With the help of Amplify360, part of Alatus Solutions, a Nebraska dental practice has increased its new patient numbers significantly and grown revenue along the way.
It helped to have friends share their previous experiences with Amplify360, but when Adam Langan, DDS, started to see great results in his own practice, he knew that turning to Amplify360 was a wise move on his part.
Dr Langan, who practices in his hometown of Norfolk, Nebraska, purchased a practice in 2010 from a dentist, who was his neighbor. At that time, Dr Langan had little experience using any marketing for his practice because he was focused primarily on delivering top-notch dentistry.
Amplify360, Part of Alatus Solutions
Alatus Solutions is a results-fueled MarTech firm anchored by Amplify360, illumitrac Software®, DentalPost, and Local Search for Dentists. The goals-focused company provides specialized solutions and dedicated support to dental practices and organizations. With a set of meaningful marketing, membership, and hiring solutions and services, Alatus Solutions’ all-encompassing portfolio is designed to take individuals and practices from where they are to where they want to be.
Approximately 50% of the practice’s patients had Medicaid coverage, and the other 50% were older patients who had been with the previous dentist through most of his career, Dr Langan estimates. Some of the patients who came with the practice didn’t stay with the office. All these situations made for a tricky start to Dr Langan’s career. “So for the first year or so, we struggled to get the word out that we were around, that it was a new practice, and that we were modernizing and becoming more of today’s practice,” he says.
Dr Langan had heard a little about Amplify360, which is part of the Alatus Solutions portfolio. He was impressed that the company was specific to dentistry and decided to give it a try. The company’s practice marketing approach involves listening to clinicians’ goals so that it can provide tailored solutions. Dentists can break through the ceiling of complexity and leave preferred provider organizations forever with the help of advanced practice assessment analysis software and a tailored marketing strategy.
“I started working with them on creating an awareness campaign and getting things out,” Dr Langan says. “First and foremost, back in 2011 and 2012, there wasn’t nearly as much of the online presence that there is now. So their methods have evolved over time. But it helped as our practice evolved. It helps to keep up the same image that we were promoting internally within the practice, externally updating and modernizing what they were using for methods of new patient outreach.”
It didn’t take long for Dr Langan to realize the company was dedicated to making sure he succeeded. “What they were doing was the real deal, and they truly cared about me and the practice, not just getting some dollars out of a contract that I signed with them,” he says. “And they’ve continued to show that over the course of more than a decade, with the team training that they offer, the involvement, the follow-up calls that we do routinely.”
Amplify360 constantly monitors phone calls that come to the office, tracking them, recording them, and reviewing them. “[For] every single call that comes in, they can categorize and say this is an existing patient, this is a new patient, this new patient called and scheduled, and this patient didn’t schedule,” Dr Langan says.
One of the company’s biggest advantages, according to Dr Langan, is that they show clinicians during the initial presentation the ability to track every source and lead that comes in and to illustrate what their return on investment is.
The Results
The number of New patients has increased greatly since the practice brought Amplify360 on board, and with that came strong revenue growth. “That’s a big, long story,” Dr Langan says. “When I started with them, we were probably seeing 5 new patients a month. Then, before I hired my associate, we were seeing on average 35 to 40 new patients a month. Now that I have an associate dentist with me for the past 2.5 years, we’re seeing on average 70 to 75 new patients a month. Revenue-wise, and this is kind of cliché, but we’re easily [at] 10 times what we were doing.”
Building an online presence takes time, Dr Langan admits, but the practice started with a direct mail program featuring nicely printed, nice-looking flyers with strong content and graphic designs and experienced a return right away. “People started calling immediately and still do to this day,” Dr Langan says. “We still do [direct mailings], and I almost don’t believe that they work as well as they continue to do.”
Another area where Amplify360 helped was the online presence buildup. “That takes a little more time to gain momentum, but once you gain that momentum, that ball’s rolling and it’s hard to stop it,” Dr Langan says. “Within 3 years, we had everything in place, and then we just periodically review and decide whether there are new updates, budget changes, strategy changes, whatever it might be.”
Dr Langan appreciates the attention and support he receives from Amplify360, noting that his main representative John Riley initially flew out to see the practice and get a feel for things. Since then, the company has provided honest, great feedback. Team training and tracking capabilities are the most impressive parts of the Amplify360 package, Dr Langan says.
“They give you the information to know that you’re making a good decision, and they come to me when something isn’t working or they think we need to modify it,” Dr Langan explains. “Rather than just continue to throw dollars at something, they tell me how to reinvest it, move something into a new sort of method.”
The team training aspect is very thorough. Dr Langan says Amplify360 does many things above and beyond what they need to do with the training of his team. The Amplify360 staff sits down and has phone calls or video calls monthly with the team on certain training topics, how to handle new patient calls and insurance objections, how to track things, how to thank patients by sending out appreciation gifts, and “those things that sometimes get slipped under the rug when we’re busy running a practice. They make us refocus on the things that matter to continue to grow our practice.”
The onboarding process was smooth, with Amplify360 addressing what Dr Langan wanted from the practice and what needed to improve and breaking down the roles of each team member. “The biggest thing is that I still feel the relationships and interactions we’re having with the folks from Amplify360 are going strong,” he says, adding that he and his team treated like friends.
What’s Next?
Dr Langan is glad to have witnessed Amplify360 grow in the past few years to the point that more clinicians are taking advantage of the services that helped his practice take off. “It’s great that they’re becoming a bigger player in the overall marketplace,” he says. “Now they’re reaching out with much broader strokes of things that they can do. They’re realizing now the things that they didn’t know they could do, so when they come to me with some ideas and some of the evaluation tools that they have for the practice evaluation, that’s an impressive thing. They’ve got a cool and slick system for evaluating the numbers.”
