OK, so far in Part 1 I’ve talked about joining an online study club as a way to stay connected, keep abreast of what colleagues are doing to adapt to our new economy, and to save money on top quality CE. And in Part 2 about reintroducing and revamping dentures into your practice as a major source of new revenue. In this next installment I’m going to introduce you to a brand-new service you can offer that will fill a big gaping hole in your whole-health dental practice, AND provide you with a whole new stream of appreciative referral patients.
As health centric comprehensive dentists, we all are very aware of the importance of Dr. Wilkerson’s Four B’s – Bugs, Bite, Breathing, and Body. And in general, I think we all have excellent systems in our practices to address the first three. (If not, there’s another reason to join an online study club:) But it’s that forth one, the Body, that is our Achilles heel. And it certainly is not just us, medicine in general has done a p…s poor job as well. The reasons are numerous. At the top of the list though are –
- The medical insurance model under values preventive health care in general, and lifestyle coaching in particular.
- Corporate advertising and sponsorship of research skews popular understanding of what a healthy lifestyle really is.
- A nanny culture demotivates personal accountability.
- For most, comprehensive personal lifestyle coaching is prohibitively expensive.
Let’s face it, incorporating lifestyle medicine into our practices is hard! And it’s not something you can easily refer out because the medical community isn’t any better equipped for it than is the dental. Up until recently, the most effective way to facilitate comprehensive lifestyle change – diet, exercise, stress management, and relationship repair; or as Dr. Dean Ornish puts it: “Eat Well, Move More, Stress Less, and Love More” – has been to check into a live-in health spa like the Pritikin Longevity Center, the Cleveland Clinic, or an Ornish Program. Effective, but way too impractical for most of our patients.
But what if you could provide your patients with a convenient and affordable proven program to bring their systemic inflammatory burden under control? A scientific evidence-based program proven to work not just in the short term, but to actually stick, providing lasting long-term health benefits as well. And what if you were to offer this program not only to your own patients, but to the patients of prevention oriented physicians in your local community? Can you see how that might be good for your patients? Might a program like that dovetail well with your oral-health practice? And do you think you could figure out how to educate your new lifestyle clientele about the value of oral health, i.e., generate some significant dental care from those lifestyle referrals?
Right now there are just three ways for you to incorporate lifestyle medicine into your practice – 1) Refer your patients to a live-in health spa. 2) Develop you own lifestyle coaching program; either become or hire a nutritionist, an exercise physiologist, and a psychologists. Or 3) Incorporate CHIP, the Complete Health Improvement Program, into your practice. I can tell you right now, #1 will be minimally effective – most of your patients just won’t/can’t do it. And #2 will require an extreme commitment that quite frankly will diminish your focus on exquisite dental care. Actually, here’s what Dr. John Kelly, Founding President of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, said about that – Though I had my own curriculum, when I saw CHIP’s quality and effectiveness, I switched and have never looked back. Which brings us back to CHIP, option #3.
Rather than repeat what I’ve already written, I’m going to take advantage of this online forum and refer you now to two webpages to learn what CHIP is all about. Here they are –
Look both of those over, then come back here and continue.
All right, if you didn’t know much about CHIP before you should know enough now to realize the futility of trying to generate an equally effective program on your own. So, assuming you really are committed to the best practice of Integrative Dental Medicine, you really only have three choices now –
- Find a CHIP facilitator near enough that you can refer to.
- Become a CHIP facilitator yourself. Or
- Partner with me, through CHIPonline.
The advantages of utilizing our online format are that it is available from anywhere, can be started anytime – no need to wait for a quorum to form, you don’t have to take any more training or increase your work load in anyway, and we keep you intimately involved without over burdening you. Here’s what I mean.
The CHIP program involves before and after lab testing to document each patient’s positive changes. The standard program includes a fingerprick blood test that can actually be self-administered by the patient that checks blood sugar and cholesterol. And in our program we also include a urine analysis from Inflammatory Markers Lab to confirm improvements in chronic inflammation. By requiring that patients physically come to you to get their test kits (I suggest that you have them collect the samples at your office too), we make you the local face of CHIP.
As our local CHIP partner, we will provide you with tools you can use to promote both your current integrative dental services and your new CHIP partnership to the medical community in your area. So not only will your existing patients benefit from evidence-based lifestyle coaching, but your referral network, and thus your practice, will grow significantly as well. Oh, and there is no cost or fee required to participate.
Don’t think of lifestyle coaching itself as a new profit center though. You’ll get the same remuneration as you get when you refer to your endodontist or oral surgeon. The margins are just too small to in a local community setting, which is another reason you don’t want to do this on your own. Instead, your rewards for participating are –
- Seeing real sustained health improvements in your patients that can only be accomplished through lifestyle improvement.
- Practice growth from becoming the go-to practice for Integrative Dental Medicine in a way that now other practice can match. Do I need to convince you that these new patients will already be pre-sold on preventive health care?
You are the choir, and I don’t need to preach to you about how critical oral and systemic health are to each other. And as educated and aware as you are, you also know how limited your efforts for your patients are unless supported by a healthy lifestyle. Now you have the final piece of the puzzle at your fingertips. E-mail me (Lon@DrLonPeckham.com) or schedule a phone call (drlon.youcanbook.me), and let’s get you up and running now.
NEXT: In Part 4 of this series, I’ll be interviewing Dr. Lee Ostler, past-president of the American Academy for Oral-Systemic Health, about next-level systemic healthcare. Great for your patients, and great for your practice.
Dr. Lon Peckham provides comprehensive and wholistic dental care in Priest River, Idaho. He is a consultant certified in Lead Management and Choice Theory, as a Lifestyle Health Facilitator, and is currently pursuing certification by the American Board of Lifestyle Medicine. He helps patients and dentists successfully incorporate whole-health into their lives and practices.