A Hygiene Driven Practice
Lyn Dalsfoist, All-Star Hygiene Mastery Coach, and Eric Vickery discuss how to achieve a hygiene driven practice and the KPI’s and retention qualities that provide growth.
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About Lyn Dalsfoist
Lyn has been a Dental Hygienist for four decades. She also holds an MBA in Health Services Administrations. Early in her career, she worked in public health. She was offered a Dental Hygiene/Dental Disease Prevention Coordinator position for the Indian Health Service Alaska Native Medical Center (ANMC) providing clinical hygiene, planned, implemented, and evaluated dental disease prevention and smokeless tobacco cessation programs. She received recognition for the success of these programs. At that same time, she also served as an adjunct clinical instructor at the University of Alaska Anchorage Dental Hygiene Program. After several years, she moved to private practice. For the past three decades, besides performing clinical procedures, she served as lead hygienist, managing dental hygiene departments, implementing periodontal disease management protocols, key performance indicators, case acceptance and recall systems. She has guided hygiene departments to expand successfully, helping practices to grow in quality of patient care and profitability.
About Eric Vickery
Eric holds a degree in business administration and brings a strong business and systems approach to his consulting. His initiation into the field of dentistry was in the area of office management. He managed dental practices for over ten years and has been consulting over 250 offices nationwide since 2001.
Episode Transcript
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:00
Hello friends, welcome to your weekly motivational moments with Eric Vickery, president of coaching at All-Star Dental Academy and my dear friend and my fellow coach, hygiene coach, Lynn. How are you Lynn? Very good, thank you Eric. Good. We’re going to talk about what it means to be a hygiene driven practice. What does that mean to you? Well, you know, I’m glad you asked that question because your hygiene actually, 30% of your
00:28
for 30% of your production and about 60% of patient appointments for the dentist’s appointments come from hygiene. So it is a cornerstone and a backbone of your practice. So it gives us the look into it. Okay. So first thing we have for a hygiene driven practice is a focus on vision, the vision of the practice. Next, a hygiene driven practice retains patients.
00:58
because patient retention is important for patient growth. Your hygiene patients allow you to grow your practice. Next, it has the support of a dentist with skillful leadership. And that means that you’re aligned with your team. And then it also is composed of your hygiene team that is highly functioning,
01:27
and highly productive hygiene team that is also compassionate and productive. And the next thing you want to have is a, you want to implement systems. These systems actually provide a high level of patient care and productivity for your practice. And also apply measurements for patients for the growth and sustainability of your practice.
01:56
Now when you implement this, yeah, your KPIs, when you implement this, you don’t just elevate the care and healthcare of your patient, but you also drive the growth of your practice. I have a question for you about this. It’s a good outline. I know this is from your hygiene coaching outline on how you support our clients with the hygiene journal practice. I recognize this outline now that you’re going through it. So retention of patients.
02:25
So when you say that, give me a number, like a percentage or a figure, and maybe how do we know if we’re retaining them? That’s such a deep, deep topic, I know, but is there any clues you can give us on, like are we trying to keep 100%, 95%, 90%? I don’t even know what that number would be. Well, 90%, 85% of your patient should be retained, and you wanna make 100% of your patient with a recall appointment. If you can do that.
02:54
That’s a success. So we’re at an appointment today to reappoint them. We want our targets 100%. Totally agree. Got that. And then our goal is 85 to 90% of retention. So let’s do some quick math. So if you’re seeing one hygienist is seeing about, we’ll average it. We’ll just guess a little 100 patients a month. There’s potential that you could say 10% of them are falling off the schedule and need to be followed up on. That’s 10 patients a month. That’s 10 patients, correct. Maybe 12 if I’m…
03:23
Yeah, 10 to 12 patients a month. So that means we also have room for 10 to 12 patients a month for every one hygienist you have in your practice if we’re not retaining all of them. Is that fair? That is fair. And that means that you have room to grow. Okay. Yeah. I talk a lot about you’re losing, and maybe I need to fix my number, you lose about eight patients a month, but it could be more than that if we don’t have good systems in place. So your last, well, second to last point here, implement systems, your standing operating procedures and your KPIs.
03:52
I’m guessing a part of that is really your overdue hygiene system as well and how you’re working that. Exactly. And when you look at your KPIs, I know a lot of people are kind of thinking about perio, but your perio percentage actually affects several KPIs. Your perio percentage is actually a lead measure that affects your…
04:15
production per patient, production per day, and even broken and open hygiene appointments that affect work. So what’s the minimum on that KPI? Oh, sorry. Quick question. What’s the minimum percentage that you want in perio percentage for a practice? Okay, so the benchmark is about 30%. But you know, because I quoted ADA as 47% of…
04:41
the population 30 years and over have perio, okay? So with the benchmark would be around 30% in your practice. Now, depends on where you are at, and unless you probe everybody at every appointment, then that’s all the way you know how much percentage. Okay, this is a good just awareness for us this week. Next week, we’re gonna talk about how to take the steps in doing this. So we’ll do some more on the second session of this.
05:11
Thank you, Lynn, for joining me this week. Everyone, go out and make sure that you know your KPIs, that you know your vision for your hygiene, and how you’re doing with retention and periopercentage. Let’s look at those, and then next week, we’re gonna talk some more about this. Thank you, Lynn. Thank you.
Questions? We would love to connect with you!
