Dentaltown August 2019 - 16

professional courtesy
column

Is Your Practice About
Altitude or Attitude?
The airline industry provides many interesting
parallels to dental practice and I thought it'd be interesting
to explore those in the context of what might be ahead
for our profession. Let's start with the key components:
* Plane fleet = practice size.
* Crew = office staff (a number that fluctuates
with the size of the plane and fleet).
* Passengers = patients.
* Seats = appointments (empty seats
are unfilled time in your schedule).
* Flight = dental procedure (some procedures
are more expensive than others).
* Fuel = overhead (labor and fuel are the two costs
that most affect the bottom line of an airline-
it is the same for many dental practices).
* Baggage fees = anything you charge for
that used to be free.
Both airline flights and dental treatments operate
with little margin for error, and delays due to unforeseen
circumstances cost companies money and customers time.
Two areas that create great frustration for passengers
are baggage fees and ticket-change fees, but they're now
profit centers for many airlines-in 2017, baggage fees
and change fees accounted for more than $7 billion in
revenue. While some dental practices charge patients for
no-shows or late cancellations, this in no way represents
a future profit center; the notion of charging patients
to change their appointments would certainly lead to
less rescheduling, but would be difficult to implement.
Dental practices, unlike airlines, can't offer the
equivalent of a frequent-flyer program. Some might
argue that a patient who has insurance
or buys an in-house plan receives a
benefit of membership, but that's not a
system that rewards them based on the
number of procedures completed or
dollars spent. In dentistry, this would
be unethical and likely illegal. In a
practice where patient loyalty is valued,
the benefits come instead through
flexible scheduling or discounts for
patients without insurance.

The airline industry changed forever when
President Carter signed the Airline
Deregulation Act of 1978, which opened the industry
to increased competition and made it more attractive
for new airlines to form. This made air travel more
accessible to everyone thanks to lower fares.
The airline industry has gone through some significant
consolidation and now the main players are so big that it's
much more difficult to start a new airline. This begs the
question of whether we'll see that same trend in dentistry
over the next 5-10 years. As mega-DSOs continue to
expand, will their presence in major population centers
make it more difficult to open new solo practices? Will
the low-cost battle ultimately lead to the addition of
new fees for patients receiving care from large groups?
I know some will bristle at my attempt to draw
parallels between the airline industry and the practice
of dentistry-after all, we're providing health care, not
a ride from Point A to Point B. While that's true, at the
core, all businesses that deal with the general public have
service at their center. In the case of the airline industry,
the race to provide low fares increased flights, air traffic
and the number of people who could afford to fly.
However, it also made air travel a miserable experience.
Every month there's another video of a passenger or crew
member screaming at someone, planes parked on the
tarmac for insane amounts of time, and flight delays
for sometimes unexplained reasons. Will this be the
future of megacorporation dentistry?
A great experience should be available to any patient
regardless of the fee. Some dentists mistakenly assume
that their high fee means they already provide a great
experience, but practices that make the effort to provide
great service will win the day, no matter their size. For
example, Southwest Airlines generally has some of the
happiest employees and they have carved a niche of
low-cost fares without baggage fees.
What kind of airline are you running? Share
your thoughts in the comments under this article at
dentaltown.com/magazine. Or contact me directly:
tom@dentaltown.com (email) or @ddsTom (Twitter). ■

by Thomas Giacobbi, DDS, FAGD, editorial director, Dentaltown magazine

16

AUGUST 2019 // dentaltown.com
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Dentaltown August 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Dentaltown August 2019
