Dental Office Hygiene Reactivation Strategy
Dental office hygiene reactivation strategies set the stage for the hygiene schedule. Inconsistent strategies are destined to bring an inconsistent schedule peppered with “holes” each day.
How would you describe your dental office hygiene reactivation strategy? Are you consistent or inconsistent in your efforts? How is your hygiene schedule? Is it solid?
What’s The Secret?
A consistent reactivation strategy will help keep the hygiene schedule hopping in your dental office! You will need to add a little charm to your strategy! However, mix some solid consistency with a little charm, and voila! You have a daily hygiene schedule any dental practice would love!
Is there a secret to solid hygiene reactivation? There are actually several secrets to success here! Here they are! My secrets for your success in maintaining a solid hygiene schedule are no longer secrets!
Practice Consistency
Don’t underestimate the importance of consistency. Dental offices often wait until their hygiene schedules start to fall apart before they start reaching out to unscheduled hygiene patients. I’ve done the same myself. Until I realized just how important the dental hygiene schedule is.
Once I understood the impact of open hygiene appointments, I needed a plan! How could I consistently reach out to unscheduled hygiene patients each month? Where would I start? How could I track it?
Dental Office Hygiene Reactivation with Weekly Management
Hygiene reactivation was added to my Weekly Management Systems! I had learned with dental office production, to break down my office production goals from monthly goals to weekly goals. I could do the same thing with unscheduled hygiene patients! Take the entire list of unscheduled hygiene patients and tackle this each week in segments.
Create a Quick Call List
My hygiene call list or short notice call list is simple. You can download a call form here and see what I have used. Create a different sheet for each day of the week, morning or afternoon, and even with a specific hygienist to give you quicker response times!
It is easier to fill an open appointment quickly when you can jump to exactly what you need! Go ahead and take a look. You can even download now.
Short Notice Call List
More about the call list. Making notes of the number of appointments offered to patients does help. Sometimes, a patient will ask to be called but then they don’t take any appointment times offered to them.
Once I hit the magic number of 5 offered appointments, I will call one last time to let the patient know for now I am going to take the off our call list.
Inactivate any patients you have not seen in the office over 18 months. It is important to the data base and the office numbers to keep things clean.
The unscheduled hygiene list is one of the ways to keep numbers accurate.
I don’t necessarily agree that it is a good idea to send a final letter out to patients letting them know you have inactivated their charts or accounts. It could create confusion.
Honestly, I recommend clearing their continuing care information and making the account inactive. Don’t archive it. It’s easy to re-activate the account if they call back.