There are several advanced strategies of hygiene I like to share with my clients. You may or may not have heard of them before, but if you use them all together, you’re going to see a significant change in your practice.
Advanced Hygiene for Success: 3 Simple Strategies You May Be Missing
1. The Hybrid Hygiene Floater
My favorite strategy is the “hybrid hygiene floater.” Basically, this is when you overpay for a hygienist to act as a floater in the practice. Many of you have a low-paid hygiene assistant who helps turn rooms and simply disinfects your hygienist’s room. What they’re really supposed to do is build and have amazing relationships with their patients. But instead, you’re focused on a time-driven efficiency where you quickly turn patients out of hygiene.
This is called stepping over a giant pile of hundred-dollar bills to pick up very small pennies, dimes, and quarters!
Instead, what I advocate is having a bench player—an extra hygienist or several—who can turn same-day perio, work through visits if necessary, serve the assisting department if needed, take patients out of hygiene, and educate them on treatment.
Think of a hygienist/treatment coordinator/assistant all bundled into one, paid like a hygienist, so they can do anything you ask them to do at any time. Now, they become a real asset. They become a producer.
You wonder why your payroll gets out of hand. It’s because you add people who can’t produce.
You add people who make it convenient for the team, but not productive for patients. So, you put a hygiene floater in place, and then if you need to double- or triple-book hygiene, when a patient doesn’t show up, this person can now do other things. If the patient does show up, then you have the person right there. I can instantly add a hygienist who produces more money than any hygienist you have today simply by putting them in as a floater.
Understand that hygienists are handicapped. They’re only going to make as much money as their hygiene visits are worth. So, you worry about adding another column of hygiene, which is going to cap you out between $1,500 and $2,000 a day, versus putting someone—a bench player—on deck who can maximize their productivity. If they’re not doing the $150 service, they can be doing a $250 or $500 SRP, or they can be floating a patient emergency visit or restoring the patient into a perio treatment. You can maximize their value. They can produce twice as much as another hygienist because they can perform other restorative duties.
2. Double Booking
Now, the second option you can have is double booking, which I previously mentioned. You’re never going to fully rid yourself of cancellations and no-shows. If you’re booking an eight-person hygiene day, you’re bound to have one person who doesn’t show. And a lot of times, you’re wasting that one hour by having hygienists on the phone instead of helping reactivate treatment.
You could be doing a number of other productive things rather than spending so much energy trying to keep your schedule full in hygiene. Instead of taking someone, a key person on your team, and putting them on the phone to fill a $150 slot, they could do something productive that could give you $1,500 at the end of the day or $15,000 by selling a treatment plan.
We really have to stop thinking so small and think about the overall business side of the hygiene department.
The biggest problem in hygiene is forgetting to diagnose. It’s so easy to go quickly in a visit and forget to educate and follow through with the patient. The end result isn’t clean teeth. The end result is an educated patient that’s moved along in their treatment plan.
3. Exiting Patients
The third strategy is to make sure someone is exiting your patients out of hygiene. They’re not leaving with the receipt or walking out to the front counter and paying their copay. Instead, have a consultative exit for every hygiene patient that has treatment in their mouth.
The worst thing you can do is turn your hygienists into cashiers. I mean, come on, are you kidding me?
It’s crazy. So, they’re already rushed and having a hard time selling dentistry, and now you have them turning into the hygiene checkout counter? It just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
You need to have a bigger picture, think about how it feels to the patient, and keep your producers doing what they do best all the time. It’s very important.
Use the Formula for Success.
Incorporate these strategies into a simple formula for success. Multiply your daily hygiene goal by the number of hygiene days you have. Then, multiply that number by the number of hygienists you have working.
For example:
- Let’s say the ideal visit is worth $500.
- Let’s say you have 2 hygienists working 4 days per week.
- Let’s say they’re working 50 weeks a year.
- Let’s say they treat 4 patients per day.
- $500 x 2 hygienists x 4 patients x 4 days x 50 weeks = $800,000
This becomes the value of your hygiene department that you are shooting to achieve every single time.
Your goal is to build your practice into accomplishing this. It’s not to say, “What did our hygienist produce the last six months? Well, okay. If we get 10% better, we’re in great shape.”
The power of this formula is to enable you to stop thinking about getting better based on where you are now.
Instead, start thinking about what OPTIMAL is for your practice. Let’s think about what it’s supposed to be. Not what it has been—what it’s supposed to be. And you do this by building this formula.
More insights coming soon…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Recognized by thousands of dentists across North America, Scott Manning is an accomplished author (“The Dental Practice Shift” is the #1 most requested book in dentistry) and a highly sought-after public speaker. For almost two decades, he has dedicated his life to inspiring and motivating dentists worldwide to create wealth and lifestyle-based practices. Today, when he is not sharing his positive messages worldwide, he loves to travel and spend time with his beloved wife Kristen and daughter Saylor.
To learn more, visit dentalsuccesstoday.com.
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