Gain Sharing and Production Incentive for Dental Providers in Community Health Centers
There are several ways to make the benefit/remuneration package attractive to potential dental professionals. A production bonus is one of them. When developing your budget for dental you will at some point use a formula to figure out how many encounters per day/per provider it takes for your department to break even on an average uninterrupted day. This number should be used as production goal for each dentist. When their production exceeds that minimum (for our company it is 15 patients), they receive $10 dollars per patient in excess of 15 patients. Encounters are all billable face to face visits, including hygiene.
It may be convenient to extrapolate an hourly quota from the daily minimum, and use this as your multiplier for clinical hours. Most providers have complex schedules that may include administration and other non-productive, yet mission oriented procedures and duties. Such example are hospital dentistry, sedation cases, outreach (mobile dentistry), administration, meetings, etc. These hours are cut out from the calculations because they would obviously work against the provider, as they are not a true indicator of his/her production.
For example, our hourly multiplier is 1.875 (15 per day), therefore if your provider worked only 6 clinical hours the minimum standard for that day would be:
6 hours x 1.875 patients/hour = 11.25 patients
If they saw 13 patients that day, the bonus encounters would be:
(13 patients – 11.25 patients)$10/patient = $17.5
Typically these calculations are done for the entire month or week, as there are some days that the provider does not meet the minimum standard.
Included with this description of our gain sharing incentive is a working template of a typical provider’s work week, that tracks clinical hours, non-clinical hours, production minimums, and overage. By pre-setting the template with all the calculations, all the provider or director has to do is fill in the blanks.
This example represents an excel spread sheet that can be used for tracking the providers hours, production, admin, and other miscellaneous categories. The totals at the bottom represent calculations from pre- set formulas. In addition, in the column labeled Production Standard, each cell represents the minimum standard formula, 1.875 patients x hours (represented in column “D”), therefore once the clinical hours are typed in the production minimum is automatically calculated.
*See handout*
Cell E17 represents the total minimum standard for the week, in this case, 36.56 patients.
Cell D18 represents the total patients actually seen, in this case, 49
Cell E18 represents the difference between the minimum standard and actual, in this case, 12.44 patients.
Cell M18 represents the overage multiplied by $10/patient, in this case, $124.
As you can see, once the template is created, it takes only minutes to figure out gain sharing totals at the end of each week. Unfortunately, we have not been able to adapt EZ Labor and other “canned” payroll management systems to quickly and easily track production overage.
Dental Provider-Longevity/Production Incentive
The following proposal focuses on rewarding dentists for their productivity, quality and commitment over time.
Rationale: Having a longevity clause tied into your production incentive has several advantages. The most important being that it sends a direct message to your providers that their commitment and loyalty are valued, and will be rewarded appropriately. A second advantage is that the longer the dental provider has been with the company the more likely they are reaching the plateau of their pay scale, and the perception of loss of value is offset by the longevity incentive.
Below is the incentive plan in detail.
(1)After the third year of service at company name (using the first month after the month of your third anniversary date), assuming that the dentist has met production and quality standards and has received a favorable evaluation from the previous year and is not on probation or suspension, the remuneration on production will be increased $1 (e.g. from $10 to $11 per encounter over minimum expected under the given formula).
(2)That the increase of $1 per encounter beginning with the fourth year of service only extend out five additional years or to a maximum of an additional $5 per encounter over the minimum. (e.g. from $10….to ….$15 per encounter over five years).
(3)That this incentive does not take away in any material way from any other adjustment in pay, whether that be merit, pay scale adjustment, or other cost of living or like adjustments that may come from time to time.
(4)Company name reserves the right to freeze or terminate this plan, upon 30 day notification to the eligible dentist, if resources are inadequate to support the plan or at the general discretion of the Company name Board of Directors.