Browse by Topic: DSO & M&A · Practice Operations · Hygiene Career Track · Practice Finance · Regulation & Compliance
Here's the short answer: a healthy hygiene department generates at least 25% of a practice's adjusted production, keeps 90% of recare patients scheduled, and treats periodontal disease at a rate that roughly matches its actual prevalence in the population. CDC data puts periodontitis at 47.2% of adu...
Short version: the fastest revenue in dentistry is already in your database. Recall is keeping active patients on schedule — target 90% of hygiene patients leaving with their next appointment booked the same day. Reactivation is going back after patients who've fallen off, typically 30% to 50% of a ...
Every state now permits some form of hygiene practice outside direct chairside supervision by a dentist — the scope varies widely, but the door that used to be fully closed is, in most places, at least partly open. What hasn't caught up is the business information hygienists need to actually walk th...
Myofunctional therapy has gone from a niche referral almost nobody in general dentistry had heard of, to a service line that orthodontists, airway-focused dentists, ENTs, and sleep clinics are actively looking to refer patients into — and increasingly, to bring in-house. For a dental hygienist looki...
By Pete Volk, founder of Dental Strategy Institute, with clinical review by Susan Volk, RDH.
Of all the reasons a hygienist talks herself out of going independent, "the paperwork" is the quietest and the most defeating. Not the clinical part — you've got that. The nagging sense that on your own, yo...
More hygienists are stepping away from full-time chairside work and building something of their own. Orofacial myofunctional therapy has become one of the most compelling paths for making that move — a cash-pay clinical specialty, in genuinely short supply, that draws on skills a hygienist already h...
By Pete Volk, founder of Dental Strategy Institute, with clinical review by Susan Volk, RDH.
If you've caught yourself wondering how many more years your body can do this, you're not being dramatic and you're not alone. The neck, the shoulders, the wrists, the sheer sameness of the schedule — those...
By Pete Volk, founder of Dental Strategy Institute, with clinical review by Susan Volk, RDH.
There's a number you've probably run in your head on the drive home — what this actually adds up to over a career, and whether it ever really changes. Most hygienists never get an honest answer, because the...
By Pete Volk, founder of Dental Strategy Institute, with clinical review by Susan Volk, RDH.
The gap between "I'm interested in myofunctional therapy" and "I'm actually doing it" is where most people stall. Not because the path is hard, but because it's unmapped — you don't want to sink a few thous...
By Pete Volk, founder of Dental Strategy Institute, with clinical review by Susan Volk, RDH.
Somewhere around the thousandth prophy, a lot of hygienists start to wonder if this is the whole job — the same forty-five minutes, the same room, the same pace, forever. If that wondering has started for y...
By Pete Volk, founder of Dental Strategy Institute, with clinical review by Susan Volk, RDH.
You can scale a perfect root, read a full-mouth series, and catch early perio a dentist would've missed. And you have no idea how to form an LLC. That gap isn't a failing on your part — nobody taught you th...