Just, you know, so some, so I talked to you about this subject of like hygienists and systems getting raises, they base it purely off of how long you've been there, not if you're good at your job or not. The dentist say, oh, she's only been here six months. I'm going to raise it. Let me tell you what, I got a hygienist is burning through patients, being efficient, being good patient experience. And she's finding me work and we're getting high and we're getting production out of her. I'll give her a raise two weeks in. I don't know what the time, but I'm a wide time is a factor on that. Well, she's going to have been here for months. I'm not going to raise that. If she awesome, you know, maybe give her a raise, you know what I mean? But you don't know what awesome is even is because you're not measuring.

So, you know, what are some of the really important metrics with hygiene? Because I think this is, this is one of the key things that you should be tracking. You know, if you use software like dental Intel, what is, what is hygienist production per hour? That's huge. I mean, I have four hygienists, their production per hour, all varies. And it typically is similar for each one month by month. So, you know, we just, we do, we have higher producing hygienists and lower producing hygienists. So you know that the ones that are lower producing are ones that you maybe want to work with on some of these things. A big factor in their production per hour is what is their periodignosis percentage? What is their perio acceptance percentage? And what is their perio visit percentage? And here's what all that means. So, periodignosis is, you know, how many patients that they're seeing are being diagnosed for perio versus how many patients are they seeing? Acceptance percentage is how many patients are they diagnosing for perio and how many patients are accepting that perio treatment. And perio visit percentage is the total number of perio type appointments, including SRP and perio maintenance, divided by the total number of hygiene type appointments. And so, you know, what are some good like baseline here? Well, guys, you know, we know that studies have shown that over 40% of adults over 30 years old have some form of periodontal disease. So if you go into dental intel and you're seeing, you know, perio diagnosis percentage, perio visit percentage are below 10%, you know that there's a problem there. And again, you know, I understand it is different by population. Yeah, there's large

one factor that there are. I mean, there's big differences. But if the national average is 40%, you know, like 27 or 30, yeah. Okay. You're at five or 10% there. There's a direct indicator that the hygienants really just go into the motions every day and just move in patients in an aperture.

Well, yeah. And I mean, guys, something, you know, I guess a grain of salt here is that of those, you know, 40% that have some form of perio disease over 30 years old, a lot of them aren't going to be in the dentist. So, you know, that that is like the people who go to the dentist are probably less likely to have perio disease in the average population. That's probably a fair point. But still, if your perio percentage is under 10%, there's a problem and I would bet money that a lot of you guys listening right here today probably do have perio percentage of 10%, 15%, 12%, 8%. So go if you haven't checked this, if you haven't been looking at this, go check your numbers. I mean, this is this is some low hanging fruit where you can one offer better patient care because guys, honestly, if we're doing bloody profias, is that really benefiting the patient? No, it's not. And it's also not benefiting your practice, your hygienants. You know, if you bonus your hygienants based on their production, like we do, you know, our hygienants, if they're over 3.3 times their hourly pay, they get bonuses. So you know, the hygienants isn't winning. If they're not diagnosing perio, the practice isn't winning. If if perio is not being diagnosed and the patient isn't winning because they're not getting their optimal health care at that point, you know, the situation is never going to improve if we don't actually take care of, you know, the root cause of it. So, you know, that's, that's just some quick, you know, metrics there. Other things that are important, easy low hanging fruit, fluoride percentage. When we first looked at the metrics, our fluoride percentage for office was like 12%. That's crazy to me. You know, like what, what they tell you you should be shooting for is like 70 to 80%. Yes, there are some patients that just don't believe in fluoride. Otherwise, it is the easiest, lowest cost, you know, most conservative way for patients to prevent dental issues. I mean, what do you charge for it? 25, 30, maybe 40 bucks max. It is so worth it. So beneficial to patients and your hygienants should be offering and encouraging patients to do this. And again, if you're not monitoring this, if your hygienants aren't intrinsically motivated to, you know, offer fluoride to all of their patients, it's just not going to be happening. And so our fluoride percentage has come up a long ways. You know, now our average fluoride percentages is in the upper 40s to 50%. We're still not where we want to be. So you know, this is something that we are working on in our practices is making sure that we are always offering and encouraging patients, you know, to accept fluoride treatment. Your super important things is what is your reappointment percentage, both for standard hygiene existing patients as well as new patients, existing patient reappointment percentage or pre appointment percentage. So basically like who is scheduled for their next cleaning appointment before they leave the office for their current cleaning appointment? You guys should be shooting for like 90% plus. There are those people that you're not going to. So here's some great verbiage for you guys because patients always have objections. And again, you know, our hygienists just like us doctors or people, please, or they don't want to make their patients upset. And I understand that. But you know, patients often say, Oh man, I don't know my schedule six months from now. You know, things are really busy, blah, blah, blah. Hey, we totally get it. You know, it's, it's impossible to know what your schedule is going to be like six months from now. But we do know our schedule six months from now and we're going to be very busy. So if we don't schedule your appointment now, can you call us three, four, five, six months from now? We may not have an opening for you or if we do, it's probably not going to be an ideal time. So why don't we just get you scheduled right now for the day and time that you think is going to work best for you because we have a lot more availability now than we will a few months from now. And then if you need to change your appointment, you'll have plenty of time to change it. You know, all we ask for is 48 hours notice if you need to reschedule. So like that is some, some great ways to kind of lower the barriers, make the patients understand why it's important to reschedule their appointment right now. And I'll tell you what, that is going to keep your hygiene schedule full. It's also going to decrease a lot of administrative time of people trying to follow up with these, you know, unscheduled hygiene patients because you're going to have a lot less on schedule hygiene patients if you just preappointed your patients. So again, should be shooting for like 90% when we first checked ours, it was like 55%. So we had a long way to go. Now we're like mid 80s. So we're getting close to where we want to be. You're never going to be 100. It would be great. But like you should be shooting for 90% plus on that pre-appreciated. Well, if you

shoot for new patients, if you have a golden shoot for 90%, you'll get higher than what you're getting now, right? It's like if you don't know your numbers and you're not shooting, the ox are always astonished. And we pull up their, what do you think your reappointment percentage is? And they hear the term 90% all the time. They say, Oh, 90%. Like, how do you know that? Well, I reappointed everyone yesterday. What about the day before? What about the month for? And then you pull it and it's 37% and they're like in shock. And it's like, because you're not tracking the KPI. You can't run a race. Well,

and it's interesting, man, because everyone thinks that. So, you know, if you talk to your team and you talk to your hygienist and ask them like, like, Hey, how do you think you're doing reappointing your patients? They're going to say the same thing. And then if you actually show them the metrics and they don't Intel, like honestly, like they're going to be shocked because like we have this, you know, confirmation bias in our minds where we think, you know, we're, we think that we're doing things like we're supposed to. We think things are going great. And we don't remember all those patients that we didn't pre-appoint. And then when you actually see the numbers, it can be shocking. So, you know, we share our numbers. We show, you know, everyone has log into dental Intel so they can check on them themselves. But we also, when we have hygiene meetings, you know, I put up all the numbers into the PowerPoint and stuff. I show them, you know, like, this is what we're looking at lately for fluoride. This is where we were six months ago. This is where we're trying to go. This is what we are for, you know, pre-appointment percentage. We are a prepareo. So, like, actually seeing the numbers is huge for your team. So, like, this is not only important for you guys, but it's important that you share this information as well. The next one is embrace change. And this is one mean you're passionate about.