As your dental consultant, Infinite Hygiene assists your dental practice with creating, utilizing, and nourishing its methodology. A dental practice’s central methodology is a cornerstone to its exterior success, both in keeping its team satisfied and in ensuring optimal patient care. Infinite Hygiene offers RDH consulting that focuses not only on your dental hygiene department, but your whole practice and its long-term success, not merely its short-term blooming. To that end, we facilitate dental practices on four different methods that increase operation performance.

1) Checks and Balances

Checks and balances exist as a way to know and track whether systems are working or not, and if they are, then what progress is being made. Most important to this tracking system is the dental practice conversion rate and general numbers. These numbers help you to garner insight into dental patients’ experiences and decision-making. Did you lose a potential return patient because of a scheduling conflict? Because of a customer service issue? Because of something else? There must be dynamic checks and balances to ensure critical milestones are pointed in the same direction as the business model to achieve practice expectations. Misaligned strategies can result in waste, financial loss, sub-optimized resources and lost opportunities.

2) Accountability

There are 6 steps to developing a culture of accountability within a dental practice. The steps include providing effective leadership, dentist(s) and the dental team, emphasize quality patient care and job performance, ensure customer service is a priority, improve quality through performance enhancement management, support the human dimension by minimizing fear and anxiety through change and ensure supporting infrastructure is available to enhance the action of the team to help them use their skills effectively. When a dental practice develops teams that excel through accountability and proper delegation of tasks, it increases productivity throughout the practice. By empowering team members through job performance and leader accountability, the entire practice benefits and becomes a stronger and more respectable part of the community.

3) Proactive Empowerment

The potential impact of a highly-empowered dental team is almost limitless. There is untapped potential in the hygiene departments of every dental practice. An effective hygiene department functions as a highly skilled diagnostic center. The critical thing to take into consideration is hiring and developing talented team members who share your vision and work together to find areas of growth within your practice. High performing team members possess a “change oriented culture” with protocols designed to establish clinical continuity, leadership and accountability. Identifying key performance indicators and realistic benchmarks help create a culture that not only focuses on clinical competence but equally important critical leadership characteristics, current diagnostic and technological tools, communication and marketing tools that improve practice productivity, profitability and standards of care.

4) Communication

Miscommunication causes tremendous stress on the practice, the doctor, and the patient. In dentistry, our work is 80% communication and 20% clinical skill. If we fail to communicate effectively, we fail our patients in their oral health care. The six ways that dental teams can communicate effectively in the practice include communicating expectations to the team, valuing contributions, handling concerns properly and in a timely manner, rewarding initiative, fostering personal strengths of individual team members, handling mistakes. Dental practices must be extremely keen on communicating thoroughly and clearly with their patients. Does the patient understand what sort of service they’re having? What sort of service they might need later? What their appointment schedule looks like, or their payments? Infinite Hygiene assists you in implementing effective communication in every circumstance, from team member to patient as well as from team member to team member.

Dental practice methodology is important – so important that practices want to get it right the first time before they build anything else on top of it. Utilize Infinite Hygiene’s dental hygiene consulting to acquire the tools you need to build and implement strategies and methods to improve your operational performance.