Dental Sleep Medicine Insider May 2017 | Page 24

DOES Y G N I I T S RICHARD DRAKE R E V D A WORK? ou’ve screened all of your patients of record and treated dozens, hundreds, THOUSANDS of patients with Oral Appliance Therapy. You’re getting some physi- cian referrals, but that can be inconsistent. Ten in one week and then none for two weeks. So what do you do? I’ve recently begun a pret- ty extensive external D2P (Doctor 2 Patient; I think I’ll coin that one) marketing campaign. Has it worked? I don’t know. It’s still in prog- ress, but guess what? I’m going to bring you along the journey with me. We spent time interviewing media buyers and market- ing gurus to finally come up with “the plan” last fall. Two themes, we thought: one for PAP failures, and one for snoring and tired all the time. That about covers it, doesn’t it? The 10%, and the 90%, respectively, of the 400,000 plus sleep apnea candidates I estimate reside in San Antonio, Texas. We hired an actor, an actress, and a camera crew. We set up the bedroom scene in the media buyers home, and before you can even write the $10,000 check it took to make three thirty second commercials, I heard some- one say “Lights, camera, action!” Concurrently, we held staff meeting after staff meeting trying to distill our current systems to better handle and route the calls we soon expected. Phone scripts. Updated job descriptions.