What is NPS?
Simply put, NPS, or net promoter score, is a measure of how likely your patients are to recommend your dental practice to other people. There are lots of articles about the origins of NPS, how it's measured, peer-reviewed applications in healthcare, or if you're a fan of reading the original source material, you can check out Fred Reichheld's book, "The Ultimate Question 2.0."
My goal isn't to rehash the abundance of digital ink spilled about NPS.
Rather, I want to explore why we need more than NPS, especially in oral health care.
Why You Need More Than NPS
NPS, at its core, is a quality assurance metric. It helps you understand your patients' overall feeling about the care that they're receiving in your office (and increasingly, outside of your office). While this might be all you need if you're running a restaurant or selling a product online, we, as healthcare providers, have never been satisfied with 'good enough.' We understand that there is always room for improvement, both clinically and as it relates to patient experience.
To understand how we can continue to improve, we need more than quality assurance metrics; we need quality improvement skills.
At DifferentKind, we have deep and meaningful experience understanding the factors that impact the patient journey, and the evidence-based approaches necessary to do something about it. I sometimes joke that I've spent the last five years trying to forget that I'm a dentist so I can better understand the patient perspective. Joking aside, we can help you measure, understand, and improve the aspects of the care you provide that strongly influence your overall NPS score. It's one thing to know you might need to treat your patients with more empathy, but it's another thing all together to understand and implement the style and skills necessary to actually do it.
From Convenience to Quality
As digital transformation has accelerated the consumerization of healthcare, many of the solutions currently being developed target making the patient experience more convenient. I'm all for this, as no one likes sitting on hold while trying to make an appointment when they could have one click on their phone accomplish the same thing. However, while convenience is important, it does not necessarily lead to quality.
The hard yards ahead include solutions that help make dental care easier for patients AND make them healthier.
It's those kind of solutions we're committed to creating for you and your patients. It's those kind of solutions that will ultimately create lasting and lifelong promoters of your practice. It's time for more than simply NPS in dental care; it's time for a DifferentKind of measurement altogether.
