Customer Overview

Smiles West is the flagship brand of B. Deirmenjiian & Affiliates, a DSO founded by Dr. Barouir “Barry” Deirmenjiian that has grown to 25 locations across eight brands in the greater Los Angeles area, acquiring roughly two practices per year. The organization has earned placement on both the Inc. 5000 and Inc. 500 lists in California. Its mission is to make dental care affordable and rewarding for patients from every background and walk of life.

The Challenge

Marketing Director Sherri Paxton is responsible for ensuring that front desks and the call center maintain a high level of scheduling performance across all 25 locations. To accomplish Smiles West’s five major operational goals, full utilization of teams and operatories, meeting patient demand, maximizing the marketing budget, sustaining cash flow, and continuing to acquire compatible practices, she needed robust, real-time data on call conversion for both new and existing patients. Before Patient Prism, tracking the right numbers was manual, fragmented, and incomplete.

“Before then, even as I was pushing leads into my offices, I didn’t really have a good metric to measure the conversion rate of how many leads became actual patients.”
— Sherri Paxton, Marketing Director, Smiles West

Why Patient Prism

When SMC National invited Sherri to pilot Patient Prism, she said yes immediately. The combination proved to be exactly what she needed: SMC National provided call training and accountability frameworks, while Patient Prism’s AI delivered the deeper analytics, RELO alerts, marketing attribution, existing patient call tracking, and an intuitive dashboard she could review across all locations without manual compilation. The pairing gave her team both the coaching infrastructure and the data to act on it.

Implementation

Patient Prism was onboarded across nine Smiles West locations in October 2021. By the time of this case study, 19 of their 25 locations were live on the platform. Sherri uses the dashboard daily to spot performance issues by location, consult with industry experts, and set realistic improvement goals for location managers. She digs into failed calls, for both new and existing patients, to identify specific conversation problems and work directly with managers on resolution.

“I’m on a campaign now to get our practice managers and doctors to watch Patient Prism’s dashboard, become engrossed in the data, and think proactively about how to lead their teams to higher performance. I don’t need to be the only one managing by the numbers.”
— Sherri Paxton, Marketing Director, Smiles West

Results

In October 2021, the month Patient Prism launched, Smiles West was converting new patients at 84% but had over $52,000 in lost estimated revenue sitting in unrecovered calls. Over the first five months, the RELO process recovered 51 new patients with a 27% follow-up success rate, generating over $162,000 in estimated revenue from callbacks alone. By March 2022, Patient Prism ROI had exceeded 1,800%.

$162,000

In estimated revenue generated from RELO follow-ups in the first 5 months

1,800%+

Patient Prism ROI in March 2022

51

New patients recovered from RELO callbacks in the first 5 months

Sherri views the 27% RELO conversion rate not as a ceiling but as a starting point, knowing from other DSOs on the platform that doubling or even tripling that rate is achievable. She is actively pushing location teams to do callbacks not just for new patients, but for existing patients as well, expecting the gains to multiply as performance improves.

“Within just a couple days I knew this solution had the potential to significantly increase my new patient conversions. The additional metrics for existing patients was just a bonus.”
— Sherri Paxton, Marketing Director, Smiles West