How Dental Hygienists Can Benefit from DSOs

At the fourth annual Dykema conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, Heidi Arndt spoke with Dentist’s Money Digest to provide a perspective often overlooked in the dental community. Arndt, a dental hygienist and owner of Enhanced Hygiene, hopes to enlighten her audience about the importance value of hygienists in a practice. Watch or read below to learn more.

“One of the biggest things that I found out early as a dental hygienist is the lack of support for hygienists after [they complete] school. So, in school we learn so much information on how to pass our boards [and] get licensed — our education is completely based off that. But, once we’re in the actual practice, there’s limited training and development for the dental hygienist. That’s where I feel like there’s a gap, and that’s where we fill the gap.

We create the training and the development for the dental hygienist after they get into the real world and experience the challenges that we have, such as understanding insurance, understanding CDT codes, understanding how to communicate with a patient, understanding how to communicate with the doctor, etc. Those are skills we did not learn in hygiene school, and so, we need to fill that gap for hygienists in order for them to be effective in the industry today.”