A survey of several dental professionals offered the following suggestions for dealing with back pain: Dental loupes are the magnifying glasses that dentists wear to enlarge everything that they see in the mouth. ... Secondly, loupes are worn to allow dentists to have a more “physiologic” posture while working, and thereby minimize the slouching which dentists are historically known to develop. Working out your core means working out the entire middle section of your body which includes your stomach muscles, your hips, your butt, your lower back as well your side obliques and adductors. ... Core exercises also strengthen your hips,...

Do you ever ask your patients, "Any questions?" If you do so often enough, you'll lose a lot of income. Let me explain. Dentists often tell patients they need to do this, this, and this, in a rapid-fire style, throwing in terms patients probably don't understand (like leaky margins), and then ask, "Any questions?" More often than not the patient says no, and then goes merrily to the financial arranger and asks what procedure their dental insurance will cover. Often whatever procedure is covered is all they commit to -- and sometimes not even that. Many dentists never really get the...

Other than P & L numbers, key stats to monitor are: Number of days workedProduction per dayProductionCollectionNPsCollection percentageOpen hours in hygieneHygiene hours workedNumber of patients left without hygiene appointmentPercent of open hygiene hoursStaff pay as percentage of gross income Kevin Tighe, Cambridge Dental Consultants, Senior Consultant, got bitten hard by the business and marketing bug during long summer days working at his dad's Madison Avenue ad agency. After joining Cambridge as a speaker in the mid-1990s, Kevin went on to become Cambridge’s senior consultant and eventually CEO. Cambridge Dental Consultants is a full-service dental practice management company offering customized dental office manuals. Frustrated?...

Not knowing how to run an effective staff meeting can have some negative consequences in the overall health of your dental practice. We’ve found that many offices don’t have meetings at all. When they do, we often find that nobody gets anything out of them since poorly organized staff meetings can easily turn into gripe sessions that waste everyone’s time. Staff meetings, or team huddles, should be useful and routine, not organized as emergencies because someone is upset or a team member has made a mistake. Calling a meeting for these reasons is usually ineffective and can actually be damaging. Staff meetings that aren’t...