I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of taking sleep dentistry courses that sound like the same old broken record. It’s almost like all these exterior companies are reading the same page from the same playbook. Honestly, I learned most of this stuff during my Junior year of dental school—there’s rarely a novel system, process, or approach being shared.

It’s a shame, too, because successfully diagnosing and treating sleep apnea is super underemphasized in our industry. Adding sleep dentistry to your services is a great way to boost your revenue but, more importantly, it can help you and your team to change even more lives.

I apologize: I don’t plan to complain throughout the rest of this week’s blog post. But the grievances I’m harboring right now have been expressed by dentists across the board for some time—I just thought my readers might relate. Attending a conference or taking an online course just to hear “Sleep Apnea Pitch 2.0” has evolved into a norm no better than pulling teeth (pun intended).

Jokes and cynicism aside, I do think it’s great to see so many companies trying to get dental practices to take sleep apnea more seriously. But the unfortunate reality is that even the practice owners who want to implement sleep apnea treatment are having trouble doing so. Usually, the troubles come in the form of billing issues. Getting paid through medical insurance can be difficult to navigate for any dental practice in the first place. But when it comes to sleep apnea, insurance companies make it extra difficult for practice owners to make money.

That’s why I was pumped when Dr. Avi Weisfogel reached out to me. Avi is the guy behind the International Academy of Sleep (IAOS), and he’s a fellow doctor who has trained many others to implement sleep dentistry in their practices. Avi knows how to navigate the process behind the scenes to prevent your claims from getting rejected. It’s not easy—it’s a nuanced process—but the dividends you’ll reap and the impact you’ll make is well worth it. His approach was created after he learned a simple trick (almost by mistake), and it revolves around starting a separate “sleep business.” Now over 200 dentists across the country have successfully deployed the IAOS model to create stand-alone sleep businesses to run alongside or in the place of their dental practice.

Let’s back up for a second, though, and talk a bit about Avi’s story. I’ll tell you how he transitioned from being a normal dentist to becoming the sleep dentistry guru he is today.

Avi got into sleep dentistry right out of school. After graduating from NYU in 1998, he saw his first sleep patient three days into his year-long residency. That was but a year later when Avi was more of an amateur; all his knowledge came from attending a weekend-long course that wasn’t too different from the courses offered today (and you know how I’ve been left feeling about those). However, that same patient soon came back, happy to tell Avi that he had changed her life. From there, Avi understood the power of sleep dentistry. Eager to explore how he could make a difference in the world of sleep, he spent countless hours trying to implement OSA treatment within his practices using traditionally-taught methods.

But in using these methods typically taught at sleep courses, Avi failed to make it a meaningful part of his practice. Unfortunately, not many patients were coming in for sleep dentistry: Avi’s next sleep apnea patient came eight months later and the next came another year after that. When Avi started his own practice and advertised for sleep apnea treatment, he got maybe one or two to come in. Even then, he’d first have to send those patients to a physician. Thus, early on, Avi learned that implementing sleep apnea treatment into a dental practice can be a headache unless you know how to control the whole process.

After over 10 years of trial and error, he acquired Healthy Heart Sleep, a DME company with no relationship to his dental practice. Through this company, he was able to work with doctors from across the US to help them establish diagnostic programs within their medical practices and direct the recommended treatment paths for each patient.

By 2013, Avi began to help other dentists by sharing this unique method so they could build similarly-designed businesses. As a result, IAOS was born in 2016. Nowadays, Avi offers courses for sleep dentistry designed to blow the other guys out of the water. I can vouch firsthand that Avi is the real deal when it comes to helping dentists effectively navigate the overly complex process of diagnosing and treating sleep apnea.

In other words, he’s not like those other schmucks I’ve been growing frustrated with. Plus, he’s offering a Nifty deal (so don’t forget to check it out!).

 

 

Learn about:

• • Why are dentists having so much trouble implementing Sleep Apnea treatment within their practices? What are the big problems that Avi sees?
  • What’s the problem with most online courses that teach about sleep apnea treatment?
  • How do you get sleep apnea patients to come to your office? And, once they do, how do you get paid for them?
  • What’s the most frequent story that Avi hears?
  • Why does adding sleep as a service in a practice usually fail to launch?
  • Why should you treat Sleep Dentistry as a separate business?
  • What is the common mindset to avoid when trying to implement sleep treatments?
  • What simple trick did Avi come up with to get paid quadruple what he would’ve been paid as a dentist?
  • How many of Avi’s students are seeing 20+ sleep dentistry patients per month? 
  • How is it that 100% of the students who roll through Avi’s online course are billing through medical?
  • What can you expect to be taught in Avi’s course?
  • How long will it take to learn the nuances of sleep dentistry? How long did it take Avi?
  • How many months will it take to gain inertia and go on autopilot with 20+ sleep dentistry patients a month?
  • How can implementing sleep dentistry change the trajectory of your entire practice?
  • What courses does Avi offer?
    • Hint: one is small—no more than 15 dentists—while the other is large, free, and takes place in Vegas.  
  • And more!

 

NIFTY DEAL:

25% off any Sleep Blueprint Event

 

CHECK OUT THEIR EVENTS HERE:

Upcoming Events – Dental Sleep Medicine Courses in 2022

 

 

 

 

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