#9: The Build-Up Weekly

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Dear friends and colleagues,

Welcome to the 9th edition of The Build-Up, where we deliver weekly insights and inspiration for dentists on every stage of the private practice journey.

Hope you’re all doing well! I can’t believe that we’re already at the end of April.

For the newsletter this week I’m trying something a little different.

Instead of the traditional format, I will share a handful of links to interesting blog posts, tweets, and videos from around the web.

Then I’ll do a single 🤿 deep dive 🤿.

This week, the deep dive will be focused on using Chat GPT in your practice. I even filmed a short video, so you can follow along.

Let’s get started!

Good Thread on Dealing with Ineffective Employees

Have you ever had to deal with an ineffective employee? Perhaps someone who was promoted beyond their ability? (This is the so-called Peter Principle.)

I thought this thread outlined an insightful approach toward employees who miss the mark.

(Don’t worry Alison, Andrea, and Acsa…this isn’t directed at you. 😉)

Whether you’ve just been letting it slide, want to address the issue but aren’t sure how, or recently purchased a practice and inherited an ineffective employee, you can use this to reframe expectations and offer a dignified offramp.

Offering a choice like this makes so much sense. If anyone has the chance to use this in real life, let me know how it goes!

Nissan’s 4-hour Commercial with 17 MILLION Views

In a rather inspired move, Nissan posted a 4-hour-long ‘commercial’ that’s been played over 17 million times. In fact, I’m playing right now as I write this newsletter. Why? It’s an animation of a woman driving a Nissan and passing Nissan billboards set to four hours of a chill lo-fi beat. (Lo-fi is a genre that combines jazz, funk, electro, and hip-hop and intentionally retains ‘imperfections’ or low-quality recordings to evoke a kind of nostalgic effect.)

Hats off to Nissan for a real outside-the-box marketing move. Perhaps this will inspire you to make an out-of-the-box move in your practice.

Let me know if you have any great ideas!

🤿 Deep Dive: Using ChatGPT in Your Practice (+ video)

I’d like to introduce you to a remarkable (did I say remarkable? *you could turn this video into a grueling workout by doing 5 burpees each time I say the word remarkable) tool that can help streamline various aspects of your dental practice: ChatGPT.

I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but most dentists I’ve spoken to haven’t used it in their practice. So let’s dive in!

What is ChatGPT? 

ChatGPT is an advanced language model developed by OpenAI that uses artificial intelligence to generate human-like text based on a given prompt. This cutting-edge technology can be a game-changer for dental practices, helping you create engaging and informative content for social media, newsletters, patient letters, and standard operating procedures (SOPs) in a fraction of the time.

In this video, I’ll show how I've been using ChatGPT to generate various types of content for dental practices. You’ve really got to see it to believe it.

 Here’s a link to ChatGPT itself. If you enjoy the free version, the $20/month paid version allows you to access GPT 4, which is more powerful and accurate.

Here are the handful of simple use cases I briefly explored in the video.

You can copy, customize, and paste the prompts for your practice.

Social Media Content: ChatGPT can help you create captivating and relevant social media posts that engage your audience and inform them about your practice, your services, and the latest dental health news. Here’s the prompt:

My name is Trevor Kimball, DDS and I own a general dentistry practice in San Luis Obispo, CA called Happy Smiles. I need to schedule engaging Instagram posts to promote my dental practice. I’d like the ratio to be 80% interesting content and 20% direct CTAs. I would like to promote my team and the work that we do, our office and technology, our engagement in the community, the pets of my team members, and also our new patient $100 off special. Please tell me what to post a picture of and provide the copy for 10 Instagram posts. Please use a friendly and upbeat tone.

Newsletters: ChatGPT can help you generate content for your newsletters so that you can easily stay in touch with patients. (Disclaimer: I did use GPT for parts of this newsletter, but ended up re-writing about 80% of it. But it’s so much easier to just tell it what you want to do and have it write your first draft than staring down a blank page!)

Now can you please write copy for an engaging monthly newsletter highlighting the fun that we’re having in the office (we just went to our monthly team dinner) and also the importance of oral health. 

Patient Letters: ChatGPT can help you compelling draft patient letters or emails. Here’s a sample prompt for an end-of-the-year insurance letter.

At the end of the year, we send out a letter encouraging patients to maximize their insurance benefits for the year. Can you please write the letter? Make it upbeat and light, but also emphasize the importance of maintaining oral health. The letter should fit easily on one 8.5 x 11 piece of paper.

Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): Maintaining up-to-date SOPs ensures your dental practice runs smoothly and consistently. ChatGPT can help you document the systems in your practice and create clear, concise, and easy-to-follow guides for employees.

I'm looking for an SOP on how to reach out to patients overdue for hygiene visits in my dental practice. I have Open Dental software and I'd like a complete guide for a new employee, including keystrokes, scripts, texts or letters to send, etc. Please be thorough and thoughtful. I'd like any scripts or copywriting to be kind, empathetic, and professional. Emphasizing the importance of the hygiene visit, including the perio-systemic link, should feature in the scripts.

The Future and AI

Now that we’ve looked at how you can use ChatGPT today, let’s talk briefly about how scary (and exciting but also very scary) this all is.

AI has the potential to revolutionize many aspects of dentistry, including diagnosis (such as reading X-rays, scans, and other diagnostic reports), patient communication, intelligent scheduling, and more.

There are many journal articles and reviews on AI in dentistry, including AI challenges in dentistry, demystifying AI in dentistry, AI ethics and dentistry, and trustworthiness in AI for dentistry. They all basically say that we need more information before truly integrating AI into the dental practice.

This is true. We don’t know what’s coming.

And outside the dental context, this technology's economic and social ramifications are both exciting and disturbing.

I found this discussion on the disruptive economics of AI especially interesting. As a wet-fingered dentist, your job security is far better than mine as a broker in this new world.

But in the face of new challenges, we can only do our best to rise to the occasion or put our heads in the sand. And I know which one I’m choosing.

Currently, however, ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful tool for writing first drafts. That’s how I’ve been using it, and you can too.

And with that, I hope you enjoyed the 9th edition of The Build-Up Weekly.

Let me know if you enjoy this new format. And if you have ideas for content that you would like to see or that you think your fellow doctors would find informative, please reply to this email!

Please consider using the link below to share our newsletter. 🙂 

With best wishes to you and your families,

Trevor Kimball, PhD

A Guide for Selling Your Dental Practice

You can download it for free here. It’s material that I’ve covered in this newsletter before, but - if you’re contemplating a practice sale - the advice in this guide is crucial.

And if you’re ready to have a conversation with a practice sales professional, get connected with your local Integrity Practice Sales broker here.

It’s worth having a conversation no matter your current transition plans. You never know what you’ll discover together.