Why Dentistry Needs to Stop Chasing the YES

02 Oct Why Dentistry Needs to Stop Chasing the YES

Dentistry has spent a lot of time chasing the YES.  Of course, case acceptance and treatment uptake matter, and it’s understandable for a dental business to pay attention to them. But somewhere along the way, the patient saying yes becomes our measure of whether the conversation was successful, and that tells us surprisingly little about the quality of the decision.

A patient saying yes doesn’t necessarily mean they understood. A patient saying no doesn’t mean the conversation failed.

We need to stop making the YES our measure of success. Trust isn’t based on the number of patients who say yes, we should be much much more interested in understanding how the decision became possible.

• Did the patient understand their choices?
• Could they question the recommendation?
• Did we explore what mattered to them?
• Could they comfortably disagree?
• Did something the patient said actually change what happened next?
• And, ultimately, did the decision genuinely feel like theirs?

Patients don’t experience their care as a collection of unrelated transcripts; they experience a communication journey, and carrying some of that understanding from one conversation into the next could help create continuity that goes beyond simply remembering the clinical facts. With the right insights, we can start to see patterns that matter. One conversation tells us what happened, and several may make us wonder whether it’s happening again, but many conversations reveal patterns we couldn’t previously see. These aren’t patterns that let a computer decide what kind of dentist you are, they are patterns that give you something to be curious about.

This is why we have developed Unpack. The dentists who are BETA testing Unpack through Club Connect are helping us understand what works, what doesn’t, what we’ve got wrong and what genuinely makes someone stop and think differently about a conversation they’ve just had. That’s important because we don’t want Unpack to become a communication score, we don’t want a league table of dentists, and we’re definitely not trying to build another sales tool dressed up as communication training.

We’ve created something that helps good clinicians keep learning from one of the richest sources of feedback available to them: their own patients. The technology matters, but the curiosity it creates matters much more.

What are your conversations teaching you?

We’re currently testing Unpack with dentists in Club Connect and gradually inviting more dentists to join Early Access.

Unpack isn’t being built to help dentists get more patients to say yes. It’s being built to help us understand what happens before a yes, or a no.

Stop chasing the YES. Start understanding the decision.