I am really excited to also introduce our partners, Curve, and join today joining me today, is Cody Kadell, the product specialist at Curve. She's going to also be sharing a little bit about Curve and, how Pearl and Curve are working together to best serve your practices.

So whether your team is new to Huddl's or just needs a refresh, today's session is all about making those morning meetings matter, less talk, maybe, more alignment, and real results. So here's a quick question to kick us off.

What would you change in your practice if every team member walked in truly prepared, not just for the day, but to take the very best care of each patient. Right? So what would you do to change that if you start your morning huddle a little differently tomorrow? And, ultimately, we know when we take the best care of the patient, the production always follows.

Right? So that's the best part here. That's exactly what today's speaker is gonna help us unlock. I'm thrilled to introduce Kelly Fox Galvini.

Galvini, did I say it right?

Yo, Bonnie. It's okay. Fine. It's good. I need some help. Baloney. It has a silent g.

One of the most knowledgeable and dynamic dental professionals in the field with over thirty years of experience as a clinical assistant, practice administrator, trusted adviser. Kelly's helped dozens of practices. I'm sure there's many of those you can tell us all about, some great stories. Hopefully, we'll hear about these morning huddles.

And I thought this was a really interesting doubling collections in under eighteen months by building leadership, streamlining basic systems that we're all aware of but maybe need a little more input, and really improving that communication. She brings unmatched energy, real world insight, and a real deep belief that dentistry is a career, not just a job. I really loved this on your website, which was knowing for inspiring a greater sense of purpose and success with fun along the way. And that's something that, in dentistry, we have to be mindful of.

Right? We gotta put a little more fun back in those morning meetings. You know? We all go in, oh, boy.

What are they gonna tell us today? And I really like that a lot of their work they've been doing is based on a lot of, individual practices on what they have seen work. So without further ado, I will turn it over to you, Kelly. Thank you so much for joining us.

Please be sure to stay and, have lots of time to have Kelly answer your questions, and I'll see you guys in just a little bit.

Awesome. Thank you so much for that wonderful intro, Sheela, and thank you, Cody, for hosting us this evening. So it's my pleasure to be here with everybody. I'm super pumped to talk to you guys about huddles.

I know sometimes huddles don't seem like the most interesting topic, but I'm here to tell you that when you do your huddles well, it will change everything about your day, your practice, your culture, and really overall your patient experience. That's what it's all about. Right? So I've been coaching on the East Coast for a real long time.

I've been practicing here in the New York metropolitan area for a very long time, but I've also traveled this great country. And what I've seen in my years as a dental team member and a dental coach is that most practices are doing things pretty well. They're trying. They're making an attempt.

They're, they've got great teams. They've got nice personalities. Most of the time they have really nice patient relationships. A lot of practices are using some super cool technology now like Curve and Pearl.

Right? They're doing the things. They're sort of swimming around in this fishbowl here that you see on the slide, doing the things but are also frustrated. They're feeling really burnt out.

They're feeling like maybe patients aren't as receptive to some of the things as they once were. It's hard to get people to keep their appointments. It's hard to get patients to understand insurance in network, out of network. And it's frustrating.

Right? Burnout is worse than it's ever been in dentistry. So what we know in our experience is that if you just refine some of the things that you're already doing well, you have an opportunity tonight to be that goldfish on the top of the slide that's gonna jump out of that fishbowl and jump into the world of curve and pearl and smile potential and refine your huddles in such a way that every day will be a day that is absolutely built for success and fun. So I'm Kelly Fox Galvani.

I've been in the field for over thirty five years here on the East Coast. I realized as a very young person in dentistry. I started in dentistry. I was really a teenager going to college, local community college for something that had nothing to do with dentistry.

As a young kid, I actually had pretty bad experiences with dentistry. I had a kind of really old school orthodontist, and he wasn't super friendly, and it was a really long arduous experience with my orthodontics.

I had a tooth that needed a root canal when I was a teenager. So in my wildest dreams, if you would have asked me when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, please tell me the top fifty things you'd like to be when you grow up. Dentistry would not have been in the top fifty. But life is funny.

Right? So when I was a kid going to community college, couple years later as a teenager, I was working part time in a health club at night, a fitness club, a gym, Gold's Gym, and I was working as a receptionist because my dream was to own a fitness club as a young person. That was what I thought was gonna be my great career. So I'd work at this desk at night, and the rule was in the gym that if a member came in, even if it was close to closing time, we needed to stay and let the member complete their workout, and we couldn't lock up and leave until they were done.

So we closed at eleven PM. And three or four nights a week at ten forty five, we had this tall, handsome member. He was tan. He had really beautiful, big white teeth.

And he would come in at night, right, fifteen minutes before we were supposed to close, and he would start his workout, and we'd have to stay and wait for him. But he was he was such a gentleman. He was always dressed to the nines, and he would walk up to my reception desk each night and say, hey, Kelly. You've got a beautiful smile.

Have you ever thought about being in dentistry? And I knew him as doctor d. That's what everyone called him. And I'd say, ew.

No. Doctor d. Teeth are disgusting. I would never. That's a terrible idea. And this went on for months and months and months.

And like many young people, as I pursued my college education and worked this part time job, I started to become a little disenchanted with my major and my, you know, potential career choice. So was kinda frustrated. I was kinda burnt out. I was talking to my parents about it.

My parents encouraged me. They said, hey. Maybe, you know, when that dentist comes in next time, if he asks you again, maybe you should just say yes, see what happens. So sure enough, he came in the next week or so and same exact thing, walked up to my desk a few minutes before closing time and said, hey, Kelly.

You've got a beautiful smile. Have you ever thought about being in dentistry? And I said, you know what, doctor d? Actually, yeah.

I'd like to. And so he reached into that double breasted suit that he was wearing into the the front pocket of his jacket, and he pulled out a fifty dollar bill, which, in the nineteen eighties, fifty dollars was a pretty impressive amount of money for a teenager going to school and working part time.

And he slid it across my desk, and he said, hey. Okay. Great. Here's fifty dollars.

Go buy yourself a pair of white pants and kids, and I'll see you tomorrow at two o'clock. And that's how I became a trained on the job dental assistant. And within a couple of weeks of working in a dental practice as a trained on on the job dental assistant, I realized that dentistry is one of the great loves of my life. And I just absolutely fell in love with everything about the profession.

I became so passionate about it. I was so thrilled with how much there was to learn and the patient relationships, and I never really looked back. But also as a really young person, I recognized that so many people in my profession were burnt out. They were overwhelmed, and they weren't loving it and enjoying it the way that I did.

And even, you know, as a young kinda inexperienced, not so educated person, I knew that there was more out there for people. And so it was always a dream of mine from when I was very young to help other dental professionals have that passion for dentistry like I did from the start. And so that was always in my mind, and then timing is everything in life. So seventeen years ago, my kids were growing up, and, it was just the right time for me in my life.

And that is when my coaching company, Smile Potential Dental Coaching, was born. So my team and I have been coaching practices on predominantly on the East Coast. We've got a few speckled around the country, but we really focus in our region for the last seventeen years, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut predominantly.

And, you know, it's a very busy high demand market here. A lot of challenges in this region. Every region has its own unique challenges, but we really believe that the morning huddle is a key part of what drives every successful practice. It's something that absolutely should never be skipped.

So let's talk a little bit about the history of modern dentistry. And I find this to be fascinating when we look at kind of all of the things that we've had available to us in dentistry throughout the years. So I came into dentistry in the nineteen eighties. Right?

So implants were still very new when I started in dentistry. And I can remember that same really visionary maverick dentist, doctor d, that I worked for my my first job as as a dental assistant. He was very innovative, and he was very progressive. And so we actually had a lot of patients that were having implantology done in New York City, and they were coming out to our practice in Eastern Long Island to have restorations done, implant restorations.

And a lot of times the cases were not really working. And as a young person, not, you know, not super experienced, I remember thinking, my goodness, these implants seem kind of barbaric. Like, I don't know if this is ever gonna work because they they'd fail a lot, and people would have bad infections, and patients would be disappointed. But isn't it interesting how absolutely essential implants have become to helping people live long healthy lives and chew their food and be confident about their smiles and look at how far we've come with implants?

And so since then, we've had, digital dentistry, which I am so grateful that I was there. I was working still full time as a chairside assistant when digital dentistry was born, and I got to be an early implementer of some of the technology that we use every single day now that we can't even live without.

And then aligner ortho, wow, amazing, especially considering my history with orthodontics. I would have given anything to have aligner ortho when I was a kid instead of the super barbaric old school orthodontics that I had. And now we have AI. How amazing.

It is changing everything about our lives, our world, and if we understand it about our dental practices, what a wonderful opportunity to help our patients. So as much as we rely on technology and as much as we love the progression of technology, the most important thing in dentistry is people. The people that are patients, the people that are the dentist, the people that are the team. And so in order to serve our patients really well, no matter how great your technology is, no matter how beautiful your facility is, no matter how talented you are doctors as a clinician, if you do not have a truly healthy team culture, it is unlikely that you will have highly satisfied patients and a truly successful practice.

So in my experience traveling the country as a speaker and here on the East Coast as a coach, we have pulled over a thousand dental team members.

And when we ask them, what are the things that you prioritize most as a dental team member? What are the things that make you the most satisfied? What do you really want? And as long as they feel that they are being paid fairly, as long as they feel that they are not grossly underpaid for their skill, their region, their experience, etcetera, they don't say money first, interestingly. They always say number one is appreciation.

Then they want clarity of expectations. They want goals. They wanna know what is really expected of them. And what gives someone more clarity for the day than an amazing huddle? Right?

Competitive wages and benefits. Yes. We are in the type of economy right now where team members want to keep advancing their income because that's the way it's working right now. They want strong and fair leadership.

They wanna know that there is a leader. They wanna know that the leadership is fair. There's not favoritism or or different rule rules for different people. So that's really important.

Managers and doctors on this webinar tonight think have a little self reflection and think, am I a strong leader? Am I a fair leader? If you're not, it's unlikely you have a healthy culture. Opportunity for growth in education.

Believe it or not, a lot of dental team members in all roles, not just roles that require CE for licensure, but dental professionals and dental team members in all roles really wanna grow. They wanna learn. They they don't wanna be left behind while doctors go to CE or doctors jump on a great webinar like this. Right?

So if you have not been inclusive with your team for education opportunities, practice owners, and managers on the webinar tonight, please reconsider that. They want it. They deserve it, and we want a team of experts serving our patients. They want work life balance.

Dental team members want some flexibility, if possible. And even if that means that it's PTO that has to be requested at whatever the appropriate time line is, they wanna have a little bit of flexibility. They want to have a good healthy work life balance.

And they like to know that they're in on things, meaning that if big changes are coming for the practice, like, for example, we're working with a practice right now in New Jersey that is in the process of switching to Curve. They're gonna be going live on Monday the eighteenth. The team in that practice was very, very involved in the doctor's decision making in switching their practice management software. So that team feels really invested in the success of this change because they feel like their opinion and concerns about changing were considered before the decision was made.

And so now we've got a team that is, like, super excited to switch softwares, which is not always so easy to accomplish. So we're we're really pumped for them to go live on curve in just a couple weeks. And then last but certainly not least, job security. People wanna know that they're working for a practice that is, stable and strong and that they're they can trust that their job is secure.

Secure. So these are the things that build a truly healthy team culture. And Huddl, as I said, clarity of expectations and goals is a huge part of it.

One of the things that I have found prevents practices today in twenty twenty five from committing to huddles consistently is the thought of we're too busy. We're so busy. We just can't figure out how to make it happen. We're too busy. We can't we can't you know, there's no way that we could start fifteen minutes later or come in fifteen minutes early. We're just too busy.

So if if that sounds like something that you hear yourself say or people on your team say that, I want you to take a step back and try to reframe that. Busyness is not good.

In dentistry, being productive is good, but busyness is actually the enemy because the busiest practices are rarely the most productive. So busyness and productivity are not synonymous, so please try to reframe your thought process. And let's start focusing on having productive days, not necessarily busy days. Again, a great huddle will help you road map that.

So why do huddles matter? Your huddle should really only have two purposes. It is to prevent problems and discover opportunities. When done properly, your huddle can be and should be your most productive ten minutes of the day.

So let's say, for example, patient start time is nine AM. That means that your huddle should begin at eight forty five. It's ten minutes. Doesn't matter if you have a total of five people attending the huddle or if you have twenty five people attending the huddle.

When done properly, according to the framework that we're going to discuss this evening, it only takes ten minutes. So if we start that huddle at eight forty five, we finish at eight fifty five, we've still got a five minute buffer for everyone to be back into position to start the day on time and not be kind of running around while patients are already in the reception room waiting for us. So the most productive ten minutes of the day, well designed and engineered.

So what are some of the things that we should be doing to prepare before the huddle? We love to put a really nice sign up on your check-in desk or some offices have, like, a vestibule. We like to let the patients in. I don't really wanna leave them standing outside or sitting in their car.

We want if if they come a few minutes early, that's a great sign. That means that they're excited to be there. They find that your office is comfortable, and they feel safe coming in a little bit early. So we don't wanna lock them out.

If if they wanna walk in a few minutes early, let's let them do that. But let's put a really nice slot a sign like the one you see on the slide here up in a frame where they can see it and let them know that we are in our morning planning session, and we will be with them promptly at nine AM or whatever the start time is for the day. It's also super cool if your PMS or your patient communication software has the ability. You can use a QR code in there and let them check themselves in while they're waiting.

So try to, you know, incorporate that technology a little bit too so they don't feel like they're just waiting. They're getting the process started. If you're not using technology, like some of the products we're gonna talk about tonight, you've gotta go through your charts the old fashioned way. Right?

But if you're using Pearl and Curve and some of the other PMS systems, you probably don't have to do quite as much old fashioned data mining in your charts. No matter how you do it, that works gotta be done before the huddle. The huddle is not the time to find the information. You need to make sure that all of your moving parts are ready.

So when we're huddling, all the information we need is in front of us regardless of how you got it. We wanna make sure somebody from the administrative team before the huddle begins has played all the messages, checked emails, and text messages, etcetera. So we should be looking at the version of the schedule that we think is the most true for the day. Any changes that came in on messages, text, or emails overnight, we wanna go ahead and make those revisions to the schedule before we huddle.

Everyone must be on time. Everyone must be on time. So I often say that the huddle is kinda like the homeroom bell. If you guys can think back to high school or junior high school, when that bell rang, if you weren't all the way inside the homeroom classroom sitting down, you were marked late.

Right? So you have to kinda have, like, an imaginary bell. If your huddle begins at eight forty five wherever you're huddling, if you're huddling in a break room, if you're huddling in an operatory, if you're huddling in in behind the administrative area, if it's private from the reception area, wherever that spot is, you know where you need to be. Nobody should have to come looking for you.

Everyone must be on time. In an ideal huddle, everyone participates, and we're gonna go through the steps this evening on which team members in which roles, what information they're responsible for, and how we can make it really fun and fast paced so nobody feels like they're just standing there being spoken to. It's super interactive, a lot of value coming from every department. We wanna eliminate this all the distractions by prepping in advance.

We don't want people kinda going through stuff trying to find what they need as we're beginning to huddle. Huddl should only be focused on problems and opportunities. We shouldn't be eating our breakfast. We shouldn't be talking about how bad the traffic was or or really even kinda going off track and talking about concerns for other days.

We've gotta be laser focused for today.

Now these are three funny words. I like to say these are the best three marketing words in dentistry. And if anybody wants to play along with me now, I'll give you a couple of seconds to throw it in the chat if you think you know what these words mean. If you guys wanna play along before I reveal, they're called.

Anybody know it? I know we've got a couple of smile potential clients at least on here, so there's at least a few that know it. If anybody wants to throw it in the in the chat, I'll give you a shout out.

So, and that is start out on time, stay on time, and get out on time. So once again, if your huddle begins at eight four at eight forty five, patient care time begins at nine AM, your huddle has concluded at eight fifty five. If the patients are in the reception room before nine AM, they need to be seated in the patient care space at nine AM prompt, not nine zero one, not nine zero three. And furthermore, doctors, if your assistant or your hygienist has seated that patient, you need to be in that patient care room as quickly as you can to begin the procedure.

The patient should not wait in an operatory treatment room for ten, fifteen minutes waiting for a provider to be to come in and begin. Suitsaku means starting precisely on time, making every possible attempt to stay on time, which huddles will help, and then getting out on time. Getting out on time for our breaks and getting out on time at the end of the Great, great marketing tip, also a great part of building a truly healthy culture.

So how do we come prepared for the huddle? Everyone should have a printed wide angle view of the schedule. And I know that that seems a little counterintuitive because some of our practices are so tech driven now and people have nobody wants to print any paper anymore. But there's a real big advantage to having that physical paper that everyone can make their notes on.

Even though we've got so many workstations in our offices, it's sometimes hard even with rooms that have two and three and four monitors now to get to the screen you need to get to to remember something that you talked about four or five hours ago in the huddle. There's a lot of nuance details that we're bringing forth in these huddles. So I'm still of the belief system that you should have that paper schedule printed out and try to keep it on your person somewhere. Keep it in your the pants pocket or some other place where you've got it you.

Even if you go into an area of the practice that may not have a computer workstation as handy, bring it with you. Everyone should have a highlighter and a pen. We're using the highlighter to indicate different colors. This is especially important if you don't have the most advanced technology like Pearl and Curve, and you wanna have a pen to also make an additional notes.

Everybody's gotta come prepared. I don't think that the doctors need schedules. I think that the assistants have the schedules for the doctors, so this is everyone on the team, including administrators, except for doctors.

We always like to begin our day with something positive. Right? We set the tone for the day. So it is super important that every morning, if we have multiple doctors present, we don't need every doctor to give an acknowledgment because time is precious in these huddles, but we do need a doctor to give an acknowledgment of some sort to start off the day with a positive tone.

So some examples of a huddle of a huddle acknowledgment might be the doctor saying, hey, guys. Yesterday, we accomplished all day. Yo. That's like high five.

That is a win. If we started out on time, stayed on time, and got out on time, let's acknowledge that because it's not always that easy. Right? We received fifteen new five star reviews this month.

Let's celebrate that. We might even wanna read the the latest great reviews so that we can cheerlead and applaud for ourselves and really own that win. We might the doctor may say something like, I'm hearing everybody really trying to use this new script that we're trying to get down. Right?

Acknowledge the good. Let's get in the habit, doctors, managers, practice owners, leaders, of catching people doing things right instead of trying to catch them doing things wrong. So powerful. We wanna read the vision statement.

So there's a big difference between a mission statement and a vision statement.

The vision is internal. It's something that your patients will never say. It's for your eyes only. It should be as unique as your fingerprint.

It represents your practice. It is really your purpose. And so it should be very succinct, very short, actually super easy to commit to memory if you're doing it right. So we want to read it in the morning so that we have top of mind awareness.

Who are we? What do we do? How do we wish to serve these patients? And that's what your vision statement is all about.

We do wanna review yesterday's goals and your month to date goals. So things like and these are all things that you can certainly get out of your Curve software with great ease, production totals, collection code totals, bonus targets, where are we? If we're if we're bonusing, let's make sure we're giving people a very transparent target that they can see. It's impossible, practice owners, doctors, managers, for people to hit a target that they can't see. You've gotta be transparent. Your new patient numbers, avoid guessing, bring real numbers and real data.

We wanna review today's schedule. This is where we start to get down to the nitty gritty with preventing problems and discovering opportunities. We do not want to read the procedures one by one. We do we should not need doctors to say, this morning at nine AM, we're doing an MOD on number fifteen on missus Jones.

At ten AM, we're doing a crown prep on number thirty one on Susan Smith. That is ultra boring, totally unnecessary, and it does nothing to drive performance, culture, and growth. So things that we should be talking about is if we have a multi doctor practice and we have hygienists working, we should know for sure on each and every patient which doctor will be examining that patient for the hygienist. That should not be something that is determined mid appointment.

It should not be a guessing game that needs to be pre engineered and predetermined using historical data, patient preference. There's a variety of ways that you can dial in on that, but that needs to if it has not already been indicated in your practice software prior to the morning huddle, that final decision needs to be made in the huddle.

This is also an opportunity for the dental assistants to look at the doctor's schedules. Let's say, for example, we've got three hygienists working and two doctors, and all three of the hygienists have patients that would ordinarily prefer one of our doctors.

If that one doctor, we know when we look across that paper schedule and across the computer schedule, if we know that that doctor is going to be in a procedure at that time that will make three exams very challenging, that's the time to to have the other doctors kinda organize it and say, you know, doctor doctor so and so will take one of those exams to take low pressure off. So we wanna go ahead and figure that out in the morning huddle proactive rather than reactive. Can we identify any family members without appointments? Is there any heads up for patient information?

Any patient appointment risks on the schedule? People that are not confirmed, people that are flaky, anything like that. Let's get that all out there in the morning. Any potential logjams?

Are there any things that we see in the schedule that really look like things might go sideways? If so, what can we do proactively to correct? Are there corrections that can be made? Are there any patients that have current events?

Somebody's got a new grandbaby. Somebody sadly had a death in the family. Any other life events that need acknowledgment or perhaps celebration. Let's make sure that we get that so that we're always delivering that five star customer service to our patients.

A great thing in morning huddles is to always make sure we're identifying patients specifically that we will individually ask. I'm not talking about just blasting out a QR code at the end of the appointment. I'm talking about making an emotional connection and a relationship and authentically asking patients for referrals or reviews.

Also, looking for opportunities to give anniversary gifts. So many practice owners have patients that have been with them for decades. We we do a really good job in dentistry, tracking new patients, celebrating new patients, giving new patients discounts and gifts and bonuses and different things like that. Right?

But how about those patients that have been with you for decades? How special would it be if we look through our day and we determine that we had one or two patients that doesn't have to be the exact day that they started in the practice or even the exact month, but we know that it's the twentieth year of them being a patient. How lovely would it be if we had a nice little gift, something equivalent to like a new patient gift that we had prepared for them, and we just thank them so very, very much for their loyalty and the relationship and how much we value them. That's how you build a practice, and that's a great opportunity to put that on social media and let people in your community know how much you value your patients.

We wanna go ahead and go a little further with discovering those opportunities. So this is where our highlighters come in. Right? So we use a a five colored highlighter in Smile Potential.

You guys can adapt this to suit your needs. This is especially important if you're not working with the highest level of technology. So these colors can mean different things. We use blue for patients that require hygiene assistance.

Green for new patients, orange for unscheduled treatment, yellow for financial considerations, pink for asking for referrals and reviews. So as this information is being conveyed by different people in different departments depending on responsibility, everybody's grabbing their own highlighter and highlighting their own schedule. So you're fully engaged and fully accountable. We're in it to win it.

So little deep dive on the hygiene strategy. What are the opportunities? Patients that need X rays, patients that could benefit from a wellness scan, patients that could benefit from perio charting, perio therapy opportunities. Generally speaking, if your practice has a hygiene coordinator or a dedicated hygiene assistant, that that person would help with this strategy and conveying this information.

If you do not have a dedicated hygiene assistant or hygiene coordinator, then the RDHs would lead this section of the huddle.

The beautiful thing with our friends at Pearl is that you do not need to go very far to gather all this amazing information. With Pearl, it is good by data mining and chart audits and Hello Streamline workflow. So you can easily see on the Pearl Intelligence daily dashboard patients that are in need of FMX, patients that are in need of ByteWings, patients that are overdue for hygiene of some kind, need perio charting. All of this is right there color coded according to your schedule.

It's extracting all of that information that is sometimes a little tricky and time consuming to go and dig out of the charts manually, and it's putting it on this beautiful user friendly dashboard so we can just take that information now, run with it, and discover those opportunities. That's what it's all about. And here's another view of the Pearl practice intelligence dashboard, a little bit of a a more dialed in view here. So I love this feature.

My hygienists that are on with us this evening, I know it drives you ladies crazy when you've gotta get in there and and dig deep to figure out when these patients had perio charting last. Are they have they ever had it? Is it outdated?

How wonderful. Pearl is gonna go in there and show us, for example, in the screenshot that we have on this slide, this practice had seventy five patients scheduled this day. Forty seven of them had outdated period periodontal charting. What an opportunity for diagnosis and to help people understand their perio health. Absolutely fabulous.

Same day dentistry with Perl and Curve. How great would it be if you had a dashboard that could easily show you your opportunities for same day dentistry? Filling those last minute openings or changes, this is gonna allow you to meet and, frankly, exceed your daily goals on a very, very regular basis. If you're not using technology like Perl and Curve, you can do the same thing by digging in deep to those records and those charts, getting that information out of there, and using the highlighters to identify everything so we can capitalize on those opportunities.

You're wowing patients with convenience factor. When we can provide same day dentistry in a really seamless low stress way, patients love it. Time is people's most precious commodity. So if they're in in your schedule already today and we've made it really easy for them to have another service or level of care provided in a reasonable amount of time today, they're loving that.

They want that all the time. But here's the trick. Don't wait until they arrive to ask them. If we've determined that there's an opportunity for more today, as soon as we come to that conclusion, let's reach out to them and say, hey, missus Jones.

I have the best news ever.

This never really happens. But today, when you come in to see mister Smith, your favorite hygienist, Jennifer, can also see you to take care of your gum health. Could you stay an extra hour? Get them locked into it in the morning so that you know that that spot is filled, and they're not frustrated when you offer it to them and say, oh, I would have stayed, but nobody let me know. Now I have to pick my kid up from soccer. Right? Let's lock it in as soon as we discover the opportunity.

And here's another great view of this Pearl intelligence dashboard. It is just brilliant, showing us unscheduled treatment, potentially undiagnosed treatment. It's lighting everything up color coded patients that had miscoded prophy's. This is something that we see far too often where practices either because they were too busy, we hate that word, or, maybe they're just isn't a great understanding.

They don't have a great checkout process. They're still miscoding a lot of their perio therapy. There is so much low hanging fruit in every single practice when you extract the data out like this. These opportunities should not be missed.

And now we see the beautiful way that Pearl's second opinion integrates right into the current practice management software. So everything is just in there. And Cody's gonna give us a little bit more of a walk through on this in just a few minutes, and she's gonna show us really the bells of and whistles of how this works. I can't wait to see this working firsthand in one of our client offices when they get onboarded in just a couple of weeks.

Super pumped for that. Comfort times or emergencies. We wanna go ahead and check those open blocks, designate a strategy. So in the morning huddle, if your day is scheduled where there is no open time, all of your blocks, including your comfort time blocks have been filled for the day, we actually wanna decide in the morning huddle, should we get another problem focused patient, where are we gonna put it?

We shouldn't have to interrupt the providers midday to ask that question. You can actually engineer that first thing in the morning in your huddle. We wanted to find true dental emergencies. In dentistry, there are hundreds and hundreds of dental problems, but there are really only four true dental emergencies in in adult dentistry.

The first one is the patient is up all night with pain, and that's not the person who calls and says, well, you know, it's been a little twingy, on and off for, four or five weeks, but I'm going on vacation, so I really wanna come today at six o'clock. That's not a true dental emergency. That's a problem.

Somebody who's up all night with pain, they are if you ask them, can you please tell me your level of pain on scale of one's ten? It's ten. They have called multiple times. It's usually overnight when the pain gets worse, so they've usually called every emergency number that they can.

You can hear if you know that patient well, their voice actually sounds different because they're in so much pain. That's a true dental emergency. That patient shouldn't have to wait until we have time. We should actually tell them to come right down just like urgent care would.

Doesn't mean they're going to be seen right away, but we're going to triage them, and then we're to figure out how we can accommodate them in some kind of a timely fashion. Bleeding and it won't stop. Same thing. Dental patient is bleeding and it won't stop inside their mouth or directly outside their mouth.

They need to come right now, and that's a true dental emergency. Visibly swollen. Inside the mouth, outside the mouth, visibly swollen on an adult on an an adult patient. They need to come on right down.

They're not going into a block time. Fell on the sidewalk and broke their two front teeth or some other scenario similar to that, even if they're not in pain. When patients have a traumatic injury to their front teeth, even if it doesn't hurt, it is really scary and frightening and traumatizing to them. I I don't wanna make that person wait.

I want them to come in so we can work on that with just as quickly as we can.

Financial considerations. We got through those opportunities.

Not everything is such an opportunity. Sometimes we're trying to prevent problems. Right? We talked about that.

Things that the entire team needs to be aware of. Not that we're gonna do a deep dive on the backstory on why these people have balances, but it's really important that every member of the team understands patients that are coming in today that have significantly overdue balances, no signed financial agreement, or they only have a commitment financially to a limited amount of treatment. The reason why is that our team members need to be on the same page. If I'm a dental assistant and everybody in the admin team is busy and I hear the door open, if I'm a great team player, I may go and grab that patient out of reception even though they weren't checked in.

But if they've got a huge balance that the financial coordinator needs to talk about, I actually didn't help anybody by bringing that patient in. Right? So that's that's one of the many ways that we can prevent problems in our morning huddle is by having more transparency on financial considerations. We talked about this a little bit.

Everybody on the team should be grabbing their pink highlighter and selecting patients that you know you have that patient's a raving fan. They're always giving you compliments. You've gotta get great rapport with them. You know that they love us.

You know you have good conversation. If every person on the team, not necessarily the doctors, team members, but if everybody everyone on the team picks one or two people to ask for either a referral or a review, depending on what you know about your patient, be strategic, make your ask very patient centric, you will be amazed the types of leads and reviews that you get from your patients. And then close that huddle with a motivational thought for the day. Make sure we close it with something good, a new goal, an inspiring quote, a brief story.

Make sure that it's we started with a positive, and we're gonna bookend it with another positive. Right? No doom and gloom. I don't wanna see these low energy huddles, which I sadly observe sometimes when we first meet client practices.

I shouldn't have to come in and feel like I need to hold a mirror under your nose to see if you're alive in the morning huddle. Huddle. This is high energy. This is our kickoff.

Let's keep it high energy. And doctors, this really begins and ends with you. If you're a low energy, so is your team. So get your head in the game.

Now if you're interested in getting this entire road map, please go ahead and scan this QR code or go into the chat. I put all my contact information in there. I'm happy to send you everything about how to have a huddle, including a huddle agenda. We have one for pediatric dentistry, ortho, general dentistry, multispecialty dentistry, and we also have the data mining sheet.

In the event that you don't have all these amazing technology tools in your toolbox yet, we give you the data mining sheet to give you a lot more clarity on who does what. So we show up to those huddles totally prepared to have the best day ever every single day.

And so teamwork. We know that when our high powered team work together, all of those little tiny goldfish that we had in that first slide, they can be as big and bad as the shark. Right? So show up prepared.

Be a team player, be a leader in your own right, believe in the power of working together. Efficiency equals profitability. Morning huddles are key part of profitability. You've gotta have it.

And this is that list. Right? So along with clear roles and job responsibilities, written systems and protocols, proper onboarding, and clear practice goals, if you are not huddling every day and really with an in it to win it mentality, you're not going to have the most profitable practice out there. It's just not gonna happen.

You've gotta be doing high performing huddles. Now I wanna give you guys a little time to do q and a unless Sheela wants to jump back on, and we'll hold off on this. Can you guys start to throw some questions in the chat?

I love q and a. Let's get started on the chat.

I've got a couple. Actually, we got some q and a questions that came in via DM on social media. So if everybody wants to play quiet and shy, I'm gonna give you guys some of the ones that I got in messages in the last couple days.

I love it.

How are you guys feeling? Is everybody feeling shy? Are they feeling I know I've got a lot of New Yorkers in this this attendee list here. So they're the New Yorkers and the New Jersey people are generally not that quiet.

Oh, I think we've got a couple. Let's see. Here we go. Let's see what we have here.

So one of the great questions, and we get this all the time, is how do you stay on topic? Right? Especially when you've got a lot of people coming to your huddle, big crowd. How do we prevent anybody on the team.

As a matter of fact, sometimes it's the doctor that we have a hard time keeping on topic. Right. So that's a big question that we get. How do we stay on topic?

And it's really a mindset. It's really understanding that the huddle is about today. The huddle is, like, one percent yesterday because we're looking at our month to date and our year to date goals early on in the Huddl very quickly. Ninety eight percent today and one percent tomorrow.

We're gonna just take a brief little glance tomorrow and also to finish out the month to date goals. So it's a mindset. It's understanding that we cannot talk about a patient that's coming in next week. We cannot talk about a patient that was in five days ago.

We can't talk about something that's doom and gloom and really frustrating. You've gotta just have a mindset that we can only talk about the patients that we wanna serve today. A huddle is not a team meeting. So that's my best suggestion and advice on how to stay on topic, and you you kinda learn it.

It's learned behavior. It's it doesn't happen on day one. You just have to stay the course and gently remind each other. Let's shelf that for now, and let we'll find another time to talk about that.

We've gotta stay focused for today's Huddl. Another great question that we got, via DM is and I see come one coming through the chat the chat right now too. Who does the talking or leads it? And so there's many different ways.

I love for Huddl's to be totally interactive. I don't think that there should be a leader and someone that says everything. There can be someone that sort of sets the order or gives a little guidance if people get jammed up or if people try to talk over each other, almost like, a mediator of sorts. But we love when everyone on the team is fully empowered to share what they know and bring their best information to the table.

We just got a really great question from Jennifer in the chat. How do you manage a Debbie Downer, a negative Nelly, the one who sees the glass half empty? And this is such a great question coming from Jennifer. It's tough.

Right? Because we want to reframe our mindset and our attitude that we are setting this day up for success. So forcing those acknowledgments, and if you have if if it's not your doctors that are the negative Nelly, if it's a member of the team, maybe in your practice, Jennifer, you have to do a rotation of different members of the team have to come with a positive acknowledgment every day. And and if let's get that mindset out there.

We bookend it. We start with a positive acknowledgment, and we end with that motivational thought or positive thought at the end. Right? And that sets the tone for the day.

Even if we have a day where things get slippery and things get challenging, we'll remember that kumbaya feeling that we had at eight forty five in the morning where we were like, okay. We can still win this day. Right? So it is a learning curve.

Some people brains, they are truly pessimistic people. They're harder to manage. They're harder to deal with, but encourage them, stay the course. And when you see them making even a marginal change, make sure you acknowledge it.

That's gonna give them that positive reinforcement that they need. Another question that we got is how do you make huddle huddles energizing instead of boring?

Aside from pumping everybody up with coffee and caffeine before the huddle is, you know, really demanding, creating a culture where people hold themselves to high standards. People learn as dental professionals that our patients expect a lot from us. We can't burn the candle at both ends. I know a lot of team members, they stay up way too late at night.

They don't don't eat well. They're not hydrated. They're really making a lot of bad lifestyle choices, and that's why they're coming in so low energy. So try to encourage each other.

If you have a practice like that where everybody kinda looks like they just rolled out of the bed in the morning and they're they don't really look like they're in it to win it, maybe you guys have to do some team building events that focus more on yoga or physical health or going out to eat healthy food together as a group. Maybe there are some behaviors and things that you can learn together as a group to help people have more natural positive energy and just feel good about themselves and about their career.

Kelly, we've got a quick question in the q and a over here.

The question is from Amanda. Any tips for taking the team from reading the schedules as a morning huddle to creating an engaging huddle where all team members have buy in?

So we've all been there. Right?

I love that, Amanda. Yeah. And that's the tricky part. Breaking that habit of going through and reading each procedure, I think that's the hardest fix to make in huddling because it that just for a lot of people, they feel like that step has to be done.

Mhmm. And I think it's really looking at your team, certainly requesting the the data mining sheet and looking at which departments could be bringing what information. Information. And even if you're integrating that with the technology, make sure the people that match that information are reporting the information out of the technology.

So we gotta force engagement. Right? And we've gotta shift what we're focusing on. Instead of looking at the minutiae of what procedures we're doing today, what are the opportunities for the patients in those chairs? ouched over, and it's just another boring day. You've gotta just break that cycle and stick with it.

Don't give up.

There's a question here for Cody.

Cody, we wanted to know a little bit about this is not I'm gonna shift over to Cody, then we'll come back to this one. I'm curious too, Kelly, about the doctors.

So, Cody, there's a question about, can you tell us some major differences between Dentrix and Curve?

I don't know if Yeah. Absolutely. So starting off, Dentrix is going to be an on premise solution, which means it has a server where PERM is a hundred percent cloud based, so you're never having to have that server. You log in from a Chrome browser, and you have access to, all of your information just as you would in Dentrix but from anywhere.

Some other differences is that, Curve is moving fast paced. So we're obviously partnered with Pearl, so you have access to Pearl AI. We have our own mobile web app, so you can actually have access to all of your patient information right there from your mobile device, which is a fan favorite for doctors, especially ones that travel a lot, maybe for trade shows, or might just work a couple days a week.

Some other aspects of it is that you have everything all in one. So your electronic forms, all of your patient engagement, insights, which are our dashboard that people might use another third party for. Everything's in one solution versus having to piecemeal things together like you might have to with Dentrix.

Nice.

So helpful. We have got to streamline. Okay. I'm curious about this one, Kelly.

How do I get people to come in earlier, and do the doctors need to attend the huddle?

Yeah. So, you know, sometimes if practices have not had huddles in their framework of their practice systems, it is tricky because people you know, sometimes when they started working in a particular practice, they were told they don't need to come in until five minutes to nine. But now we're saying, hey. That's got not gonna be enough time.

If patients are at nine AM, we've gotta be there. You know, if Huddl is eight eight forty five, really everybody's gotta be present at, like, eight forty. So you've got time to put your stuff down, get to your Huddl. So many times that's a big ask because people have responsibilities with, you know, children or other things in the morning.

So you've really gotta figure out practice leaders, owners.

Can you make an adjustment to your schedule? And and what kind of buy in do you need? We've we have situations where we've got team members here in the New York metropolitan area. Some of these team members, they're commuting, like, an hour and forty five minutes each way on public transportation.

They cannot get there any earlier. It just won't happen. So we've got some practices where we've made special concessions, and sometimes there's a team member that's got a crazy commute like that. They're allowed to phone in.

It's not ideal, but you cannot skip it because it's challenging. You've gotta figure out a solution. And and it may not be the most ideal solution, but saying that it's too tricky to figure it out isn't a reason to skip huddles.

And sometimes if it's just, like, a lazy punctuality thing, that's a deal breaker. Right?

Like, that's not an excuse to not huddle.

Absolutely.

And do the doctors need to to attend? For sure, they do. The doctors, if they're if they're scheduled to see patients that day, they better be in the huddle. For sure.

Yeah. I love that one too because that's important. We need to be mindful about creating our day, serving our patients, and we all have to be focusing on that same thing, which you said earlier as opportunities. Opportunities. So I wrote down about twenty things. I'm sure everybody else is just looking forward to watching this webinar again, and that QR code that you put in there gave us all kinds of information.

I do wanna let you guys know the chat is still open.

Kelly, anything? Contact info is in the chat too, guys. If you didn't get a chance to catch the QR code, all of my contact information is in that chat. Screenshot it and save it.

We just got one more question in the chat, Sheela. Do we have a minute for it? Yeah. Absolutely.

How do you handle an associate who won't recite the practice's vision? So, you know, I think it's all about how we establish the practice vision, doctors. And, you know, did is it is the vision about you, or is the vision about we and about us? Right?

So making sure, practice owners, that you have buy in from not just your team, but your associate doctors too. Is is there commonality? Do we believe that this is the winning vision? Do we believe that this is who we are and this is who how we hope to serve our patients?

If people refuse to read it, there is generally a huge disconnect in philosophy. And, you know, with all due respect, if you have an associate doctor that is that distance from your philosophy, there are going to be issues, big ones. So if you can't hone in on that and find some middle grounds, maybe it's not a great fit.

Awesome. Okay. I'm gonna share my screen real quick here and go over a couple things. One, Kelly, we would love for you to put your information back in the chat.

There was one member here that wanted to make sure they got that. I think it's in the beginning of the chat, but let's pop it in there again. Sure. Also, I'm gonna bring Cody back on to go through a little bit, and then we'll wrap up again here with Kelly. You might get a few more questions.

In our we have Karen has a question. Karen, if you wanna jump that question right into the QA, we'd love to answer your question.

After you hear a little bit from Cody, we just wanna let you know too we have special offers today to invite you to have your team find some time to learn a little bit more about Curve, a little bit more about Kelly and how she can help your practice, and ultimately too as well how Pearl can really help streamline your morning huddle as well as these radiographs that we're gonna share with you in just a moment.

Imagine being able to present treatment you find in the huddle, and the cavities are in color. Right? Little incipient lesions are yellow, and little progressed areas of decay are in pink, and patients are actually starting to really understand what you're explaining. That's a big win for teens. So, Cody, if you wanna jump on in and join us, love to have you on camera and walk us through a little bit about Curve. And, again, we just invite you to stay for another few minutes, put some more questions in the chat, and we'll finish up with Kelly in just a second.

Yeah. Absolutely. So jumping in to show you a a little bit more detail or a sneak peek of how Pearl is integrated with Curve. So now you'll see that we have Curve's imaging pulled up. You'll notice that the second opinion button is right here at the bottom of our image.

Once you select the second opinion, it actually throws you into Pearl's second opinion software.

This is gonna bring the AI analysis right inside of her imaging for you and your team.

So all your images are gonna get that instant and consistent detections that you can review, document, and even present with your patients. You'll be able to see things like calculus, theories, noticeable margin, pre appropriate, and more.

All the tip of your fingertips, what we're really seeing practices love is the ability to, get buy in from your patients. They're getting to do that same day treatment faster. They're gonna be able to show patients exactly how deep that decay might be.

And even our front desk team members are loving this because they can use it whenever they are fighting back and forth with those insurance companies. It makes it almost impossible for them to say no. So practices front and back while having referral integrated into their softwares.

Excellent.

This is a quick sneak peek. Oh, sorry. I was just gonna open up if you had any questions about Curve and Pearl putting this together.

Anything else coming into the chat?

I don't see any other questions right now.

Can you I don't think any I don't think everyone can see my chat, so I'm gonna screen share one more time, guys.

And then on this last slide that I have here, my contact information's on the slide.

So let me know if you guys can see that. Sheela, can you see that?

Yeah. And it's, just wanna there you go. Perfect.

Excellent. Thank you for that. Very helpful.

And feel free to reach out to Kelly as well because we all always need more information, more help, more coaching, all of us every day.

Could use some of your help, Kelly. So we'd love that you were here today, spent time with us, shared all that information about the morning huddle. So, guys, coaching at smile potential dot com.

And Happy to jump on a complimentary thirty minute no strings attached coaching call with anyone. If you guys wanna talk about huddle or you wanna pick my brain, I love to play a fun little game called ask the dental coach anything. So if you wanna just schedule that through coaching at smile potential dot com, I'd be more than happy to jump on, for any topic that you have and send you my resources as well, all the Huddl resources that we talked about this evening.

Love that, and thank you so much for joining us tonight and sharing all that information with us. So valuable. And, again, those of you that are starting to think about, you know, end of the year planning and what are we gonna do for next year and what are we gonna do to end this year strong, it's really valuable to take some time to think about what things can make the impact overnight. If you're thinking about moving into Curve, that's a great way to think about things as well.

A lot of things inside of Curve so you don't have to jump around and find different resources in different areas. And that what we really love about Curve too is that Pearl fits straight inside. So when you take X rays, all of a sudden, you now have an instant AI analysis. And when we're embedded into different imaging system, that's really kind of the best way to remove any kind of change management.

So, again, feel free to reach out to Kelly, reach out to Curve, reach out to Pearl. We're the trifecta today. And looking forward to more exciting things that Curve is gonna be doing to really kinda streamline your day. And having Pearl be a part of your radiograph analysis is the best way to let your patients see what you see.

And within the first thirty days, you will see an automatic increase in your case acceptance just on the treatment that you're recommending.

And that's a big win, especially as we've all spent years explaining shades of gray. And and I remember showing the little white enamel and how it shouldn't have a gray triangle. Right? And now we're in a world where patients can actually see what we're talking about without taking a radiology class. So so thanks you to all of you, especially on the East Coast that have stayed until the very end. We know it's late for you.

Cody, thank you so much for joining us as well. We're thankful to our Curve partners. And, Kelly, a special thanks to you for all of your knowledge and information. Look forward to having you on more.

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