Tag Archives: costo

7 February 2019Blog ENattenzioni, cliente, comodità, confronti, costo, cura, dentista, impianti, marketing, modernità, necessità, ortodonzia, paziente, prezzi, professione odontoiatrica, protesi dentali, qualità, richieste, salute, strategia, tempisticheBioservice

Patient or Customer?

Patient or costumer? …simply two sides of the same coin!
Let’s analyse the two words that make up the dichotomy.
Patient means “person affected by a disease, and more generally, who is entrusted to the care of a doctor or a surgeon”, while customer in current use is “who usually uses the services of someone or buys what he needs from the same supplier” (Italian Dictionary).
In the light of the definitions it seems easy to assert that, since the dentist is a doctor, the people who turn to him are his patients as a result. But how much have the patient’s requests and the service provided by the dentist changed?
The dentist knows that the patient has much wider demands than “simple pain treatment” so it ranges from aesthetics to orthodontics. The practitioner decides to invest money and time with equipment and learning curve to satisfy the wishes of the patient who gradually becomes more and more “customer” given the varied demands that go beyond pathologies. It requires a service, weighs the costs and analyses them from an economic point of view. Certainly the best thing to do is not to catalogue or label, it will be the request itself that will make the individual a patient or a client. The patient has a painful problem that he wants to eradicate by relying on the wise hands of his doctor, the customer has intentions and evaluates the economic exchange to meet needs or desires.
It seems almost as if the two roles are intertwined: there are alternating phases in which the individual demonstrates to calculate, to choose in a very careful way, and this denotes typical traits from the client, then the phase in which the individual makes contact with the doctor and listens to him in the diagnosis and in the proposed line of care, and the figure of the patient is outlined, when it comes to estimates, it is natural to emerge again the trait of the purchaser. All in all, it is nothing more than a mix of both figures that alternate by weighing costs and benefits, quantity and quality.
From the ethical point of view of the medical profession, it is advisable to attribute the term “patient” to the individual because of the service provided by the doctor himself at the time of need. Having said this, the new frontiers (demands) in the dental field have shifted the horizon of the dental profession, widening the margins of work and profit for the dentist, who inevitably has to make use of prudent marketing strategies to propose his services while maintaining intact the ethical sense and a correct perception of the real state of health of the patient himself.
The person has multiple needs and the dentist can find a way to accommodate them: the patient requires care, attention, seriousness, professionalism, continuity; the client asks for prices (check the rates and compare them), convenience (the location of the office, if it is more or less easy to get there and park), timing (number of sessions, speed of execution), avant-garde (the latest techniques in use to be sure to get the best results), modernity (there is a need to develop the office and follow the trends of the moment regarding image and dental aesthetics).
The spectrum of relationships has expanded but the focus remains on the individual and his needs, whether as a patient or client.

25 October 2018Blog ENaccoglienza, ambiente, costo, cura, dentista, impianti, ortodonzia, paziente, preventivo, professionalità, protesi dentali, studio odontoiatricoBioservice

Patient’s expectations

patient expectations blog bioservice matrix

Let’s go in the patient’s shoes… do they go wide or narrow?
Each company is committed to managing its work by focusing on the needs of its customers, in the same way the dentist must have at heart the expectations and needs of its patients.
We want to find answers to these seemingly trivial questions:
What do patients expect? Why should a patient choose a professional over another? What are the variables that determine preference?
We asked a sample of people with different ages, interests, needs, habits, jobs and lives directly to answer these simple questions regarding the choice of the dental office. The choices come from well-defined parameters. It will be interesting to compare the patient’s expectations with those of the Doctor by comparing them with the results of the survey. Specifically, the survey was conducted on a sample of 150 individuals (Italy, September 2018, sample varied in terms of age, average user from the economic point of view) involving all age groups: children under 12, children under 20, people under 45, over 45 and middle-aged over 65. The questions, being open-ended, required interpretation in order to manage the final data in calculable percentages.
In general, this type of trend and preference emerged:
Care for the environment and hospitality
With a percentage of 90%, respondents expressed this basic need. The children have underlined the need to enter dental surgeries as little as possible aseptic, with dedicated areas and smiling staff. In order to avoid the white hospital gown, colours would be fundamental in order to brighten up the context, making it “less medical and more playful”. On the other hand, the rest of the interviewees, also raising the age range, show the same need that is to be welcomed in an environment that is able to infuse as much as possible serenity, familiarity and positivity through colours, furnishings, cleanliness and corners recreation / recreation.
360° information
With a percentage of 85%, the request for information is overwhelming. The remaining percentage includes almost exclusively the “under 12” bracket, which is directed by close relatives for the choice of the attending physician and which trusts the information in the possession of their relatives. From the adolescent age group, gradually growing with the age of the interviewed, the desire is to have useful information about the study, treatment, types of interventions; first of all, patients admit to check the presence in the waiting room of the information material (transfer of valuable content) and then ask the team itself the ability to communicate and give explanations and comprehensive guidance. Information on site and online through an updated and functional website where you can find most of the information. The demand for modernity and avant-garde involves all age groups.
Clarity on estimates and costs
Most of the respondents (65%) are convinced that the cost is a relative problem for the pockets, also considers fundamental the explanation of the various items that make up the estimate explained from the point of view of the treatment even before the price. The widespread need is to find the right professionals who know how to recommend the best intervention, in the time and number of essential sessions (widespread fear is that of optional treatments that only inflate the fee). Patients also need to be able to defer payment, so as to embrace full treatments divided into several steps with payment in instalments.
Comfort
Excluding the children who have strictly highlighted the playful part of the pre-visit, the rest of the respondents (70%) said that the choice of dentist also depends and above all on this type of factor that embraces both the willingness to fix the visits, check-ups, interventions in days near the call or in accordance with the needs of the patient and the convenience of the location of the office; the proximity to free parking, to service centres, to quiet areas that are easy to reach and leave without further costs in economic terms and in terms of time in the event of reaching areas with limited or congested traffic.
What others think
Almost all the interviewees showed that the choice of the dentist is determined by the word-of-mouth factor (90%), coming from the opinions of friends and acquaintances (judgement taken into consideration) as well as from the web in which they pull up the reviews left by patients (monitoring especially by young people under 45). It would be appropriate for the dentist to have a clear idea about the widespread idea of his practice, especially the online reputation that spreads in a viral way. Thanks to the virtual presence (social, website, familiarity with various platforms) the doctor will be able to monitor and act on his image to improve and propagate it (by advertising). And this is how the patient himself requires the presence of the dentist on the web to be able to quickly compare his profile with that of other colleagues and draw his own (partial) conclusions.
The statistics have shown that those interested want to be informed and comfortable.

6 July 2018Blog ENcosto, cura, dentista, impianti, informazione, low-cost, marketing, odontoiatria, paziente, professionalità, protesi dentali, reputazione, salute, studio odontoiatricoBioservice

Dental technician is a doctor or a seller of teeth?

dental technician seller teeth blog bioservice matrix

How has the context in which the dentist works changed? Is the dentist a doctor or a seller of teeth? What is the benefit for the patient?
These questions open Pandora’s box in the field of Dental, a huge amount of reflections placed in the context in which our Professional operates.
The panorama has completely changed, the dentist finds himself living the so-called “empty drawer syndrome” and suffers the presence and the pressing spread of the “low cost” chains. It seems that the last solution to adopt, considering the “crisis” that has emptied the agenda, is that of the sale of sales in the dental field! As if the value of the service were eclipsed in the face of the advantageous price.
The so-called chains operate on economies of scale and on marketing communication (with a focus on the most expensive therapies such as orthodontics and prosthetics, especially on implants), all this has favoured demand but first of all has created new models of reference on the market. The communication used by the chains, and the huge budgets allocated to this dissemination of information, have had a significant impact on the market, because on the one hand they have made implantology better known and on the other they have destabilized the pricing policies of the traditional dental system. Given the low prices, the collective “value” of therapies has been lost.
In fact, the tendency on the part of the average Italian patient is not to abandon the traditional study but to rely more and more on the chain for expensive interventions (prosthetics and orthodontics). From statistics – data other consumption 2016- the average cost of a patient with a traditional dentist is about 370€ while it is about 900€ when he decides to turn to a chain.
But you should not be suspicious in the face of the word marketing, it means nothing more than “create and give value to the service“, marketing is not purely sales. People don’t buy products but solutions to their problems and that’s why ethical marketing uses communication to express values, spread the culture of health and raise awareness of the need for care by stimulating the economy of the dental office. Therefore, the dental office must have a healthy communication and a good dialogue with the patient, that is, transparency; the patient appreciates who follows him/her in the course of treatment, who motivates the provision of the service by illustrating the quality of the service itself. The service given by the doctor to the patient is not only based on the “tooth product” but above all on the ability to make a diagnosis. One cannot be undervalued and talk about the price of the product (tooth) when the doctor’s fee is based first of all and above all on the provision of the service.
Ultimately, people do not buy what you do but why you do it. Giving a predefined price to a diagnosis, a treatment, or a rehabilitation plan is absolutely incompatible with the service itself. There are certainly fixed costs such as material, production, transfers and deliveries, physical developments, equipment, but the cost of a service is not bound and justified only by these amounts but the intrinsic value of the service provided by the doctor. The doctor advises, clarifies, includes and follows the patient before, during and after. The doctor enables the patient to benefit from the best possible service, made up of competence and mastery of knowledge and tools. This makes the difference, creates value and must be disseminated through targeted information.