Dr. Erin Elliott, a general dentist in Post Falls, Idaho, who lectures nationally on dental sleep medicine, made it work in a busy general practice. In this episode, Dr. Lorne Lavine asks her how.

What they cover:
- Why sleep apnea is "not an old fat man's disease," and how her own dad's snoring turned out to be moderate to severe sleep apnea, with a heart rate of 83 while he slept
- Why dentists take the course and stall, and her fix: a dedicated sleep champion and a six-month runway
- Getting the whole team talking about sleep by giving every team member a free sleep study
- What an Apple Watch or Oura ring can and can't tell you about sleep
- Her workflow: a yes in hygiene, a separate sleep consult, a home sleep test read by a sleep physician, then the results conversation
- Why a $2,500 appliance feels harder to sell than $5,000 aligners, and why you shouldn't lead with medical insurance
- "Do not cheap out on the appliance," and how to follow up to show the therapy is working
- What's next: appliances with built-in sensors, myofunctional therapy and new nerve stimulators
- Plus Naren's marketing tip: how to get ten or more Google reviews every month

THE ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE
Don't make sleep rest on you. Pick one person on your team to be the sleep champion, treat it like a startup inside your practice, and give it six months before you judge it.

Find Dr. Elliott at erinelliottdds.com.

WORK WITH US
Marketing: book a strategy meeting with Naren's team at ekwa.com/wired
Technology: schedule a call with Lorne at thedigitaldentist.com/call

Subscribe at wireddentistry.com/subscribe for the episode, plus the one thing from it worth doing, written down.

Naren Arulrajah has watched practices do it both ways. In this episode, Dr. Lorne Lavine asks him how to get off PPO plans without emptying the schedule.

What they cover:
- Why costs are up 30 to 50% in a few years while PPO reimbursements haven't moved, and how that slowly squeezes take-home pay, staff and patients
- A biological dentist who was 80% PPO: marketing first, then one plan at a time, from about $1.1 million to $1.8 million while cutting to three and a half days
- A dentist who dropped his three worst plans at once, then moved the $1,000 he used to spend on ads into Friday cash bonuses for every five-star review that named his team
- The keywords that reach the half of Americans with no PPO plan, and why keywords alone won't book anyone without real cases on the page
- "Who do you want to be a hero to?" Picking services you're passionate about
- Why the front desk has to learn to roll out the red carpet instead of asking "what insurance do you have?"
- How Naren's own dentist went from one Google review a month to four a day by asking at a different moment in the appointment

THE ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE
Don't drop every plan. Find the one PPO plan you're effectively working for free on, and make it the first to go once your marketing is bringing in new patients. The time you get back goes to the patients who choose you.

WORK WITH US
Marketing: book a strategy meeting with Naren's team at ekwa.com/wired
Technology: schedule a call with Lorne at thedigitaldentist.com/call

Subscribe at wireddentistry.com/subscribe for the episode, plus the one thing from it worth doing, written down.

No call tracking. No answering service. No way to book after hours. The marketing was working. The practice just wasn't catching what it sent.

In this episode, Naren Arulrajah sits down with Lorne, who has spent 25 years inside dental practices' networks and servers, to go through the technology decisions that quietly cost practices patients.

What they cover:

• Why practices buy technology they can't support, and treat it as a purchase instead of a system
• What Lorne checks first when he audits a practice (hint: it's not the server)
• Where the new-patient journey breaks: the first call, the unmonitored inbox, the first appointment three weeks out, the reminder going to an old number
• The most expensive mistakes, from the big dramatic ones to the small ones nobody notices for months
• What to cancel right now, including the software modules nobody uses
• How to tell useful AI from hype, and the three questions plus one red flag to check before you sign with any tech vendor

THE ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE
Call your own practice. Pick a Tuesday at 12:30, ring the main number and see what happens. If you have to leave a message, time how long it takes to get a call back. Most practice owners have never done it, and most are surprised.

WORK WITH US
Technology: schedule a call with Lorne at thedigitaldentist.com/call
Marketing: book a strategy meeting with Naren's team at ekwa.com/wired

Subscribe at wireddentistry.com/subscribe for the episode, plus the one thing from it worth doing, written down.

Dr. Lorne Lavine interviews his co-host Naren Arulrajah on what separates the practices that dominate their market from the ones spending more every year and going backwards.

The three numbers every practice owner should know, and 95% don't. Your phone conversion rate — the average practice books one in three new patient calls. Your cost per new patient call. And what each channel actually costs: around $60–70 a new patient through organic search, against roughly $650 through Google Ads.

Why a PPO patient quietly costs $3,500 over five years — and why those same patients are the least likely to accept high-value treatment, because in their mind it isn't covered.

The practice that went from $650,000 to $1.3 million while cutting a full day off the schedule.

Plus: how patients actually search now that AI sits inside Google, why running ads can damage trust before the relationship starts, and why you only need to dominate your own neighbourhood rather than the whole market.

THE ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE

Find out your phone conversion rate this week. The average dental practice books one in three new patient calls. The target is 70%. You cannot fix a number you have never measured, and this is the one that decides whether everything else you spend is worth spending.

WORK WITH US

Marketing — book a strategy meeting with Naren's team at ekwa.com/wired 
Technology — schedule a call with Lorne at thedigitaldentist.com/call

Subscribe at wireddentistry.com/subscribe

Most shows pick one. This one doesn't.

Dr. Lorne Lavine spent over ten years as a periodontist before founding The Digital Dentist 25 years ago — he's been inside dental practices' networks and servers ever since. Naren Arulrajah has spent 19 years marketing for dental practices, more than a thousand of them. In this first episode they explain why they stopped treating marketing and technology as separate problems.

Lorne on the number one issue he sees: almost every practice has a backup. Very few have ever restored one. New HIPAA rules will require practices to document a 72-hour restore — he'd be unhappy if his clients' took longer than 72 minutes.

Naren on the gap between marketing that works and a practice that can hold what the marketing sends it — and the four things the practices that are winning all have in common: organic search they don't have to pay for, a steady flow of five-star reviews, phones that actually convert, and landing pages that show the work. The average practice books one in three new patient calls.

Plus: who this show is for, how guests get picked, and what's coming in November.

THE ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE

Unplug your server and start the clock. Having a backup and being able to restore from one are completely different things. If getting back up is measured in hours or days, you have a problem you don't know about yet. Forward this to whoever manages your IT and ask them to schedule the test.

WORK WITH US

Marketing — book a strategy meeting with Naren's team at ekwa.com/wired 
Technology — schedule a call with Lorne at thedigitaldentist.com/call

Subscribe at wireddentistry.com/subscribe