Is your perio at zero percent? If it is, it doesn’t have to stay that way! Once you create a periodontal protocol, your next step is to track a few numbers. To reveal what those key KPIs are, Kirk Behrendt brings back Miranda Beeson, one of ACT’s amazing coaches, so you can understand what's working, what's not, and the countermeasures to put in place. Your perio percentage should be as high as possible! To learn how to go from zero to 60 — and beyond —listen to Episode 582 of The Best Practices Show!
Episode Resources:
Links Mentioned in This Episode:
3 KPIs to Know if Your Periodontal Protocol is Working: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T8shs-Fz86O7dtbfx3dma5kKOknvsIJo/view
The Best Practices Show Episode #574 with Miranda Beeson:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/5-strategies-to-encourage-dental-hygienists-to-diagnose/id1223838218?i=1000612492886
Katrina Sanders’ Disease Prevention & Wine Tasting course (October 5-6, 2023): https://www.eventbrite.com/e/act-dental-hygienists-live-course-october-5-6-2023-tickets-368595568267
Main Takeaways:
Monitor your periodontal visit percentage.
Monitor your periodontal diagnostic percentage.
Monitor your periodontal acceptance percentage.
Look at all three KPIs together to get the whole picture.
Help patients discover what they need rather than telling them.
Build value through conversation and bringing patients into the process.
Quotes:
“If we put something into place, strategies around creating periodontal protocol in the office, that’s great. But it really doesn’t mean much if we don’t know if it’s actually working. Are team members following through? Are we getting the response from patients that we want? So, we want to know if those protocols are working so that team members can have accountability for their role in the process. Their own accountability, also maybe we need to be tied into that. Or we have our own as practice owners and doctors. And also, so that we can course-correct. Or, even better, celebrate when we need to. When the data points show us that need to put some countermeasures in place or course-correct, great. But if we’re doing really well, we want to take the time to acknowledge the team members who’ve been putting in the effort and making that happen. So, there are a lot of reasons why monitoring this is really important.” (3:12—3:58) -Miranda
“I would venture to say very few [practices have a periodontal protocol]. From my own personal experience as a hygienist, over the years, I can’t remember a practice I joined that had an established periodontal protocol when I joined the practice. And then, when I look at coaching and the teams that I have had exposure to, most of those teams have none, or something they’ve tried to develop on their own and they really need some help getting it growing, getting it where it’s really actionable. So, I would say, if I had to put a percent on it, it would be a really low percentage of the number of offices that truly have a documented and aligned periodontal protocol in their practice, which is why we did that previous podcast around the strategies to help make that happen in your practice. But again, if we put that into place and we don’t monitor for its success, then what’s the point?” (4:27—5:14)
“I worked in a practice that when I joined the practice, it was two percent perio. And that’s when I started looking into — I was the only hygienist there — how do I make a periodontal program? And by the time I left the practice about three-and-a-half years later, we were at 22% perio. So, it’s a matter of sitting down and aligning, and really creating that philosophy in the practice and putting strategy into, how are we going to identify health in this practice, and then what are we going to do to treat anything that’s not health so that we’re all doing it the same in a way that is the most optimal care for our patients?” (6:30—7:06)
“The first thing that we’re going to measure is our periodontal visit percentage. Now a lot of our clients and coaching clients have Dental Intel, so this helps us do that pretty easily. But you can do this manually as well, or just printing reports within your practice management software. And what that is is the percentage of patients that are seen by the hygienist within a given period of time, whatever timeframe you select. Generally, we’re looking at it weekly or monthly when we’re reporting on that.” (7:56—8:21)
“So, what percentage of patients that the hygienist is seeing are periodontal patients? We’re going to look at prophys, the D110, separate from all of those 4000 codes. And this is where you talked about, I have codes on my cheat sheet here. The codes that go into that periodontal percentage are D4355, the gross debridement; D4346, the gingivitis therapy, because technically, a patient is not diagnosed with periodontal disease when we’re using that code, but they’re not healthy. And it is still technically a perio code by way of how we classify it. The D4910, so periodontal maintenance patients. And then, the quadrant codes, the periodontal therapy codes, D4341 and D4342. And in Dental Intel, which you can also customize this in your own software, would be your implant maintenance codes or your implant therapy codes like the D6080 and D6081. So, what percentage of the patients that the hygienists have seen, say, within a given month, of those patients, how many were a periodontal procedure that was performed?” (8:22—9:29)
“A lot of people, like we talked about in our previous podcast, are doing periodontal services and gingivitis therapy and coding it as a prophy. So, it really does start with coding for what we’re truly doing. Putting out a treatment plan, talking with our patient about the difference in this type of cleaning or hygiene services than what they’re used to with preventative nature. So, really putting the appropriate codes on the services that we’re providing.” (10:13—10:40)
“If you’re at zero percent, two percent perio, like I was telling you, my practice I joined was two percent perio. If I had thought I was going to get to the benchmark of 35%, 40% perio in the first six months, that would’ve been crazy. I want to go from two percent perio to four percent perio, four percent perio to maybe seven percent perio. Now, as time goes on and you’re working a periodontal protocol over time and it gets more established and your team gets more comfortable having the conversations with patients, the business team gets more comfortable with handling objections around the treatment plans, you’re going to see that gap increase larger each time. You might start with two percent increase. But eventually, you might go from seven to 12%, or 12% to 18%, 18% to 29%. That gap will start to increase over time as the confidence and knowledge within the team improves over time.” (11:06—11:54)
“I have some awesome teams, so shout-out to all my team. And all of them that are working on this right now, the biggest thing is celebrating and helping them stay motivated with the small accomplishments. I have a team right now that’s, again, they started at zero percent. And when we did our last check-in for the weekly numbers, they were at three percent. And we’re going to talk about periodontal acceptance rate in just a minute as well, that was 100%. So, they went from no patients to three patients being diagnosed this week. All three of them accepted treatment. So, we had to stop and really celebrate that progress. Three patients might not seem like a lot if you have an active patient count of 4,000. But three patients being treated optimally for their disease state and your team feeling comfortable and confident, we have to celebrate that growth. And that means next time the growth is going to double because now, they’re more motivated.” (12:47—13:38)
“When we look at our community, our culture, we look at research, we know that based on age differentials the research is a little different, but over half of the population has some form of periodontal disease, gum disease, gingivitis, and or active disease. And as we get older, 65 and above, that number goes up into the high 60s, in some research, even the 70 percentile. So, we’re looking for is, how do we reflect in our practice, on our patient population, that same level of care? And so, the benchmark is going to sit around 35%. And that will vary. I know that’s a Dental Intel benchmark, and we do work with them pretty exclusively with a lot of our coaching clients. There are some people who would argue that that benchmark is 40% to 60%. It depends on your geographic area, access to care. There are different things that come into play. But certainly 35% is a solid benchmark to start from.” (13:49—14:43)
“The second KPI you’re going to want to monitor is your periodontal diagnostic percentage. What that means is, it’s the patients that we’re seeing for hygiene that were diagnosed for new periodontal treatment. So, new codes that are those 4000 codes, the same ones that I mentioned before. So, a patient comes in for care. You have eight patients today, and two of them were treatment planned for a 4000 code. Maybe one of them for gingivitis therapy, and one of them for quadrant periodontal therapy. And so, we’re going to look at, out of those patients, what percentage of the patients that I saw at any given period of time were diagnosed with new periodontal treatment codes.” (15:38—16:15)
“I think really important for the hygienist to track [these KPIs]. The accountability really comes back to that team member. First, making sure that the team members who are going to be asked to track these numbers are a part of the strategy around why, why are we tracking them. They really have to have the buy-in. Otherwise, this is just a chore or a task that you’re giving them. But when the hygienist is responsible for monitoring that, they’re going to be paying closer attention to the outcome. They’re going to be thinking more mindfully about it throughout the day and thinking to themselves like, at the end of the day, if they’re tracking day after day or week after week, ‘What can I do? Because, oh man, I was at two percent this week. But Michelle was at 22% this week. Maybe I need to get with Michelle and figure out what she’s doing that I’m not doing.’ So, there’s a level of accountability when the hygienist is the person tracking those numbers.” (16:31—17:22)
“When you’re looking at your periodontal visit alone, that’s telling you one piece of the picture. What we need to be looking at is, ‘How do we make that grow?’ Well, let’s look at, how often are we making this diagnosis? If we can see that that number is maintaining relatively low, or maybe it has a spike, ‘Oh! What did we do last week when we had that spike?’ so that we can improve our efficiency with more diagnosis and more acceptance. These numbers are going to follow suit with your perio visit, initially. When you’re first implementing a periodontal protocol program and you’re at one percent in terms of your perio visit percentage, this number is also going to be relatively low because you’re not really diagnosing perio. But as we start to diagnose more perio and this diagnostic number goes up, then over time as we schedule those appointments, that visits percentage is going to go up as well. And so, they really all tie into each other. But the consistency of monitoring it and, ideally, monitoring it at weekly team meetings, reporting to each other, checking in with each other, so that we can see ourselves along the way and not waiting till month’s end and looking backwards and, ‘Wouldn’t it have been nice to know if halfway through the month I wasn’t anywhere near where I needed to be?’ So, if we’re looking at that weekly, monthly at minimum, then we can start to make those changes that we need with the efficiency of the protocols to try to improve over time.” (18:07—19:30)
“If your periodontal visit percentage is doing great, you’re up to 10% now, and then all of a sudden, it levels off, I bet if you look at your periodontal diagnostic percentage as of late, it’s gone down. Because if we’re not diagnosing new perio, that visit number, that overall periodontal percentage is going to decline. So, they do have a direct correlation which feeds into our other KPI as well. But you can’t really look at just one and really tell how healthy your protocol is. You have to look at all three of them together to get the whole picture.” (20:01—20:35)
“The third [KPI] is periodontal acceptance percentage. So, what that one is is the number of those patients that we diagnosed with gingivitis or some form of periodontal disease and treatment planned those 4000 codes, how many of those patients commenced with all or at least part of the treatment that we recommended? So, what was the acceptance percentage from those patients of moving forward with that treatment that we recommended? And you can see how those tie in with each other. So, it might be important to see, ‘Great. Our diagnostic percentages was 20%. That’s huge! We did awesome diagnosing perio.’ But if our perio acceptance percentage was four, are we doing a good job relaying the value in what we’re recommending, or are we just doing it and checking the box? Now, if we’re 100%, that’s awesome. We’re killing it. Every single patient that we treatment plan for periodontal therapy this month proceeded with treatment. We must be doing something right. Let’s celebrate that and talk about what we did this month to make that happen.” (20:40—21:41)
“[Acceptance means patients] scheduled. They scheduled something. Something got put into the schedule from that treatment plan. So, if I treatment planned four quadrants of periodontal therapy for a patient and they scheduled for their first quadrant of therapy, that’s considered the patient accepting. Now, there are two different ways you can measure this. And to get too complex, we should probably be careful. But you can measure it by the dollar amount. You can measure it by like, ‘I treatment planned $20,000 of periodontal therapy, and $10,000 of periodontal therapy got scheduled.’” (21:59—22:33)
“In the very beginning when periodontal protocols are newer to teams, I like to focus on patient acceptance first because it’s an easier measurement to understand and wrap your head around. And sometimes, when it’s new to our teams, that means it’s new to our patients. We haven’t been talking about this. And so, them accepting even one quadrant is a big deal. And then, we can work through the experience of that first quadrant, building more value, they’re not scared anymore because we kept them nice and comfortable. And then, they’re going to proceed with scheduling the rest of that treatment. So, when it comes to breaking down acceptance, it’s that that patient that we treatment planned scheduled for something off of that treatment plan, at least got started with that treatment plan.” (22:33—23:18)
“I have teams, and I know they’re not the only ones out there, that the doctor is doing the initial periodontal assessment, and diagnosing, and treatment planning, and discussing that with the patients. They see the doctor for their new patient visit. So, these periodontal protocols are going to be built into your new patient experience. But they’re also built into your existing patient experience, those recare visits. So, that’s your hygienists, for sure. And in a lot of offices, the hygienist also does see the new patient, so it would be built in there as well. But I don’t want to miss out on mentioning that there are doctors who perform the new patient evaluation. They performed the full-mouth periodontal charting. They set the patient up and go over those findings with them. They’re talking about the value of what’s next and treatment planning. And so, we have to also know that the doctors, this information is really important to them as well. And in some offices, it might be the doctors or their assistants that are tracking this data around acceptance because it might be them that is having to develop that.” (24:03—25:00)
“These really all fit together in a bubble. But the diagnostic percentage and the acceptance percentage probably feed in the most. If you’re just looking at acceptance percentage, you’re going, ‘Great! We were at 100% this week. We killed it with patient acceptance for our periodontal procedures.’ But if we’re not looking at diagnostic percentage, is it that we diagnosed 50% of our patients with perio and 100% acceptance, or did we diagnose one patient with perio, and that one patient accepted? So, if we’re just looking at acceptance, we’re missing the piece of, how big is the exposure? Which is where that diagnostic percentage comes into play. In the same way that if we’re just looking at how many did we diagnose, what percentage did we diagnose, but not looking at how many of those actually moved forward with treatment, we’re only getting a piece of the picture. Those two really go closely together.” (25:18—26:13)
“[Periodontal acceptance percentage should be] as high as possible — 100%. I shoot for high goals. I want 100% of my patients that I’m recommending perio care to move forward. But we have to do, just like we have with anything else, where are we starting at? Are we starting at zero? If we don’t have a periodontal protocol and we’re starting from scratch, then we might start a little bit lower because we know our team is not as confident yet presenting that. We know our business team hasn’t really worked through how they handle presenting the investment and handling the objections around it. So, maybe our percentage starts at, we’d like to have at least half move forward. And by next month, we want to be at 70%. And by the next month, 80%. And eventually, my goal would be all of the patients that you’re recommending treatment to are moving forward because they have the value, you’ve set up easy systems for them to be able to pay for this investment if they’re stuck there. There’s really no question. They’re asking for it, and they want it, and they’re all ready to go.” (26:19—27:15)
“For me, a big piece of it is, it’s around value, and are we having the right type of conversation with the patient? So, are we making sure that we’re helping them to discover this disease process with us so that they want treatment, versus us telling them they need it? So, that’s a piece of it. But then, also, when this isn’t something that we’re used to implementing, our patients aren’t used to hearing it, if we’re talking about existing patients that, now that we’ve identified health in this practice, I’m looking in Mrs. Jones’s mouth. I’ve been seeing Mrs. Jones every six months for the last seven years. How am I going to tell her that she has active gum disease when she’s been coming to see me twice a year for seven years to prevent gum disease? And there’s a piece with the hygienists, again, it could be a separate podcast, that’s a level of guilt or denial around that we were a part of allowing this to happen. And I really want to encourage hygienists to not go down that path. You know what you know, and you’re working with the best pieces of information that you have at the time that you’re making those decisions. And then, once you have the ability and the intention around learning and knowing more, now we have to do something different. So, to what you were just saying, when you have a patient in that situation, let’s just plant the seed. Maybe today is just planting the seed. Starting to explore the things that we’re looking for that feel outside of normal limits. Start to encourage your patients to try a little bit of this at home to see what you can do, ‘Let’s check again. But I’d like to see you in three months instead of six next time because this is getting a little outside of my scope of where I’m comfortable. Let’s have you back a little sooner.’ Maybe at the next visit, now, they’ve already been thinking, ‘Man, I’m not exactly healthy like I thought I was for the last seven years.’ And when they come in for this next visit, now we can move forward with presenting treatment and they’re more on board. It’s not as much of a shock to their system. So, there’s different ways you have to approach it based on the patient in the chair. A new patient, go for it. An existing patient is going to be a little bit trickier.” (27:50—29:55)
“They’re coming to you, as the expert. And so, you have the responsibility of letting them know their level of health or their level of disease, in the same way that you go to your medical doctor and you want them to tell you if your bloodwork is showing that there’s something going on that’s not normal. You’d be upset if your doctor didn’t tell you that they saw signs and symptoms of something that could be devastating to your health. And so, a big thing that I see, and I’ve experienced this myself early on in my career, you feel like you’re delivering bad news. You feel like you’re giving someone this negative piece of information when, really, you are offering them an opportunity to be healthier. You’re offering them an opportunity to be accountable for their health.” (30:40—31:28)
“It’s a mindset shift, and it’s reducing the minimizing language. We’ve talked about that on some podcasts before. You’re “kind of” on the verge of having some gum disease here. I’m seeing “a little bit” of bleeding. And using those terms of “bacteria” and “infection” and “disease”, I actually, years ago, Dr. Sam Low, I was doing a course with him, and he said, ‘I tell patients your jaw bone is deteriorating away from around your teeth.’ And we were like, ‘That is intense. Do you really say that?’ ‘Yes, because that’s what’s happening.’ And I’m like, okay. And I had another hygiene friend, a little tidbit, who used to say that, ‘You have active disease, and your body is trying to shed the source, which is your teeth. And so, we have to reverse that disease state and the biofilm and the calculus on your teeth so your body will stop trying to shed those teeth.’ And I’m like, this is some intense language compared to, I see “a little” bleeding. We probably need to floss a little bit more and see what happens next time. So, having that confidence and sharing with our patients that this is an opportunity for us to minimize those risks. Like, ‘I don’t want you to lose teeth. I don’t want you to have an increased risk for a heart condition. I don’t want you to struggle managing your diabetes, because you’ve been sharing with me that that’s been a struggle with you. Your A1C’s been up and down, and this can correlate. I don’t know if you know that. I want to give you an opportunity to do some therapy here with me with this practice so that we can help you be healthier.’ That’s not bad news.” (31:32—33:04)
“Think of it’s your family member. This is your mom, your brother, your sister, your best friend in the chair. Wouldn’t you want them to have an opportunity to not go down this path of disease and destruction? So, let’s offer this person the opportunity, that’s in our chair just like you would someone that you care about. It’s just a matter of, like we talked about last time, and I know you referenced — if you didn’t listen to the last podcast around the strategies, a lot of this comes down to confidence and making sure we have an environment and the skills that we need verbally to have these conversations with our patients. And once we develop those and put them into practice — you’re not going to be great at it when you get started. But you will slowly get better and better over time. And all of these numbers that we’re talking about today are going to improve over time as you feel more confident as a provider to have the conversations and to build your knowledge.” (33:51—34:44)
“Countermeasures are things that you can do to correct course, things that you can do, we need to either stop doing this and start doing this, or pause that for now. We’re going to try this instead. What are we going to do differently? Because what the numbers are showing us is what we’re doing isn’t working. So, what’s a countermeasure, something else that we can do, start or stop, that’s going to help to improve these numbers over time, to improve more patients having access to care. And so, for this in particular, for these KPIs, it kind of goes back to those strategies. Let’s revisit what’s our hygiene philosophy? We talked about stages of change. Maybe we all understood our hygiene philosophy the first go around, but none of us really accepted or became committed to really owning it. Let’s go back to that, then, and talk about it and make sure we’re all on board and we’re committed to this philosophy for our patients.” (35:16—36:08)
“What about identifying patients’ health? We talked last time on the podcast about step one can just be, what does a healthy periodontal patient look like in our practice? Document that. All of the hygiene team and or doctors that are making these diagnosis come together and agree that this is what healthy looks like. Maybe we need to sit back down again and revisit what we agreed healthy looks like to put that back in the front of our minds so that when we’re evaluating patients throughout the day, because let’s be honest, we get busy. We just check the boxes. We go through the motions. Keeping it in the front of your mind that you’re looking for, is this patient healthy? Is this patient healthy? Is this patient healthy? All day long. And if they’re not, what am I doing?” (36:08—36:49)
“The other things are that other strategies we talked about, utilizing your software and technology to the best of your ability, to make sure that you’re using imaging to share with the patients. So, if we’re talking about patient acceptance, maybe we’ve diagnosed it and we haven’t had the acceptance. So, let’s look at how we’re sharing that information with our patients. Are they looking at the pictures with us, or are we just talking behind their back? Are we telling them, while we’re scaling, because we’re in such a hurry? Or do we sit them up when we’re finished with our periodontal evaluation and we show them the chart and the bleeding points and the photos that we took with the inflammation and the calculus that we can see. So, we have to look at all of those strategies that we’ve put into place to develop the protocols, and then what are we doing with them now or what should we change about them. And that happens too. We work with teams where we put something into place, and then they start using it and go, ‘I don’t think this is quite right.’ Great. Let’s alter it. Let’s adjust it. What do we need to do differently?” (36:51—37:52)
“If you’re coming to a team meeting, and on our scorecards, we gauge things in red and green. And if you have a lot of red around these periodontal KPIs and you’re saying, ‘Hygienists, I’m done with this. I don’t want to see any more red on this scorecard. You need to get it together,’ I promise you that red is going to get worse. We have to approach it as a team. ‘Okay, we’re seeing consistently that we’re not where we want to go in terms of our growth with this.’ Having an open, trusting communication in our team meetings where we can — we talk about vulnerability-based trust. We can admit, as a hygienist, I can say, ‘I know what my issue is with this. I know why my diagnosis rate is so low. I still don’t know if I fully understand staging and grading. I know we started implementing that in the practice, but it’s big for me. I think I’m kind of there, but I don’t think I’m fully there. So, sometimes I revert back to what I was doing before and I bring them back in three months.’ You have to be comfortable enough as a hygienist, with the environment. Your leader has to create an environment in the practice where you can say that in that group setting and everyone rallies around you to help you get back on track, which might mean we need some more continuing education. That’s another countermeasure. How do we make sure our team has the knowledge base that they need to have confidence in diagnosing and talking about periodontal disease with our patients?” (38:12—39:36)
“I’ll speak to the hygienists for just a moment. Don’t wait for your doctor to send you to a course. That would be great. So, doctors, if you want to send your hygienists to a course, that’s awesome. Send them to Katrina or whatever you feel like fits what you guys are trying to do. But hygienists, don’t wait for your doctor. The number of hygienists that I know who say, ‘Well, I haven’t done anything but online CE because my doctor doesn’t send us,’ well, you could send yourself. You can sign up for anything that you want to sign up for and go. It is your career. It’s your license. It’s your growth that’s going to be affected. Why is that someone else’s responsibility? That’s how I look at it. When I had a patient in my chair about eight years into being a hygienist, who had a hybrid, I had never seen one before, a fixed upper denture on implants, and I asked them to take out their dentures so I could go put it in the ultrasonic. And they’re like, ‘Oh, it doesn’t come out.’ ‘Well, what do you mean it doesn’t come out?’ ‘It doesn’t come out. It’s screwed onto my implants.’ ‘Well, how am I supposed to clean that then?’ I was clueless. And right then and there, it lit a fire. I was like, I have to figure out how to do this. I wasn’t going to settle with, ‘I don’t know how to manage that,’ and that’s that. I had to go seek out information. There wasn’t a lot of it at the time, courses and information. I had to travel to find implant courses that were teaching me, as a hygienist, how to manage that type of patient. I didn’t learn that in school. I had never seen it before. I was taught what implants were, not what to do when you have four of them that are covered in calculus and screwed into a denture that doesn’t come out. So, I encourage hygienists to not wait on someone else to do that for you, but believe in yourself enough to invest in yourself and keep growing and learning.” (40:56—42:43)
“You have to look at all three of these numbers together. Don’t choose just one of them and say, ‘That’s going to be what we do the basis of everything off of. Now, if you had to look at just one, perio visit might be the best one to look at independently. But I say look at all three of them combined to really see the whole picture. Also, use these numbers to create some incentive or competition within your team.” (42:55—43:20)
“Do something fun within your practice like, ‘When we all get to this number, we’re going to have a team lunch,’ or something to keep your team motivated day after day when they’re caught up in the drudge of patient after patient to keep it front of mind and motivated. And if you have individual hygienists, multiple hygienists and they’re tracking this data, there’s a lot of friendly competition that can come into play within the practice when you have a nice, healthy, trust-based practice where I want — I always reference Michelle. She’s one of my favorite hygienists I’ve worked with for years. ‘I want to beat Michelle this month. I want more patients getting optimal care out of my room than out of her room this month. How do I do it? Because she’s a rockstar.’ And we start to develop a little healthy competition and some incentive for your team to want to keep going.” (43:30—44:16)
“The incentive for most hygienists, like I said last time too, is these patients are their friends. I don’t know many hygienists who don’t go into hygiene because they care about people, and they enjoy making connections and building relationships. These are connections. These are friends in their chair, and you’re helping more and more and more of them as you watch those numbers rise.” (44:20—44:38)
“At the end of the day, if you tell them what they need versus helping them to discover that they want this for themselves, you’re not going to see the growth potential that you could see if you shift that approach and that mindset. So, that goes back into that traditional approach of, we don’t even tell them what we’re doing when we go into perio chart. We just start doing it. And they’re laying in the chair thinking, ‘Well, she’s stabbing me again. Oh, I taste blood. Of course I do. She’s stabbing me. Why wouldn’t I?’ versus having a conversation before you get started, letting the patient know, ‘This is what we’re going to be doing, patient. This is what I want you to listen for. This is what I want you to feel for,’ so that they’re a part of that process.” Having a conversation with them afterwards where they’re sitting up, eye to eye, knee to knee, using the technology, looking together. You’re not talking about it to someone else who’s poking something in the computer behind their head, and then sitting them up and saying, ‘You really need this,’ and then they go up front, and it’s $1,000, and my insurance isn’t going to take care of any of it, if not part of it, and they’re like, ‘I don’t even know what I’m doing.’ We have to build value and take the time to bring them into the conversation so that they’re asking, ‘Oh my gosh. I have to do something about this. What can we do?’ ‘I am so glad you asked. I have a plan, and I can help you.’ Because if you want it, and they don’t, they’re not going to move forward. They have to want it.” (44:53—46:15)
Snippets:
0:00 Introduction.
2:49 Why it’s important to monitor KPIs.
3:58 How many practices have a periodontal protocol?
5:15 Alignment is key.
7:47 KPI to monitor 1) Periodontal visit percentage.
9:30 Enter your codes correctly.
10:56 It’s okay to start at zero.
11:55 Celebrate progress to stay motivated.
13:41 The 35% benchmark, explained.
15:34 KPI to monitor 2) Periodontal diagnostic percentage.
16:19 Who should track these numbers?
17:22 Monitor your numbers weekly.
19:30 Numbers tell a story.
20:35 KPI to monitor 3) Periodontal acceptance percentage.
21:41 Acceptance, defined.
24:01 Periodontal protocols are also built in for doctors and assistants.
25:02 Look at your KPIs together as a whole.
26:14 Periodontal acceptance percentage benchmarks.
27:16 Plant the seed.
30:02 Change your mindset and language.
33:04 Get better and better over time.
34:51 Countermeasures, explained.
37:53 Approach this as a team.
39:36 Never stop education on perio.
42:48 Last thoughts on KPIs.
44:46 Want versus need.
Miranda Beeson, MS, BSDH Bio:
Miranda Beeson, MS, BSDH, has over 25 years of clinical dental hygiene, front office, practice administration, and speaking experience. She is enthusiastic about communication and loves helping others find the power that words can bring to their patient interactions and practice dynamics. As a Lead Practice Coach, she is driven to create opportunities to find value in experiences and cultivate new approaches.
Miranda graduated from Old Dominion University, and enjoys spending time with her husband, Chuck, and her children, Trent, Mallory, and Cassidy. Family time is the best time, and is often spent on a golf course, a volleyball court, or spending the day boating at the beach.
