Readiness and budgeting

Before beginning your medical-dental integration project, assess your practice’s readiness and build a budget. There are several factors across practices that seem to influence successful integration:

• Consider where your practice is in terms of leadership and staff support and engagement, time to devote to the project, hiring a dental hygienist with qualities that will support this type of care model, and experience with quality improvement.
• Building a budget will help you plan for startup and implementation costs and projected revenue.