
For the majority of dental business owners hygiene is an area of untapped potential.
I recommend focusing on hygiene as a separate ‘business within your business’. When you look at the profit per hour you make from hygiene compared to your associates you start to see why.
This is because an associate who is paid 45% of the income they generate will work with a nurse. So after you deduct the cost of that nurse you may be paying away 65% of revenue. So in simple terms, if the associate generates £100 income in an hour, you will be seeing £35 of this.
On the other hand, a hygienist typically works on their own. So if we take an average salary of £32 per hour for the hygienist, using the same example of £100 hourly income generated, you will make £68.
So hygiene can be a very profitable area.
To increase the volume of patients benefiting from your hygiene support, you need to adopt two strategies:
1. Increasing the number of appropriate patients who see your hygienist — your hygiene concentration
2. Increasing the number of times these patients see your hygienist — your hygiene frequency
You can start increasing your hygiene concentration by highlighting patients who are not seeing your hygienist but would benefit from doing so on your day sheets. This provides a prompt for the dentist to go into ‘hygiene mode’, using visual aids such as an intraoral camera to zone in on problem areas in their mouths and also sharing a ‘scoring system’ which the patients can understand and get on board with. Some practices work in an extra few minutes per appointment with these patients to provide time for hygiene to be discussed.
Your hygiene frequency can be driven by the creation of different hygiene plans to recommend to your patients.
Remember, if you would like to discuss how you can maximise your hygiene function further or wish to discuss any other business growth matter, call Clear Vision on 01249 712074.
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