Dental Consultant | Dental Practice Solutions

Enhancing Dental Practice Productivity: The Key to Reactivating Patients

By: Debbie Seidel-Bittke, RDH, BS

July 9, 2024

One of the most direct methods to enhance productivity within a dental practice is through the reactivation of overdue or inactive hygiene patients, effectively bringing them back into the fold of routine dental hygiene appointments.

At Dental Practice Solutions, we understand the immense value of reconnecting with patients who have previously engaged with your dental practice. These patients already have a rapport with your team and perceive your practice as their trusted dental provider. Moreover, many of them likely have pending treatment needs.

Reactivating these patients not only helps keep a productive schedule but also strengthens patient retention and improves overall practice efficiency.

Continue reading and learn how to enhance your dental practice productivity with the keys to reactivating patients.

Dental Practice Solutions encourages dental offices to have specific ways to bring overdue-unscheduled hygiene patients back to your office. Your reactivation system must be automated so it works behind the scenes while employees complete other productivity tasks.

Only when automated systems do not motivate patients to schedule should you begin making phone calls. And of course, if you have patients that insist you only contact them by a phone call, do use the phone to communicate with these patients. Today’s population uses millions of text messages to communicate, and 90% of text messages are seen quickly, and respond much faster than a phone call or voice message.

Dental Practice Solutions has a Practice Growth System that includes Patient Retention. This is a white glove system that provides dental practices around the world to not only attract more new patients but it can be used to reactivate overdue hygiene patients, plus it will help schedule more cosmetic cases.

Phone Calls to Overdue Hygiene Patients

Most phone calls in our world today never reach the patient. Seldom do people answer a phone call when they don’t recognize the phone number calling. Even when do leave a voice message, that message many times, goes without the patient returning your call……not always but most of them time; isn’t that correct?

A few tips when you do make a phone call to schedule overdue/inactive patients:

Note: Most of our clients use a customized dashboard and we train them how to very easily generate a list of overdue hygiene patients and we can categorize by the type of unscheduled treatment needed (ex: Implants or Restorative $500 or greater), as well as specific insurance types.

Step 1. Generate a list and save this list of overdue hygiene patients who have unscheduled Perio therapy.

Step 2. Generate a list of patients who have been in the office within the last 6-9 months and do not have a next hygiene appointment.

Step 3. Generate a list of patients who haven’t been in the office for a hygiene appointment for 9-18 months.

Step 4. Next, is a list of patients who have unscheduled restorative and already have a next hygiene appointment.

We are now half way through 2024 and it’s important for these patients with insurance benefits to use it or lose it! Now it’s time to put the pedal to the metal and get these patients back on the schedule.

Step 5. Have one team member lead your hygiene patient reactivation system. This team member will support cross-training of the other employees so they can also participate in reactivating overdue hygiene patients and patients with outstanding treatment.

If you have this process automated, it makes this system less time-consuming and simple for the other team members to initiate a text message or email if needed. Make sure you have a specific process which includes your text and email message content as well as when and how often you will text or email your patients before a phone call is initiated or a letter mailed. Mailing a letter is another topic for another day but some we train our clients to do and it has yielded great results!

Use “Engagement” which is connected to the KPI dashboard to set up the various categories of the patients mentioned above. This allows you to easily automate text messages to your patients.

Step 6. When sending text messages make them short, sweet, and to the point. No more than 2 sentences. Make sure your office name and phone number are included in the text message. If you have a scheduling link, include this and make it super simple for patients to get back on the schedule with a click of a button.

If you would like to learn more about this, plan to join our Hygiene Reactivation Power Hour where we walk you through this process and provide implementation tools. You will also have access to a free snapshot of your hygiene departments untapped potential. When we look at a dental practice, there is always over 100k that is sitting there waiting for you to tap into.

If you never look, you will never know!

When you register for the Power Hour you have access to try out this dental practice system and check out for yourself how this works. Less work, more productivity!

We recommend you always follow-up with patients within 48 hours if they leave your office without a next appointment. As the patient is rushing out your office door make sure you tell them you will be calling or texting them a scheduling link to get them back on the schedule!

Create urgency around preventive care and saving money. Whatever you know is a possible objection to scheduling care, speak to that potential objection!

Example: “Mrs. Jones, I know money is a concern and it can potentially cost more if you leave the tooth untreated. Is tomorrow at 10 AM a good time to call and get you scheduled?

No? Ok, how about I text you a link and when you click that link? Now you can choose a day and time that works best. Does that work for you if I text that link to you?

Awesome! We will see you soon and get that hole taken care of before it causes more problems and costs you. more money! See you soon.”

We cover all of this information during the dental power hour, plus, a lot more so please be sure you register.

If you miss the date for our Hygiene Reactivation Power Hour plan to book a workshop for your office to learn and implement this important information.

You can contact us here to book a discovery call to find out more about a workshop or more that we offer.

Keep your back door closed and an additional 100k+ to your practices’ bottom line!

7 Tips for Dental Hygiene Appointment Success: Staying on Time, Keep it Down to a Science

By: admin

July 24, 2013

Let’s face it, working in a dental office and managing to stay on time for your patients can be a stressful event!

The dental office team members need to take charge and manage the daily schedule.

How can your dental team take charge and reduce the potential threat of stress of “Staying on Time”?

The dental hygiene appointment can be stress-free is you follow these 7 tips.

Step 1 Set Goals

Break down your goals according the each department, and each treatment room in your dental office. For example, a typical dental hygiene appointment should provide profits to the dental practice not a loss leader.

If you plan accordingly the profit potential can happen with the feeling of stress. Waiting for doctor to examine the patient is often a huge stressor. Even patients become anxious waiting for doctor to arrive. Have you had patients who had to wait for the doctor exam and they became impatient? Read on for some more tips to stay on time.

Step 2 Time Your Procedures

I am almost positive that you have a good idea how long each procedure will take. Time your procedures; doctor / hygiene exams, assistant time, fluoride treatments, sealants, even doctor prep time, on and on. Write down a list of services you provide patients. Write them down, include the treatment room available for the procedure (Maybe you can move a patient who needs impressions, etc., after the routine hygiene procedures) write down available rooms, which can additionally provide this service. (Within their scope of practice) This will help you gather a lot of information about how to schedule more productively and with less stress.

Have you taken time to “time” your procedures? If you have not done so, schedule a monthly team “timing meeting.” Your timing can become easily disrupting with various factors. Some of these factors are employee turnover, what to do in the case of a late patient, how do you make up for time if patient anesthesia is a challenge, etc? There are so many more topics regarding timing so sit down and create a success plan around this topic.

Step 3 Break Down the Time

Break down each appointment into primary, secondary or doctor/assistant time. When you schedule around the primary providers time, your practice will drive a health level of revenue.

I want to ask that you write down and share what type of dental procedures you enjoy providing. Include the entire team: dental hygienists and assistants as well. As a dental hygienist, I have enjoyed treating the periodontal patients. Many of my dental practice management clients have a hygienist that prefers to see the periodontal patients. In many offices one hygienist will see a large majority of the pediatric patients or the new patients. Another hygienist is best at treating the more difficult patients; stressed out patients and more difficult periodontal cases. Discover which services each provider enjoys most and then schedule in “special” times for these types of services in each provider’s schedule.

Block your schedule in 10-minute increments. If you choose 15 minutes, you will lose thousands of dollars over a year of appointments. It just doesn’t round up when you have 15 minute increments of time in your daily schedule.

Here are a few examples:

Scaling and Root Planing (SRP) – 2 quadrants. This may take only 90 minutes. There will be 3 – ten minute increments of time left after this block of time.

A patient who is at moderate to extremely high risk for caries will be returning to your office every three to four months for about 10= 20 minutes of time. (CAMBRA – CARIES MANAGEMENT BY RISK ASSESSMENT guidelines)

If you have a 90-minute block of time for two quadrants of SRP, the block of time after this service is a great time to schedule an appointment for a patient at moderate to high risk for caries. (Fluoride Varnish, homcare instructions, etc.)

Possibly a small child can be seen for a prophy/fluoride appointment. Sealants or impressions for night guards or bleach trays can fit in these thirty minutes of time as well. When you strategize and look over the doctor’s schedule, you may have the prep of a crown scheduled for 80 minutes. The doctor’s time should be blocked off during the exact time he/she must be in the room. (Examples: anesthesia time, preparing the crown, seat time, etc.)

Think outside the box of purely blocking patient dental hygiene appointments for exactly 60 minutes for a hygiene appointment. Block out the assistant time as well in this situation.

Many offices are implementing assisted hygiene, (Not to be confused with Accelerated Hygiene!) and I enjoy guiding teams through the process of creating a stress-free, success schedule of time with assisted hygiene. Always block for doctor, assistant time and hygienist time.

Step 4 Use a Schedule with Blocked Templates

Once you have established your daily production goal for each treatment room, work with your team to create and visually layout a best schedule to create quality dentistry, delivering impeccable care and that personal touch.

Do you prefer to see your high-end aesthetic cases in the morning? Do you want children in the office early morning? Block out these times exactly when you want them to be in your schedule.

I always requested that my patient appointments for scaling and root-planing be scheduled in the morning. Occasionally, I would have one after lunch but I definitely enjoyed seeing the more difficult cases in the mornings when I was fresh.

Step 5 Decide Who Will Schedule Next Appointments

The success of a full schedule really has a lot to do with the clinical team. If you have a couple of administrative team members at the front desk, you may want to have one of them in charge of scheduling doctors’ appointments.

The hygienist (or someone on the hygiene team) is the very best person to schedule future hygiene appointments. I have found over the years as a clinical hygienist and working with my clients, that the hygienist is in a good position to educate patients about their need for specific types of appointments and the necessary intervals to maintain optimal health. This is in line with how communication works best. It also eliminates patients going to the front desk with any confusion about why they need a next visit for “x, y, or z.”

The one time it is not efficient for the hygienist (or someone on the hygiene team) is when the patient needs multiple appointments scheduled. An example of this is a patient who was diagnosed today for four quadrants of scaling and root planing and will need to return for 4 appointments plus a perio maintenance appointment, four to six weeks later.

It can be a good idea to have one person at the front desk also is in charge of the hygiene schedule. This is one person who can make follow up calls to overdue hygiene patients as well as schedule these multiple appointments as necessary.

Step 6 Hygiene Exams

It works best for everyone, (patient, doctor and team members) if doctor enters the hygiene treatment room to complete the exam after the hygienist has completed her/his assessments and before the last 10 minutes of the hygiene appointment. I will share a diagram at the top of this blog and below is an explanation of how this should flow.

**See the photo at the top of this blog for a break-down and science of time management. Doctor should come into the hygiene room to complete the patient exam after 2nd interval – (See the time management pie chart) which is the hygienist’s initial case presentation. The hygienist completes his/her assessments and then presents his/her findings in an initial case presentation. This is a couple of minutes to explain what the hygienist and patient saw in the patient’s mouth. Doctor should not enter the hygiene room to begin the exam later than 15 minutes before the hygiene appointment is supposed to end.

Step 7 Communication Saves Time

Many offices today use radio devices, communication lights in the treatment room, or instant messaging on their computer software to communicate if a patient has arrived to the office.

Many sports teams have a high level of communication skills, moving from one play to another. This is the same level of communication you will want to have in your dental office.

One More Stress relief Management Tool

Imagine your time management skills as rewarding and stress free.

Understanding the value of your time, how it can be used and a commitment to effective communication are your keys to manifesting your goals and increasing profits in your practice!

Do you have a time stressor during your day in the dental office? What might that be? I would enjoy hearing about your time stressor.

Maybe it will be another topic here for another week’s blog. It is possible that I have a solution. If you write it in the comment below, you never know, someone else may have a great solution.

Looking forward to supporting you!

ABOUT DEBBIE

Debbie Seidel-Bittke, RDH, BS, is founder of Dental Practice Solutions and for over 20 years she has been committed to creating a dental hygiene department that works enthusiastically, creating a high performance teams, improving patients’ total health and consistent profits to the dental practice.

She is an author for journals such as Dentistry Today, Hygiene Town and RDH. Debbie speaks internationally about systems and services in the dental hygiene department to create a team that works like a well-oiled machine, improving the total health of patients’, utilizing the most recent science to prevent disease and consistently increase profits.

In 1984 she graduated from USC in Los Angeles in with a Bachelors Degree in Dental Hygiene. She is a former clinical assistant professor from USC. In 2000-2002 Debbie co-taught the practice management course for the dental students. Debbie is also a former dental hygiene program director for a school in Portland, Oregon where she wrote the accreditation, hired the instructors, purchased all the equipment, worked with project managers on the building of the school while managing a 2 million dollar budget.
Debbie works with dental practices throughout the world and is considered a leader in creating consistent profits to a dental practice through services and systems in the dental hygiene department.

Check out her new program for 30 Days of information to increase profits in your dental hygiene department: 30 Days of Profit to Your Dental Hygiene Department