I’m just like, man, this is good. Yeah. So then I pick up the phone and speak to him and I go, Jaz, I spoke to this thing and it did that and it’s like, you’ve like scratched the, not even scratch the surface, you need to try Jaz Mode. Yeah, you need to try Jaz mode. And I was just like, wow. Wow. And so that’s an everything killer. Gives your nurse an easier time. I’m sure it gives you an easier time.

[Jaz]
There’s a bit of time. So for me, the main thing was during these TMD consults or new patients, and I’m a kind of guy where if it’s a one tooth problem. I can treat and plan the spot. I can have a nice conversation, consent and stuff. If it’s anything more than a one tooth problem, right, I can’t do it. I can’t just like bleh and expect them to retain it. I do a loom video, which we’ll talk about, but the whole conversation, because if you think about it, even if you, someone uses like an alternative, like Kiroku, lots of clicking and that kind of stuff.

But when it comes to actual explanation of the treatment plan, there is no set treatment plan for each individual. There’s always nuances. And to capture those nuances, you still have to put your fingers to the keyboard. You still have to do it to add those little nuances. Actually, because you’re getting married in six months, we’re going to do the whitening after blah, blah, blah, whatever.

It always has some nuances. This captures it in voice. So now before notes was like very difficult for me to do very laborious. Now I just generate. And I just read and I’m smiling and the odd time I might have to remove a word or the odd time it might think that something like hypermobility was a cause of bruxism, which it wasn’t.

It just interpreted it from what I said. I just delete that. But the AI week by week is getting more clever. And so Kevin, who’s the guy who made this is a dentist actually. He’s just adding all these changes in constantly improving that even the AI was very grateful that he made Jaz Mode. So I don’t know if you know this, I’ll just spend another minute on this before we move on, but It’s a huge heartache, headache for dentists, note writing, right?

And the product initially for Digital TCO was like, you know how the patient leaves and then you go and type your notes and you fix it up, right? His product was, as a patient leaves, instead of typing, you’re just dictating and the AI just figures it out, right? Which is cool, but I don’t have to sit after patient leaves and try and remember and do that.

I want it to listen and figure it out. And that’s when he created Jaz Mode and he named it after me, which I just love. And this is the thing that’s just absolutely blown me away. And there’s a whole community, hundreds of us on our app, Protrusive Guidance. We’ve got a little space called Digital TCO Feedback.

So every day we’re feeding back to Kevin. He’s got these live people, right? Cause we’ve got this like half price off deal and stuff in exchange. And now week by week, he’s adding a pause button here. He’d added a risk bank. So Prav, what the risk bank is, if someone mentions. The trigger words, risk of root canal, okay, and they usually give their spiel. It will actually put their exact spiel, how they want it in their notes. It will just come up based on the trigger words that they said.

[Prav]
And is that a risk? Is that a dentist by dentists? So you can have your risk bank.

[Jaz]
Yes.

[Prav] And someone else can have their risk bank and so on and so forth.

[Jaz]
And I think the next stage is that we can like share each other’s risk banks because as they build up, right, and you can share each other. I’ve been sharing templates. So my template I’m pretty happy with. It’s just, honestly, exciting time to be in notes who don’t want to click and that kind of stuff. So, moving on from the different softwares available, you know, spoke highly about care stack, but if you’re having problems with notes, definitely check out Digital TCO.

It’s been a game changer for all the colleagues that use it. And I think the next thing we should talk about then is also when I use Digital TCO, because I’m so immersed in this audio recording, I also use dental audio notes, which I have made an episode about. I’m just a big fan of recording audio anyway.

I met a dentist. just the other day, who’s actually a previous guest of the podcast. And I told him about digital TCO and Dan and stuff. And he goes, oh, I haven’t heard any of these, but I do audio record my consultations and oh, is that right? I was like, how’d you do that? And he says to me, I use a dictaphone.

Okay. And then after the patient’s gone, I then upload it to my computer. I move the MP3 file there. And sometimes I don’t even, he actually said this. Sometimes I don’t even do my notes because I know that audio recording is there somewhere buried in a file somewhere, right? So, isn’t this amazing that now not only have you got the audio recording, you’ve also got the notes there, medically, legally, very important, okay. And it’s actually filed in a cloud somewhere, not actually taking hard drive space.

[Prav]
So can I play devil’s advocate here? Is there any situation where, because you’ve got that comprehensive of notes, that could act against you. Do you understand the question I’m asking?

[Jaz]
100 percent I understand the question. Now, I think the question really is for those dentists, most of us who use templates, right? We often, when we set the template we try and make the ideal template. Why would you sit down and make a crappy template? You just wouldn’t. You’re going to use it a lot. You’re going to make a really thorough template.

So on that same day, I met this another young dentist and I told her about, oh yeah, everything I’m saying, okay, it goes on there. But then she says to me, what if you forget to mention this and you need it in the notes? But I said to her, I said to her, why is it fair to our patients if we’re not saying the rist of them, but we’re saying in [overlapping conversation] of them?

That is the sin. And so what this has done for me is it really helped me up my game Prav. So now I work very much more in checklists. So, okay, we’re for every time this story, I need to make sure that these checklists I take off. And I think it’s made me a better clinician, a better communicator, because now the pressure is on now that I’m being audio recorded and the quality of the notes is very much reliant on my mouth.

It is very, very important, right? Whereas the templates, that’s where I think you get in danger. The reason I think you can’t get in danger with the AI stuff with Digital TCO is because it literally is your voice, what you’ve done, it isn’t templates. So for example, classic one, You’ve taken out a lower molar, but in your template it says warned about the sinus risk and you forgot to delete that.

There’s no sinus risk when you’re taking a lower molar. There’s no sinus there, right? So that is a danger, whereas actually that doesn’t get picked up because you didn’t mention the sinus. So that’s why that I think you’re more likely to get in danger with written templates than you can with voice.

[Prav]
So tell me, with your spoken stuff, do you have almost like hey, these are the words I’m going to mention and you have a typed out checklist that you, or is it all up here? So like if I’m talking about marketing, yeah, like it’s all in here. And that is very unlikely. I won’t mention these 10 things, for example.

They’re like baked into my brain. It’s muscle memory. Is that the same with you? And is that the same with all dentists? Or is this a case of you don’t know what you don’t know, but your template’s got your back sort of thing. And like, so is this for only certain types of dentists or is this for everyone?

Some dentists out there are going to think, screw that. I’m not getting all my- cause I’m pretty shoddy at my stuff. So I’m not going to do that. The reason I mentioned that is because I’ll say we’ve worked with clinicians, our senior clinicians have pulled them up on their note taking and so on and so forth.

And he’s created a ton of problems in the practice, right? Because the complaints come in and then you think, actually, do you know what? They didn’t check this, they didn’t do this, and I’m not a clinician, right? But I’ve been copied into communication and thinking. Bloody hell, like, as a practice owner, if I knew how shoddy these associates were, just because they were generating money and converting a line of cases or whatever, right?

The comebacks we’ve got to deal with now, and our principal clinician now has to put everything right? It’s a nightmare. So as an owner, I’m thinking I want to enforce this for everyone. Because then I know everything’s done right. Back to that question.

[Jaz]
Yep. Yep.

[Prav]
Are there certain questions, certain technicians that think, screw that. There’s no way I’m doing this.

[Jaz]
Well, the initial question you asked is about how do I work and have I got like essentially a checklist, right? And it’s all about a checklist manifesto. I’m a big believer in that. So at the moment, because Digital TCO has only entered my life. Six weeks ago, right? It’s all new to me.

I’m having to go back now and I’m literally just making these already had TMD checklist. So now I’ve got other checklists. So I want to make sure that I have got these written checklists that my nurse can just tick off. Because now she’s not having to before my nurses is writing the notes and she was frantically bless her.

She’s trying to type everything down and she’s struggling. My nurse’s stress levels have decreased right now and all she has to do now is just tick a few boxes and just point out, oh, by the way, Jaz, this was, oh yes, of course, by the way, we need to mention this. And now that is medically legally foolproof.

The next question was that, which dentist does it suit and which dentist it doesn’t. Okay, there are some dentists, Prav, you probably don’t hire them, but they will do a silent exam. Like, patient comes in, the patient open their mouth, right? And they will just do upper right six, amalgam, upper right two, this, upper left six, have a look.

Okay. Everything looks fine. Goodbye. Okay. It’s not for them. If you’re constantly giving value to the patient. So here’s what I’m doing. I’m starting off again. Okay. I’m just going to check your chewing system. Now I’m ready to bite together. Oh, look at these muscles. Okay. They’re firing nicely. I’m very happy with this.

I’m now going to move to your joint. Open nice and big. Okay. That’s a nice, healthy mouth opening there. I couldn’t hear any clicking. Ms. Smith, are you aware of any clicking, popping or locking? No. Well, that’s great. The data, now you’re feeding it. And that’s me. I’m not even, and the patient’s always loving it.

Oh, wow. I’m getting the other dentist might be checking all this stuff. But the patient is none the wiser.

[Prav]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s clueless, right? But, and so when you say that, so you say, okay, I’m checking that you’ve got a healthy joint. Are you aware of any clicking, locking or popping? Is Digital TCO picking that piece up?

[Jaz]
Yes, yes, yes, yes.

[Prav]
Oh, wow.

[Jaz]
But that’s why I say it. But I always said it. I’ve always said it. But now I have tweaked the way I speak to try and make my notes so good that I don’t have to do any typing.

[Prav]
See, it’s basically, you’re talking to the patient whilst talking to the machine and you’re talking machine to the patient, but you’re trying to do it in a way that’s humanized.

[Jaz]
But it’s actually made for better communication.

[Prav]
No, I guess that’s really cool.

[Jaz]
So dentists would like to talk and talk out loud and give value to their patients I think they are better suited to Digital TCO, but dentists who don’t like talk much maybe some like I don’t know, Kiroku, whatever’s out there, click, click, click kind of stuff, that’s fine. But if you like to talk a lot and dictate, then that’s for you, basically. So that’s more on the notes problem there is.

[Interjection]
Okay, guys, it’s Jaz interjecting here with a really important message. If you’ve been inspired to try Digital TCO, join hundreds of us on our community, protrusive guidance, where we’re actually giving feedback to Kevin.

Kevin’s the inventor. We did episode PDP 181 all about how to never write notes again. So if this is a kind of a software that you crave that you need in your life, it’s dirt cheap at the moment, especially with the protrusive discount of 50%, the extended free trial, but you have to please partake in this experiment and give Kevin feedback.

Actually, through our community that we created the risk bank and the pause feature and the ability to see if your microphone’s working. All of these came from me and the Protrusive Guidance community. So if you want to get started with audio recording, check out PDP 181 and the clinical video that I added as well.

But the first place to go is protrusive.co.uk/notes. That will take you to the place where you can get the extended free trial and the discount, but please do give Kevin your feedback so we can make this exactly what you want it to be for me and my nurse. It’s been absolutely the best thing we’ve done way better than anything else. You tried. I’ve tried Heidi. I’m trying something else called second at the moment. I’ll give you feedback on that. And so I’m constantly looking for what’s out there, but nothing has beaten Digital TCO so far in terms of reducing our stress, improving our notes and making things just happier and more efficient.

So check out protrusive.co.uk/notes. If that website’s not working for some reason, and you still want to access the discount, it’s digitialtco.co.uk/pro trusive. So I’ll put all those notes in the show link. And yes, that is an affiliate link. So we have a small financial interest here, which helps the podcast grow.

But again, if you want to pay full price, be my guest. Oh, and don’t forget to check out the video where I compare two different microphones and actually like a live demo of Digital TCO back to the episode.

[Jaz]
Loom. Now we mentioned loom huge one. I. will regularly do loom treatment plans. As you know, Prav, because you guys adopt this in your practices. Patients watch it multiple times. Patients send it to their spouse. Patients send it to their children to read as well, to have a look. And you get multiple views on this. And I find that the more views I’ve had, the more likely they’re going to take up the treatment. I just find that they’re engaged.

They’re watching again. They’re trying to understand. It’s just brilliant. So Loom for those who don’t know is a online software whereby you click record. It records your screen. And it records your voice.

You can add your camera, your face there as well. So imagine me cycling through some photos of the patient saying, Hey, Ms. Smith, do you remember this tooth I showed you at the clinic? This is the one that needs the crown because this X, Y, and Z. Oh, by the way, this is an example of a crown I’ve done. I get a link, I send it to the patient. Once the patient watches it, I get an email. To say that the patient’s watched it. It’s just communication, like one on one.

And again, I hate doing long reports to my patients, like explaining it. To have that summarized in five minute video, right? Which the first time you do it, you mentioned this when you spoke at the communication occlusion day in September. You said the first time you do it, it might take you 20 minutes, half an hour for a two minute video, right? But when you get slick at it, how much time you save is just phenomenal.

[Prav]
Is there a medical legal thing here? Because it was interesting, it came up as a question. When I was talking about this at an event recently, and they said, because you’re just summarizing it and you’re not mentioning everything in there, is there an issue because your voice is recorded, you’ve sent them the video and it’s like, ah, but Prav didn’t say this.

So the way I answered that question on the spot is I just said to the delegate or the attendee of the event, look, if you’re worried about that, then start your Loom by saying, Hey. What I’m about to present to you is just a simplified summary of a detailed treatment plan that I have emailed to you.

All the detail is within there. I’ve simplified it to make it easier to understand. So I don’t, like that was my piece of advice, but I said, don’t take that as, hey, perhaps the medical legal expert either, right? And because that question came up about Loom, I was just wondering, what’s your thoughts on that?

[Jaz]
I like what you said there. I think it’s really good way to put it actually. So I’m going to borrow that from you. I will start doing that bit more, but essentially consent is like an onion. There’s lots of layers to it, right? So the first part now, imagine I’ve got Digital TCO around the background.

I’ve explained these risks and stuff in the chair. Firstly, that’s recording the notes. Even when the patient says, yes. Oh yeah, that makes sense. And that’s recording Digital CTO. Patient understood what he said and repeated back. So that’s there, layer one. Okay, layer two is the Loom stuff. Okay, which fair enough.

It might not cover every single detail, but layer three is the juice has to be worth the squeeze. So the more complex, the more risky stuff there is, that’s the kind of stuff you can also follow up with the written stuff as well, right? And then the more complex it, it comes, you can’t just rely on Loom.

But the Loom, think of Loom as a fantastic communication tool, but also conversion tool because sales tool, yeah. When you get it is, it is when patients get a video, it’s like no one’s ever done this bespoke video. Like this dentist actually talking to me in a language I can understand. Because guess what?

Patients remember when they walk out the door, not, they just remember anything. They literally get so confused that this is why I love Loom.

[Prav]
Yeah. Do you know what analogy it brings me back to or what situation is the first time I had my car serviced? And the dude, on his phone, went under the car, with his phone-

[Jaz]
Yes! I had the same thing!

[Prav]
And showed me, hey, you know this thing here that we’re charging you 200 quid for? Here’s the brand new one, right? Because there’s no way I’m gonna look under the car, right? So then I think, Great. My mechanic’s not ripping me off now. He’s shown me everything he’s done.

[Jaz]
Is that the intra oral camera for the mechanic?

[Prav]
Yeah. So that blew me away. And so I see Loom as that maybe, providing a personalized explanation, but there’s actually, so you see it as a conversion tool there, right. But it works way before that. So during the patient journey, we go back to lead flow. There’s one email that goes out in the automation, which is let’s say the patient. Is not quite ready to come in for a consultation for whatever reason.

So we send them an email and we say hey Send us a selfie of your smile. I’ll wave it under the dentist’s nose and he’ll give you some free advice So the photograph comes in and you record a loom for the patient And you say hey and either you can do it or the TCO can do it.

It just depends on what the, what the bandwidth is there, right? But you put their picture on the screen and you say, hey, Prav, I can see you’ve got a crooked teeth here, blah, blah, blah. And clear aligners are going to be absolutely perfect for you. I’d like to meet Jessica. Now, Jessica came in to see us two years ago.

And she can see she had the same problems and we look at a side profile. Those front teeth were sticking out and we got her from here to here in nine months. Her investment in the treatment was 3, 500 pounds and she finished off with a little bit of edge bonding and stuff was a little bit more of an investment.

I’m really looking forward to meeting you. Come in for a consultation. Come and meet us. Blah, blah, blah. That’s the deal. It’s another applicable use of loom again.

[Jaz]
It’s a personal touch like no other

[Prav]
It’s a conversion tool, right?

[Jaz]
It is.

[Prav]
It is an amazing conversion tool. Now the piece about them watching it and watching it multiple times when they watch it, do you act upon that or do you just use it as data?

[Jaz]
At the moment, look, I’ll be honest, I’m so busy that they watch it. I get the email basically, and more often than not, they end up booking my diary for the treatment and it goes ahead, right? But if I had a lovely funnel set up and if we had a treatment coordinator and stuff, they could totally be using that data. They could see how much of it they watched. We can learn about where they stopped watching, why they stopped watching. There’s so much data you can get from that.

[Prav]
And so we just use it as a prompt for the TCO to follow the patient and say, hey.

[Jaz]
I saw that you watched the video. What did you think?

[Prav]
Yeah. Yeah. I saw you watch the video with Dr. Jaz, blah, blah, blah. Is there anything that didn’t make sense? Any more detail that you want? Would you like to come back in? There’s just a reason to follow up. Yeah. So once again, even on its own without that piece, it’s a conversion tool, it’s a great tool for your TCOs as well.

[Jaz]
You also use it for your managing your teams. I use it for managing my teams. Like we’ve cut down team meetings. I hate team meetings. So very much send them a Loom. This is how you do it. Can you crack on kind of thing. So I just want to mention that if you have a team, it’s great to use that. Now you mentioned about when you have that quick ones that, oh yeah.

By the way, patient who’s not, by the way, lead, who’s not a patient yet. I had to look at your smile, blah, blah, blah, that kind of Loom. I want you now to check out SmileCloud. So while you can, if you just share your screen, share your browser, go google SmileCloud, right? And while you’re googling this, mate, remember that software you told me about on Android, iOS, the one that you take a photo and then it gives them an instant smile, a quick little preview. What was it called again? At least you’ve got like a mind blank.

[Prav]
It’s not on, it’s on, you can get it on iOS as well.

[Jaz]
Yeah, iOS, Android. I’m looking at my phone now.

[Prav]
I’m looking on my phone.

[Jaz]
I even paid for it and I use it now and again, airbrush.

[Prav]
Airbrush. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I talk about it a lot.

[Jaz]
I know me too. Right after you, after you. Okay. And so there we are. There we are. Like, yeah, this is the kind of time it is now. Oh my God. It’s 10 40. So airbrush. So brilliant stuff. Right. So really, really quick. Now just have a look at smart cloud and just share your screen. Now for those listening on Spotify and Apple, don’t worry, we’ll not alienate you, we’re going to describe it. But for those who are watching on YouTube, they get to kind of see live as a, like Prav’s first reactions, if you like.

[Prav]
Smile design collaboration, right?

[Jaz]
This is the one. So my buddy, Ricky Bhopal, prosthodontist, told me about this. So just scroll down. So essentially guys, what this is, you know, that the thing about instant smile preview, that kind of stuff, it is like that to the next level.

So even with the airbrush, it is a bit rudimentary, it can mess up sometimes the skins that you have on this, the different smile features. But then actually, once you’ve got that smile, you can export this. And when you export it, you can actually get like some sort of functional mock up to try on the patient.

You can actually use this data exported into like ExoCAD and stuff. So the labs can use it as well. So it is absolutely brilliant. Like you send the lab, the preview of their smile and you based on the style that you like. And then you tell the lab, please download this library of teeth, which I used. In the smile makeover, and I think this is very photorealistic, but smile preview. So Smile Cloud has come highly recommended. I haven’t used it yet, but because you mentioned that whole thing about, yeah.

[Prav]
I was going to ask if you haven’t had a play with this. Is this something that you can use in the chair or?

[Jaz]
I think so. I think it’s very quick. That’s what Ricky told me. It’s very, very quick. Now, if you want to take it to the next level and export some, some of the data center lab, Okay. But it is very, very quick. I mean, look how seamlessly the people are. Click, click clicking and changing the proportions of the teeth and stuff, and they look really photo realistic.

You could download these unique natural libraries. So I’m gonna mention this because you mentioned about the ability to show them. So imagine you loom them now and you’ve now got a photo of them, and now you can quickly just cycle through a few different smiles as well. So Smile Cloud comes highly recommended from my friend Dr. Ricky Bhopal and had a look at their pricing. It’s bloody cheap.

[Prav]
How much is it?

[Jaz]
It’s like 20 quid a month, mate, for 120 cases. That’s, that’s bloody good. That’s, that’s really, really good.

[Prav]
I think it’s a Straumann product, but I might be completely wrong.

[Jaz]
Even Joe Rogan gets it wrong sometimes. It’s cool.

[Prav]
Or that they invested in it or something. I don’t know. Maybe, maybe, maybe I’m well, it doesn’t really matter what product it is really. It looks amazing. I’d actually, I’d love to just play around with this now that you’ve mentioned it.

[Jaz]
You can do like a free trial. So I’m going to give that a go, but I just want to share it with the Protruserati what I’m thinking at the moment in terms of these ways to communicate with patients, different previews, smile previews, if you like.

So that was a very promising there. The other one that’s quite promising for patient communication is ChairSyde. So. ChairSyde is like video animations with a click of a button that you can show to the patient. So, I’m a big fan. I’m quite old fashioned. I’m a big fan of the whiteboard and pen and drawing stuff for patients, right? This is that on like major steroids and like, they’ve thought of every single scenario. Now you’ve been speaking to Loven. I’ve seen it live demo before. What is your take on ChairSyde?

[Prav]
So, look, I don’t know enough about it yet but Loven and Co have just engaged us to do their sort of Brand Movie, like a brand strategy piece for them and just a repositioning piece for ChairSyde, right?

What I do know about ChairSyde is their mission and their values as a company. Yeah, their whole piece is not about the clinician, but it’s about impacting and educating patients so that they understand things better. I think definitely it’s a conversion tool. Yeah, definitely. It’s a conversion tool.

You can see their animations. They’ve invested so much of this in terms of time, energy, money, whatever. So, I mean, look, if clinician, like everything we’ve discussed today, including these jaw dropping animations, ChairSyde that we can show the patients and we talk about these perio pockets and you show them what the pocket looks like and all the rest of it.

And in these animations, right. The loom videos. The Digital TCO in my mind, if you’re not embracing all of this, I think it’s absolutely barmy. I think it’s crazy not to, because every single one of these, the ChairSyde tool with the animations, right. The Digital TCO, the Leadflo piece, the Loom videos, all of them, right.

Let’s forget about the money and the conversion and conversion rates and marketing and sales and all the rest of it. They deliver a better patient experience. The fact that you are now as a clinician talking more to the patient and the machine, the patient’s getting more value out of you. So the patient experience is better.

If you’re sending loom videos pre and post treatment plan, the patient experience is better. If you’re showing these animations on ChairSyde. And the patient now understands what a root canal is, the patient experience is better. Yeah, so even if that’s all you want, and every dentist should want this. It’s absolutely barmy not to embrace it all.

[Jaz]
I think the whole Smile cloud thing is more like getting the patient to visualize the outcome. I was gonna make a joke that imagine you had a not ChairSyde. Imagine way back when you had a hair side and you can and like a explanation of what actually happens in animation form.

You never know, maybe you would’ve converted. Yeah. All right. There’s a 30% chance. That’s the joke of the day. I won that one. Okay. So that’s like a process. So ChairSyde is process centered. Smart cloud is outcome centered, but here’s what I loved about ChairSyde. Again, I don’t use this.

I have no affiliation with them, but I did demo it one day when doing AI talk. And what I love is when the patient gets an email, you kind of select which animation you want to send them. You may have shown them in the clinic as well. This was the magic thing for me. They get an email and then they say, okay, this looks great.

Let me book my appointment. I would like to book my appointment or actually I need more time to think. Well, actually I’ve got some more questions and they get to select that and they get to keep the conversation going or they get to just accept the treatment plan then and there. That for me was really cool.

[Prav]
Yeah, it’s a sales tool. It’s a thing. And then there is there a consent piece where if they watched a certain amount of that video, you’ve sent them or whatever is, is there a piece in that?

[Jaz]
I don’t know exactly about what percentage they watch and whatnot. It probably is. But again, the whole element of consent, the fact that they’ve had to watch it and you get proof that they watched it is also for consent.

So you’re right. So ChairSyde, I was very impressed with, would I invest in it as an associate? If my practice got it, I’d be really chuffed. Do you see what I mean? Like if I practice, my principal said to me, guys, we’re using ChairSyde. I’d be like, yeah, this is great. I can totally implement this in my clinic and looks really good.

The other one is Pearl, Pearl is for radiographs. Can you just head over to Pearl website? So Pearl is for radiographs. Basically, I love their slogan, their ads and stuff. It’s your radiographs, but now in color. Because so often I’m pointing to the, we’ve got this big giant Samsung screen.

[Prav]
What’s the URL? It’s not Pearl.

[Jaz]
Maybe it’s Pearl. I don’t know. Maybe Google it. Pearl. All right. Sweet.

[Prav]
This is it.

[Jaz]
So Pearl, like so many times I’ve been there. We’ve got this massive Samsung screen. I’m showing the patient their bite wings. Okay. Well, this is your wisdom tooth. And do you see this little smudge over here?

That’s tooth decay. And they’re like, really? I mean, I remember being a dental student and looking at these radiographs saying, I can’t see, I can’t see shit. Okay. And so patients are thinking that like, okay, I’ll take his word for it because I can’t see shit when you put them in color. Wow. Like suddenly the, Oh yeah.

Okay. He’s not BSing. I can actually see there’s something there. So that’s pretty cool. I like it as well. Again, would I be investing as an associate? Maybe not. But if my principal said to me that guys, we’re all going to start using Pearl. I’d be like all over it. So that was the best radiographic thing I’ve seen in terms of AI and also a communication tool.

[Prav]
So when you say you said on two occasions, you’ve now said, would I be investing as an associate? Probably not. Why?

[Jaz]
Okay. So there are some things, okay, that you kind of expect the principal to buy, but then there’s so good sometimes that if your principal won’t buy it, you’ll buy it yourself. Right? So, so many, so many things I bought myself, right? A lot of things, far too many things, right? When it comes to software. Like, the Digital TCO, the practice don’t pay for it, I pay for it, okay? So, I pay for that because it just makes my life easier and I get time out of that, okay? When you look at the fees, it offers of two, three hundred pounds for an associate to foot that kind of bill, right?

For software, like, if you’re going to be using it every day and you’re absolutely in love with it, I think you can totally justify it. Will you make your money back? I think, you know what, you probably will as well. But I think if a practice as a business buys it and then gives licenses to all the associates, that’s probably the more accepted model.

So it’s probably the principals that usually seek that purchase and then give it to their associates. I just wouldn’t because the things are the way I’m working them is working for me. I would love it as a Brucie bonus. If I’m practicing, Hey guys, we’ve just invested in Pearl. I’d be like, yes, that’s so cool. Kind of thing. So that’s where I’m coming from. Do I think it can be a return on investment as an associate? I think it can, but it might be with the expense level. It might be pushing it a bit.

[Prav]
So your message really is like for me as a practice owner, if I want to give value to my associates, then by investing in, let’s say a Pearl license for the team or a ChairSyde license for the team or whatever, as a practice owner, is seen, or you would only see it as a Brucie bonus. Oh, this is great. I’ve got access to this or whatever. I’m going to use it.

[Jaz]
Yes. Yeah. That, but you know, I would say, and you’ve been in this situation, I would say if you’re a practice principal, have a practice meeting with all your associates and show them and make them come up with the idea, say, can I get it rather than you imposing it on them? Cause then it won’t get used. But if it’s their idea saying, Oh, can we get Pearl? Then it’ll get used. You’ve been there.

[Prav]
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Even if it’s your idea.

[Jaz]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Prav]
Yeah, absolutely.

[Jaz]
So Pearl’s been a super impressive in that regard. And those are the main ones I want to talk about today. The only thing I want to borrow some more expertise from you is the whole Google reviews thing. So let’s say you’ve done the whole Pearl, ChairSyde, patients have the treatment, done these wonderful letters and looms and that kind of stuff. You use Digital TCO, you got the bum in the seat using lead flow, for example, the whole circle. What’s your recommended software, if any? For collecting reviews, because at the moment we’re in the practice, we’re using something called, I think it’s Reputation, maybe is that one?

[Prav]
Yeah. Doesn’t that collect some other sort of reviews or do you know what?

[Jaz]
It doesn’t go on Google. It goes on like a work. No, we use working feedback. We use working feedback. Yeah, that’s it.

[Prav]
Yeah. I’m not, I don’t know who working feedback is, but I’m not a fan. And it’s because it’s look, any reviews is better than none. So I’m being hypercritical here. But for me, the reviews on Google carry more weight on bringing in new business.

Helps with your Google local rankings so that you appear more visible in search. So for me, Google reviews are the Holy grail, right? One of the things that we do in, in baked into the Leadflo software is at the end of treatment, right? We send out a request for a review via email. And also you can trigger it via SMS.

The conversion rate via SMS is so much higher. So much higher because you send them the link that takes them to your profile for the Google review. So as soon as they get the SMS and they click on that link, boom, straight there, click your stars, write your review. It’s a little bit like the QR code thing I do when I give lectures.

So whenever I give a talk somewhere, right at the end, I say, right, guys, what I’d love you all to do now, I’d like you to do me a favor. I’d like you to hold your phones up, turn the camera on, and then I changed the slide to my QR code and say, just stop this code and just write in the next slide. What you got out of today.

And it’s a great way of getting like 30 Google reviews in one hit. Yeah, but it’s the same thing, the same link that QR code takes you to, you can send in a text message to a patient and you will elevate reviews. So I’ve not used, and there’s tons of software out there, getfivestars. com and so on and so forth that manages it.

There are also companies out there who will dial into your SOE and say of all the patients who came in in the last X, Y, and Z, ask them for a Google review. But the interesting thing here when it comes to asking for Google reviews, a lot of practices think it’s just the patients who’ve completed Fancy Pants treatment, right?

But it’s not. It’s for bloody everyone, right? Even the patient who’s come in for their 55th hygiene at your practice. Yeah. It’s for everyone. And so we should be asking everyone. And whether that’s a request that goes out via mass text, mass WhatsApp, email, or whatever, or you use one of these, these pieces of software. If you use Leadflo, it’s baked into that anyway, but I don’t think LeadFlo is necessarily the best tool for doing that because-

[Jaz]
But it’s baked in, like you said, and you thought about that, you’ve been mindful of that in the development stuff, but yeah, okay.

[Prav]
Yeah, but actually, I was in a practice yesterday and I, we were talking about sort of SMS and WhatsApp communication with patients and stuff. The TCO was saying to me, what’s working really well for Google reviews is just sending the patient a WhatsApp with the link. And they do it there and then, and respond and say done.

[Jaz]
As in like there and then like at the clinic? No, just, okay, quite quick to respond. Quite quick to respond, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I like that. I think just, just sending your existing patient base a WhatsApp as a means of communication. I like that because we’re too reliant in our practice in, on email for that. So I think texts agree that the, it goes up. And then WhatsApp I think is a real gem there actually.

[Prav]
Yeah. Open rates are far higher than, so there’s two things when it comes to email. And SMS or messaging communication, number one is deliverability. And number two is open rates, right? And so if I send an email to a thousand people, I’m not necessarily going to hit a thousand inboxes, right? I’m going to hit some filtered spam, archive, this, that, and the other, and some inboxes.

If I send a thousand SMSs, I’m on your phone. If you’ve got notifications on, I’m on your front screen and the open rate is insane in comparison. So whenever we do campaigns for new clients, right. And they say, hey, I want to get a truckload of implants through the door, some ortho. I asked him about their existing data first.

I said, let’s go mining for some gold first in your practice. Yeah, because they’ve got pots of gold sat in your practice. So show me all the inquiries that came in 90 plus days ago. Let’s go back five years and send them a single text message and let’s go hunting. Because before going for fresh blood on Google or Facebook ads and spending thousands on there. There’s so much value in them. I always say I can walk into any practice and extract value out of the data. I’m so confident about that.

[Jaz]
Well, talking of fresh blood, let’s end on just telling us about the fresh, about everything you do. How can we reach out to you? How can we learn more from you? And also about Leadflo.

Again, all these things we talk about, I’ll put links in there. Loom, Digital TCO, all the things, you know, Pearl, ChairSyde, I’ll put there so that everyone can access it, but just tell us about how to learn more from you and all the things that you guys do.

[Prav]
I think the best way to, if anyone wants to connect, the best way to connect is just go to prav.com because all roads will lead to the same path, right? Whatever you’re interested in, go to prav.com. I offer complimentary discovery call. You can jump on there and we can talk about anything to do with growth of your business, whatever that is, whether it’s a practice, whether it’s you as an associate clinician or a dental business, right?

So we work with everyone and we do everything from sort of branding to consultancy to actual software development for some businesses. But the overall aim, when we sat down and did our brand values, right. And we said, well, what’s our mission, what we trying to do. And we came up with this concept, which is freedom for dental professionals, right?

That’s what we’re trying to create. And that freedom can be in many ways. So some clients come to us and they want freedom and freedom comes in a monetary format. For some people, freedom comes in, I want to do less clinical days. Do you know what I mean? Business growth, whatever that is that what that’s what we’re focused on. So, yeah.

[Jaz]
Amazing. Prav Solanki. PS is a good guy to know. I always love your, tagline. Actually. I need a cool one. So Prav, thanks for making time, brother. I really appreciate it. I a lot of value. Talked a lot of things. I learned a lot of things actually today about the whole thing, about the landline versus the mobile, that was like an eye opener and various other things that you shared with us today.

So again, I will summarize it all. This is a very rare, different type of CPD today. So you’re learning about the different softwares and stuff. So that’ll be eligible for CPD as well. So Prav, thanks so much, my friend.

[Prav]
Peace, brother. Thank you.

Jaz’s Outro:
Well, there we have it, guys. Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. There was a lot of substance in there and lots of business financial education from Prav. And so this episode is eligible for CPD. If you’re a Protrusive member on Protrusive Guidance and you’re a paid plan, you can get CPD through this episode by answering a few questions. If you want to talk about software that you’ve been enjoying, please comment below, let us all know which other softwares are out there that we should know about, and maybe in next year’s review, we could talk about some new softwares, very exciting space, always developing.

There’s probably two more softwares which we didn’t get a chance to talk about. One is a dental Audio note. So as well as using Digital TCO to actually do the AI and the note building, I’m still using dental audio notes, which is like its own software on my MacBook or on the computer, which is like a standalone software.

And that’s also doing the audio recording. I just like to have a backup because if I’m going all in and relying on audio for my notes, I don’t want to just rely on one source. I want two sources, but that’s just me. And also have a soft spot because Ala and Adam who run DAN are just so lovely. And Ala is a Protruserati and they were on the podcast and I just love their software.

So clean. I have no financial interest but do check out Dental Audio Notes. If you’re getting serious about the whole audio recording Digital TCO, I would complimentary run it with dental audio notes and all these subscriptions are still very, very well priced and they’re tax deductible. The next one, which I’ve talked about some while ago is with my friend, George Andre Cardoso is his software is called Make Me Clear.

I think this was episode 49, how to write crystal clear treatment plans. So this actually requires a bit of work. You have to like put the images in and you have to select which conditions they have. You have to put a charting, but for the bigger cases, I find that Make Me Clear makes a really nice and beautiful PDF or a printout that you can give to your patient.

So I’ve yet to find a software that makes something so nice. Now it requires a lot more work. It’s not like Digital TCO or just the AI will figure it all out. It is a bit of work involved, but for the bigger value cases, I think Make Me Clear is a really good software. If you like the idea of that, check out the episode PDP 049 to learn more about how make me clear works.

And then we have a Protrusive coupon code for that view. I think the conclusion is that it’s very exciting. All these softwares are great, but if you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got. So pick something, make a change. I know it’s overwhelming to make too many changes at once, but maybe find all those softwares that we discussed.

Which is your pain area is patient communication and real struggle for you. Then maybe ChairSyde might be something for you to try. If radiographs are an issue for you, and as a practice, maybe consider doing a trial of Pearl. If you are struggling to manage your lead and you want to be more business savvy, then maybe check out Leadflo.

And of course, if you want to solve all your issues with notes, you want to check out Digital TCO, etc. So find something you like from this episode and one thing at a time, run with it. Wishing you all the best. I’ll catch you same time, same place next week. Bye for now.