National Dental Hygiene Month: a four-week recall plan for your office

National Dental Hygiene Month is observed every October by the American Dental Hygienists' Association (ADHA) to recognize hygienists and their prevention work. A practice can mark it with a four-week hygiene recall plan: clean up the recall list, call overdue hygiene patients in ranked order, schedule diagnosed periodontal therapy, and book patients with benefits left before year end. Then recognize each hygienist, by name, for the numbers that moved.

The ADHA's 2026 theme is The Power of Us: four strengths (prevention, career, voice and patients), one per week from Monday, October 5. The plan below uses the same weeks.

When is National Dental Hygiene Month, and why make it about recall?

It runs every October; its themes address the profession, not practice operations. Recall is the natural fit: hygiene recall turns the interval a provider prescribed into an actual appointment, and hygienists are closest to it. Many dental plans also run on the calendar year, so patients with unused benefits have one quarter left.

The October recall plan, week by week

The first owner named is accountable. The Runs from column names the OpenDental screen or report; other systems have equivalents. Starting mid-month? Take the baseline that day, from the two weeks before it, and run the weeks in order into November.

October 1 and 2: write down four starting numbers

Recognition in November needs a before. The office manager writes four numbers on the huddle sheet, per office and, where it applies, per hygienist:

• Overdue hygiene patients: the count in the Recall List window week two calls from, set up as described there, with "Include Reminded" checked so patients contacted recently still count.
• Reappointment rate: the share of hygiene patients seen in the last two weeks of September who have a future hygiene appointment on October 1, checked as in our dental KPIs guide. November 2 repeats that check for late October, so both windows get the same days to catch call-back bookings.
• Unscheduled perio therapy: scaling and root planing diagnosed with no appointment, from the Treatment Finder set up exactly as in week three.
• Recall type conflicts: the patients the Recall List's Show Conflicting Types filter returns.

Week 1, October 5 to 9: clean up the list before anyone dials

OpenDental's recall types are Prophy, Child Prophy and Perio by default. Patients are set to Prophy or Perio, which the manual calls mutually exclusive; Child Prophy only attaches child procedures by age. Setup is covered in our guide to running the recall list in OpenDental; this week is the audit, done when five things are true:

• Perio maintenance patients are on the Perio type at the interval their provider prescribed. The monthly check in D4910 versus D1110 finds patients who finished scaling and root planing but are still on the prophy type. Hygienists flag others who look like perio; the provider makes that clinical call, and the office manager moves the patient to the Perio type.
• The Show Conflicting Types filter on the Recall List comes back empty. It flags patients whose recall type does not match the procedures on their scheduled recall appointment.
• The Recall List has been run once with the From date blank. Rows with a blank Due Date are patients who never had a recall procedure set complete; each gets a status or is added to week two's list by hand.
• Any Recall Types setup change has been followed by Sync, which applies it to patients with that type, though hand-edited intervals keep their manual value.
• The office has one agreed set of recall statuses under Definitions, Recall / Unsched Status, so every week two outcome means the same thing.

Week 2, October 12 to 16: call overdue patients in ranked order

The Recall List filters on due date, but a lapse cutoff counts from the last completed visit. Run it for Prophy, then Perio, with the To date today and the From date at your cutoff minus that type's interval: 12 months back for a common 18-month cutoff on a six-month interval. That window is everyone who has come due and is still recall, not reactivation. Re-order it by the ranking in our recall scripts guide, with the Treatment Finder beside it and its "Include secondary insurance and no insurance" box checked so uninsured patients stay in: overdue patients with unscheduled treatment, then up to six months past due, then older ones inside the cutoff.

Give the ranked list to one named caller per office with a daily number small enough to finish between check-ins. Every call gets a status, voicemails and wrong numbers included. Patients past the cutoff are reactivation, and the recall or reactivation decision tree sorts them. Done means the daily number was logged all five days; the rest carries into November in order.

Week 3, October 19 to 23: schedule the perio therapy that never got booked

Every hygiene schedule carries patients told they need scaling and root planing who left without a date: unscheduled treatment that hygienists feel most, because they see those patients again.

Pull it from the Treatment Finder with a code range covering D4341 and D4342, the CDT codes for scaling and root planing, "Include secondary insurance and no insurance" checked so uninsured patients stay on the list, and patients with an upcoming appointment left out. Set TP Date From to a lookback the office chooses, such as 12 months; older diagnoses go to the doctor's re-evaluation list. The other filters are in our walkthrough of finding unscheduled treatment in OpenDental.

The Providers filter defaults to the patient's primary provider, often the dentist. "Use Treating Provider" filters by the provider on the procedure instead, which gives each hygienist a list if the office assigns scaling and root planing to hygienists; otherwise split it by the hygienist who last saw each patient. "When I saw you in April, we talked about the pockets on your lower left" is a call only a hygienist can make. Each hygienist gets a small daily number for open chair time, and the treatment coordinator calls what that time did not reach. Every call ends booked, declined in the chart, or with a dated next step. Done means the daily numbers were logged all five days; the rest carries into November.

Week 4, October 26 to 30: book patients with benefits left before year end

This week the Treatment Finder runs insurance-only: leave the no-insurance box unchecked, since checking it makes OpenDental ignore "Ins Month Start". Set "Amount remaining over" to show only patients with benefits left, set "Ins Month Start" to January for calendar-year plans, and sort by the Amt Rem column, largest first.

Plans also limit how often they pay for cleanings and periodontal maintenance, so check frequency limits before telling a patient what is covered. As in week two, done means the coordinator's daily number was called and logged all five days; the rest carries into November in order.

How do you recognize hygienists for numbers they actually move?

Recognition lands when it is specific. "Of your 82 patients in the last two weeks of October, 70 had their next visit booked, against 58 of 79 in late September" (illustrative numbers) tells a hygienist that someone noticed. Use measures the hygienist controls. Only reappointment has a September number to compare against; the other two are October tallies:

• Reappointment before the patient leaves the chair. The share of the hygienist's late October patients with a future hygiene appointment on November 2, checked the same way as the baseline.
• Recall list worked. An October tally for hygienists who call during open time: patients called, outcomes logged, appointments booked. Count outcomes, not only bookings: a logged "moved out of state" cleans the list for everyone.
• Perio patients flagged and booked. An October tally: the perio maintenance patients the hygienist flagged for the provider in week one, plus week three patients who went from diagnosed to scheduled.

Compare each hygienist's reappointment rate with their own late September, not with each other: a heavy perio column and a mostly pediatric one are different workloads. On November 2, read the gains aloud by name and take any decline one-on-one.

What goes in the huddle each week?

Each week adds one line to the outreach segment of the seven-minute morning huddle:

• Week 1: conflicts left, perio patients still to move, and who fixes them today.
• Week 2: yesterday's recall calls, outcomes logged, appointments booked, and today's number and caller.
• Week 3: perio therapy patients called and booked yesterday, and which hygienist has open time today.
• Week 4: patients with benefits left who were called and booked, and open November and December chair time.
• Every day: yesterday's hygiene patients who left with their next visit booked, out of those seen, for the office. A daily watch only; November 2 uses the baseline's check.

Running it in one office or across a group

A single office can run the whole plan on paper: an office manager, the hygienists, one caller, and the four baseline numbers taped next to the huddle agenda.

A group runs the same plan in every office in the same weeks, with the same statuses and four numbers, comparing each office with its own baseline. The risk is quiet drift: by week three one office is on schedule, another never finished the cleanup, and nobody can tell until November.

We built MyDentalForce Patient Outreach for this, whether you run one office or a group. It integrates with OpenDental and builds one ranked daily call list per office from that office's own data, covering due and overdue hygiene recall, unscheduled treatment and lapsed patients, rebuilt every night so nobody re-sorts it by hand. Every call outcome is logged and written back to OpenDental, and managers see each office's activity and results without asking. It runs the daily operations of a 19-office Houston group.

A clean list on October 30 and hygienists thanked by name for real numbers: November starts ahead of September.