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The Hidden Hygiene Goldmine: Are You Leaving Money in the Chair? · The Millionaire Dentist™

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  Hello everyone, Welcome to the Millionaire Dentist Podcast, brought to you by Four
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  Quadrants Advisory. On this podcast, we break down the world of dentistry,
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  finances and business practices to help you become the millionaire dentist you deserve to be.
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  Please be advised we do speak with an honest tongue and may not be
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  safe for work. Hello and welcome. This is Casey Hires back at the
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  Millionaire Dentist Podcast in studio with co host Jared Bridgeman. Hey, good afternoon.
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  How are you great to see you. I'm all hopped up on mountain
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  dew. Oh boy, I haven't seen you drink a soda pop in a
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  while. I know. I try to try to behave try to be good.
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  I mean, this is a dental podcast. I'm drinking mountain dew.
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  That's like sacrilegious or something. Maybe, but they're also excited that they'll have
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  more business. Yeah, I've actually I was looking at my calendar early early
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  June. I go see go to my dentist dental appointment right, which is
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  one of our clients, and him nice, great guy looking at look.
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  I actually look forward to going. It's a lot of fun. Nice fella.
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  Yeah, and there. My hygienist is a friend of my wife's and
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  we're friends with them, So every just having to come over and come into
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  garage and take a look at my teeth real quick. Actually, well,
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  they are coming over for a garage party for a little after school thing at
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  the end of the week. But I'm not going to give her a sneak
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  peek into my chompers until my scheduled meeting choppers. Oh my gosh, Casey,
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  let me ask you a question here. Is there an area that you
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  often hear then to some practice owners out there complaining about that maybe does not
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  usually fall under our preview. That's a good one. And the fact that
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  I just talked about a hygienist, yeah, into hygiene. Oh, from
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  what I've understood and do understand, is you know, there are certain generic
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  base marks, benchmarks I should say, for how much money the hygiene should
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  be bringing into the practice. Correct. Yeah, part of our continuing education
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  as we get into a lot of benchmark's best practices for a healthy practice,
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  and one of those is is your hygiene department sing three times what you pay
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  them? Okay, that's a general benchmark that our firm goes by and and
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  helps our clients hit sure, sure so, but there are cases where that
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  is not happening, right. Have you heard any horror unfortunately? I mean
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  there's a lot of hygiene departments within great practices that are underachieving, that aren't
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  doing great right. And even as I've gone to different dentists over my life,
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  you can feel it. You can see a happy hygiene team right that
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  the dental hygienist. I mean in ways they're a little bit of the interface
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  of the whole practice because they're spending so much time with the patient and you
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  can feel are they in a good mood, are they in a bad mood?
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  Are they rushed? Do they seem to be genuinely care I mean,
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  that's a really good point with your patients have a lot more FaceTime higenists.
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  Yeah. Yeah, And so if the practice owner is underachieving in a lot
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  of areas in the practice or financially, they can come in grumpy. Will
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  guess what attitude reflects leadership? Captain I think is a quote a from a
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  movie, and so that permeates the whole practice. But from a hygiene department,
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  you've got the exterior how it feels how the conversations go. But then
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  you also have what's the data tell you is the hygiene department running optimally?
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  And I think you would said, hey, let's while this is costing practice
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  owners thousands of dollars and what we provide gets the millions of dollars more,
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  let's dive into a little bit of dental hygiene. What does a good department
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  look like. It's a little more practice management. We're not practice management,
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  we get into this stuff. But there's some actionable items that as a firm,
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  we know can help a hygiene department. So we thought we would share
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  those today for sure. And you know, if you check some of these
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  things off your list, that's just one last thing to kind of worry about,
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  at least for a little bit. So one of the things that I
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  think can cause issues, especially from a patient perspective, would be not getting
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  the time needed for hygiene visits. Like you, as you said, the
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  rush, it's funny, bad decisions and bad efficiencies. It just as a
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  domino effect. So if you are a practice that it has a lot of
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  insurance and you're on skates and it's a quantity shop and you're just you're just
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  running around trying to get as many people in because you're only getting fifty seven
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  since on the dollar, what picture does that paint? Well, you're not
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  going to get as much time, right, Yeah, So not only are
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  your your hygienists maybe not necessarily costing you money, but not getting you the
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  earnings that you should be getting just from that alone. And then if you
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  have a lot of insurance or your own work itself, is could be nearly
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  cut in half. Well, we've had conversations and we've talked with people and
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  they've basically said, every time and again, there's factors with everything, but
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  every time a team is coached to increase their hygiene time, production increases as
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  a result. Right Is that a mister or missus obvious statement? Maybe?
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  Maybe, but there's a correlations to everything, right, Well, and if
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  you get people in there, you get them in on time, you spend
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  the quality time that's needed with them, they're more more likely to keep returning
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  for like their scheduled hygiene visits. Well, and you can't just say okay,
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  great, let's add time. There needs to be a plan, right
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  right. You need to know exactly what's going to take place during that time.
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  If you're going to if you're going to increase it, what are you
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  going to add, What is it going to look like? How is it
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  going to be a value of benefit to the patient and to the practice,
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  because you're not just taking up time and a chair. There needs to be
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  a purpose to it, for sure, for sure. And I think that
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  can also tie into something that may be an issue as well as waiting until
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  it's too late to start hygiene now. And in terms of that, I
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  mean some practices may have had issues with waiting until the patient has some pretty
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  deep pockets, uh, you know, in their gumline, before they start
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  getting to work on it um. And at that point it's it's you're you're
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  working hard to save what's left instead of getting someone on a you know,
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  on a proper medical timeline. Because I mean it's it's a scary. It's
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  scary for a lot of people to walk in and not have their issues fixed
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  where maybe there's you know, they've got bleeding gums, you know, like
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  that Saxophonis from the Simpsons. It's it's a lot of this so far kind
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  of plays into in my mind too, patient satisfaction, buyer satisfaction, client
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  satisfaction, whatever, you want to call it. The more you feel these
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  people are spending either they're paying for insurance or they're spending their harder money on
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  this. They want to feel like they're going to a doctor, they're going
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  to someone with a medical profession, and they want that service well. And
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  again it comes back to leadership. You got to schedule some time to sit
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  down with your team to outline your specific treatment recommendations right, have a mock
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  treatment plan, and then work through what they got right, what they would
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  do differently. It's just like anything, what you're gonna put in it,
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  you're gonna get out of it. And your hygiene department needs to have clear
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  expectations, a clear path, and to understand big picture, but ultimately to
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  provide you know, some of the best perio treatment that you can provide well
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  casey with with hygiene and all that. I feel like than just may be
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  assuming it's just happening because they haven't heard any complaints about anything. UM,
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  I don't think it's safe to assume that the job is being done. I
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  know you more than likely like your staff and love your staff, and I'm
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  do work hard, but it's not safe to be to safely say I know
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  it's being done correctly every time. No, you don't want to assume.
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  I mean, one way to find out where you stand is doing an audit
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  of your charts. Just randomly pull fifteen twenty twenty five charts of adults seen
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  in the last six to twelve months. How many you have a complete perio
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  exam recorded in the last year, right, Chances are it's very good that
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  if in the last year, and again, that's a great way to see
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  in real time how's my hygiene department doing. Right, So if you pull
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  like fifteen twenty and half of them are not done, you know, to
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  completion, then that's a kind of a good guest that made of how the
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  whole year has been. It's kind of a funny topic that, again,
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  this is outside of our purview a little bit. While we help with efficiencies
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  within a department and some best practices, we don't get into the practice management
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  an It's I can kind of hear it even with you and I talking about
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  this. This is outside of our purview. These things are important, but
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  it's interesting that practice owners will think that getting one thing right is going to
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  write their ship of income overhead retirement, where also just action. Again,
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  this is thousands and thousands and ten thousands of dollars. We would call this
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  tripping over pennies to get to dollars because for us, the things that we
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  help with, it's millions and millions of dollars over the course of their career.
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  But let's say there's a dentist out there listening right now who is not
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  hitting the marks they need to even get to in collections. Is something like
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  this where they actually sit down and make a plan and work with their hygiene
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  team could help to boost them in the long run. Well, that's right.
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  I mean, do a case review meeting, you know, get it
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  on the schedule. Talk to your team, set a goal of how much
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  restorative you'd like to see enrolled in hygiene um, you know, put protocols
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  in place, that chart audit to look for current charts. That's that's an
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  important right. Communicate to your team. That's the biggest one I think is
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  make sure to stay in communication and be proactive with your team. Be proactive
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  in getting the information. Don't always expect someone to come to you because maybe
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  they didn't do the job to their own satisfaction. I know, I don't
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  run to my boss and telling myself you know well, and and again if
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  you have if you do some of these things and you you have a clear
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  path and a better outline. You also need to give them enough time,
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  like we said, so they can complete it, so they don't feel like
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  they're on skates. But I think those are all really really important. Again,
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  this is just one little topic, but it's important. Um well,
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  as you said, we do touch upon hygienea bit in our our CE course.
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  What are some other you know, generic topicsy, you may cover and
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  if someone comes to see you, yeah, I mean they tell me they
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  feel like they punched in the stomach and they ask how did I get access
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  to their profit and loss statement, balance sheet and taxes? Because the things
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  we cover, so many of you struggle with others. You might not be
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  struggling, but you're not getting to the next level. Right, You've hit
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  a level of success, you've plateaued. You're not getting to that next level
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  because you just don't know how. But we cover of some people addicted the
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  pain, you know, do they come in like Casey, you really whote
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  me on that one. Can you do it again? People typically want solutions.
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  The ego gets in the way, that's right. Well, listen,
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  folks. Coming up on June first, we're gonna be at nineteen thirty three
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  Lounge by Saint Elmo that's in Fishers, Indiana. We are doing a Bourbon
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  and real Dental Financial Advice CE course being hosted by Casey Hires himself. So
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  I got to watch people taste bourbon as I present CE on a topic that
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  NA it's been happy, yes, just like booze. And then on June
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  second, we will also another event and Fishers. We will be at the
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  top Golf and Fishers right across from my Kia. That will be avoiding cash
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  flow traps in your practice. If you're in Indiana or you're within a driving
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  rates with a nice thing about Indianapolis as we are just about two hours from
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  every part of the state, a crossroads acrossroads of America. So if you
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  need to sign up and get your free enrollment and get your earn your CE
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  credits is PACE certified, go to four Quadrants Advisor, dot com, slash
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  events. Casey's usually look great and you sounded fantastic, So thank you,
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  You're sweet. That's all the time we have today. Thank you to our
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  guests for their insight and for sharing some really great information. And thank you
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  to you the listener for tuning in. The Millionaire Dentist podcast is brought to
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  you by Four Quadrants Advisory to see if they might be a good fit for
• 11:41
  you and your practice. Going over to four Quadrants Advisory dot com and see
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  why year after year they retain over ninety five percent of their clients. Thank
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  you again for joining us and we'll see you next time.