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Increasing Your Recall Rate Through Your Dental Hygienist
Details in the dental health care profession translate to numbers, statistics, percentages, ratios and dollar amounts. There are specific vital signs that should be monitored in a well-run and profitable dental hygiene department. They include gross production, production per hour, collection percentage, receivables ratio, new patient appointments, average new patient treatment potential, case acceptance ratio, treatment completion rate and recall rate. Every dentist’s best ally in compiling and monitoring these statistics is the dental hygienist.
The most important statistic to monitor is recall rate. A properly run recare program will contribute 30-45 percent of the annual gross production of a practice. Even more telling is the fact that 40-80 percent of a doctor’s treatments come from hygiene recare chairs. For this reason alone, your recall for recare rate should be 85 percent or better. One hundred percent of the patients seen by the dental hygienist should make appointments for continuing care. Up to 75 percent of patients can and should be referred to a more frequent recare schedule. Up to 50 percent should be referred to a more intensive level of periodontal treatment. Less than 10 percent of your patients should be lost through cancellations or broken appointments.
You and your hygienist need to work out a logical plan to check these numbers routinely and carefully to determine how well your statistics measure up to acceptable percentages. If your department’s statistics don’t measure up, decide to make them measure up, set numerical goals and make some changes. Monitor numbers daily, weekly, monthly, then annually. Analyze the data you collect and learn from it. It can be your most important tool for reading patterns and trends. It can also help you spot warning signs early enough to deal with them effectively, appropriately and proactively.
Hygiene Hats: The Customer Service Rep and Educator
Every interaction with a patient is going to be a positive or negative experience that affects patient loyalty, retention and referrals. Since most patients will spend most of their time in a dental practice with the dental hygienist, she is the one who must bear the heaviest burden of providing customer service that is positive and attractive.
From the first contact with a patient, the hygienist needs to sell herself and the practice. Patients must see that she excels at her work and is proud of her work. She should be gentle, reassuring, and perfectly tuned in to her patients’ needs. A good hygienist recognizes what matters to her patients -- what they think, how they feel, what they want, and what they need. This means reading accurately whether her patients are most motivated by pain, time, appearance, money, or a combination of all of these.
To make each patient feel important, the hygienist must tailor each discussion of treatment, procedure and home care to meet specific needs, expectations and motivations. She must recognize the importance of building a relationship with each patient. A good dental hygienist knows that no two patients are exactly alike and no two messages should be exactly alike. She treats each patient as a special and unique individual. This makes good sense for the practice and for the patient.
As a good customer service rep, the dental hygienist must excel as teacher. It is her responsibility to make patients aware of their dental problems and to explain the consequences of those problems if they are not treated. If a dental hygienist performs this function effectively, she makes her patients understand and accept the benefits of regular dental care visits. She ensures that patients recognize that a visit to your practice is “not just a cleaning.” This instills in patients a good attitude about dental health care and dental health maintenance. If this is done effectively, it can cut the number of “no shows” and significantly raise the number of recare appointments.
Productivity and profit will increase in proportion to the dental hygienist’s skills as an educator. This means a commitment to being prepared to answer questions and to project a high level of expertise about everything connected to dentistry. Patients will have many questions about dental procedures, technology and products, and a good hygienist must learn the answers cold. The more she knows, the more she can convey to patients. The more she communicates in a self-confident and knowledgeable manner, the more patients will be willing to listen. The more patients listen and learn, the more they will believe in the benefits of keeping appointments and adhering to a regular dental health care schedule in the office and at home.
When patients are satisfied that they are well-cared for, well-informed, and respected as individuals, they will return.
Hygiene Hats: The Scheduling Coordinator
In most dental practices, scheduling patient appointments is a front desk function. In the case of new patients or old patients who call for an appointment because there is a problem, this is fine. In the case of recare appointments, however, it is far more efficient to make scheduling the responsibility of the dental hygienist.
If you reacted to this concept by shaking your head and telling yourself so and so does this at my office, step back and think again. For a patient, scheduling an appointment at the front desk is scheduling an appointment with someone not directly involved with his care. Your dental hygienist is directly involved. If she and the patient have achieved a good relationship, he is likely to be comfortable and even pleased knowing she is scheduling a personal and personalized appointment for follow up care.
The hygienist wins too. Because she can accurately gauge the amount of time a recare visit with a particular patient will take, she can set up a realistic block of time and thus avoid the problem of having a patient sitting around in the waiting room while she finishes up with another patient. It also gives the hygienist more control over flex time. Down time created by holes in front desk scheduling is not always efficient; down time or flex time deliberately built into a weekly or daily schedule allows the hygienist to attend to tasks not directly related to seeing patients. She can use the time to learn a new procedure, check equipment, order supplies, or help other team members with special projects.
Recare appointment scheduling begins with a spiral notebook in the hygienist’s operatory; it ends with the hygienist not being totally dependent on having someone else structure her day. It is her department -- let her take responsibility for managing the time she spends in it.
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