With the new year upon us, it’s time to maximize and optimize every part of your dental practice. Let’s start by looking at your hygiene department, which, in many cases, is the foundational pillar of your entire practice.
Yes, you have hygiene serving the base of patients you’ve created over your career. However, if you look back to the patients who have come through your door over the years, you probably realize that you have an amazingly small hygiene department compared to the number of patients you’ve seen over time.
Clearly, there’s plenty of opportunity to be had, so let’s talk about optimizing hygiene in your practice… and in a way unlike any you’ve likely ever considered before.
Establish a Goal and a Path
Let’s pretend we’re starting from scratch and establish a new goal. Almost every hygiene patient comes in for the most routine things with no real apparent plan, goal, or desired outcome. They’re really just going through the motions. So, the first thing to do is define your ideal patient visit. This can be led by the doctor depending on how mature your hygiene department is, but it should be written, outlined, protocoled, systemized, and structured.
Everyone should know it. When your new hygienists walk in the door, they should have a one-page checklist showing exactly how you do a hygiene visit in your practice. It explains what takes place during every second of that visit – from the moment the patient walks through the door until the moment they leave.
Let’s face it. You spend a lot of time talking about new patients and choreographing the visit, but you probably spend zero time choreographing and orchestrating the most valuable, volume-driven visits in your entire practice.
You can make excuses like, “They’re all healthy,” or “There’s no money coming out of hygiene,” or “It’s not a big deal,” or “It’s not our most important part of the practice,” or “It’s annoying to do so many hygiene checks.” These excuses don’t matter. Hygiene doesn’t need to be the biggest part of your practice.
What’s important is that you make hygiene work like a bonus to your bottom line. And even so, it should definitely NOT be handled like some kind of accident.
Prepare Your Hygiene Checklist.
You may already have a checklist for how your practice handles hygiene. But when is the last time you reviewed it? Is it perfect?
Does it have a “choose your own adventure” kind of structure? In other words, does it map out the path the patient goes down depending on:
- If A, then this
- If B, then this instead
Such as:
- IF a patient ends up needing more treatment, then…
- IF a patient has same-day treatment, then…
- IF they have emergencies, then…
- IF they have perio, then…
- IF they run into an issue where they’re interested in something specific, then…
Is there a path outlined to follow for every single hygiene visit?
You may wonder why your team may not always do what you expect. But the question is, do you even have a documented expectation?
When looking at your hygiene department, create an ideal visit outline. This includes the value of that visit along with creating a checklist to follow – patient by patient. You may have a routing slip, but you definitely need a hygiene protocol checklist. Once documented, put the system in place.
The secret is to get the hygienists involved and let them make it a game. Let them challenge themselves and give them incentives to do so.
When optimizing your practice, establish the average hygiene visit value at no less than $250.00 a visit. Then, if you piece together all the bells and whistles in a hygiene exam, you should be able to have a daily average value somewhere in the $2,000+ range of a full day of hygiene. This is just based on a sophisticated practice, modern technology, and fully caring for the entire health of the patient. There are no specific standards because every practice is different. But the reality is very simple:
It’s important to have an outline list of what every hygiene visit includes and the value of what that visit should entail.
If you’re going to hold people accountable, you need to have a path of optimization and a clear victory for each person. Then, they are more likely to understand their responsibilities and your expectations on the individual patient-by-patient visit. You have an actual hygiene business model that you can work with, and you know predictably what this should create for you.
With This in Mind, Do You Track What Happens AFTER the Fact?
Instead of looking at performance by provider, holes in their schedules, how much money they made per day or by patient visit, and other data in retrospect, start focusing on future casting. Instead of reviewing historical data, focus on saying, “We know that if we see this many hygiene patients next month, we know that it’s going to equal approximately this dollar figure.”
Then, you have a baseline parameter, a benchmark, and something your hygiene team can work to improve. They have targets to hit, goals, and objectives which create the hygiene business department of the practice.
Put the health of your patients first—the key is knowing what the dollar value is on that plan.
You know how much those patients are worth, and you can invest in them accordingly. You can reward your hygienists properly and assign a focused impact of the growth in the hygiene department on the overall practice. Instead of waiting for something to happen, there is now a formula to follow to make the most of each patient’s visit.
As things progress and change over time, you can update this formula with training, new advances in technology/treatment, or even your philosophy. But you need to make sure that you establish what the hygiene department (the foundational pillar of the practice) stands for, what every visit looks like, where the patient starts and ends up, and, of course, what the value of it is to the overall business that you own.
The focus of hygiene is making patients healthy by moving them along with their treatment plans.
Now, if you don’t have a tactical, proven system for creating dentistry out of hygiene, you’re not alone.
Many dentists can say, “Oh, my hygienists are really good at selling dentistry,” or “They’re really good at educating patients,” or “They’re really good at setting me up or leading the way,” or “They’re really not great at doing anything but cleaning teeth.” However, most do not have a system in place for developing the most valuable part of hygiene – not the visits themselves, but the dentistry created from it.
Your hygienists are your lead educators. They are your number-one line of defense and your salespeople in the practice, and this has to be understood, advocated, followed through on, and part of the culture of responsibility.
It’s the Perfect Time for Change
As 2025 approaches, you are probably creating goals for the new year. As you plan for implementation, make it a priority to stop covering issues with bandages for the short term. Instead, get to the root cause of the problem and fix it. Move patients forward, have integrity with your diagnosis, and help patients take responsibility for their health. To be successful, this is what must happen.
Are you ready to start 2025 on the right track? More insights coming soon…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Recognized by thousands of dentists across North America, Scott Manning is an accomplished author whose book, “The Dental Practice Shift,” is the #1 most requested book in dentistry. He is also a highly sought-after public speaker. For nearly two decades, Scott has dedicated his life to inspiring and motivating dentists worldwide to create wealth and lifestyle-focused practices. When he’s not sharing his positive messages around the globe, Scott enjoys traveling and spending time with his beloved wife, Kristen, and their daughter, Saylor.
To learn more, visit dentalsuccesstoday.com.
FEATURED IMAGE CREDIT: Rubén González from Pixabay.
