AADOM DISTINCTIONcast – What the…EFDA? Utilize an EFDA in Your Practice
Elevate your dental practice with our dynamic course on utilizing and implementing an Expanded Function Dental Assistant (EFDA). As the dental landscape evolves, integrating an EFDA can significantly enhance patient care, improve workflow efficiency, and optimize team performance.
This course provides dental professionals with essential knowledge and practical strategies for effectively incorporating EFDAs into their practices. Through hands-on training, collaborative discussions, and real-life scenarios, you’ll gain the tools necessary to maximize the potential of your EFDA, ensuring a seamless transition that benefits both your team and your patients.
Key Objectives for Implementing & Utilizing an EFDA in a Dental Practice:
- Maximize Revenue Through Expanded Services: Understand how to effectively leverage the expanded skill set of EFDAs to offer additional services, thereby increasing production numbers and enhancing overall profitability.
- Optimize Dental Coding and Billing Practices: Learn to accurately code procedures performed by EFDAs, ensuring proper billing and reimbursement while minimizing errors that could lead to revenue loss.
- Implement Scheduling Structures: Develop a comprehensive scheduling structure that recognizes the contributions of EFDAs, promoting procedure timing, likes/dislikes of providers, recognizing strengths & weaknesses for the daily office workflow, ensuring a seamless productive day that keeps the team morale up.
By focusing on these objectives, your practice can enhance profitability and improve operational efficiency
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Read the Transcript Now!
Savanah: Hey, everyone! Welcome to DISTINCTIONcasts, where AADOM showcases the best and brightest minds in the dental industry from within our Dental Management Association.
DistinctionCasts is more than just insights into dental management. We amplify the voices of AADOM’s Distinction holders, leaders in the trenches of dental management who share insights, inspiration, and real-world strategies to help you thrive in your practice.
Before we dive in, a special thank you to today’s sponsor for supporting this episode.
CEDR is proud to be AADOM’s official HR partner. We know managing a team can feel overwhelming, and that’s why we’re here to empower office managers like you with export guidance for navigating the challenges of running your practice.
Our team of HR and employment law experts is passionate about supporting AADOM members, from answering tough employee questions, provided unlimited phone and email support, we’re your trusted resource for team management solutions.
We don’t just help you create a custom employee handbook tailored to your practice—we show you how to use it as a tool to make your day-to-day operations smoother and more effective. With CEDR, you’re never alone in tackling employee issues or building a stronger, more successful team.
I am super jazzed to welcome back Stacey Singleton to DistinctionCasts. Stacey holds a business administration degree from Hesser College and is the practice administrator for Harborside Dental and York County Pediatric Dentistry in Wells, Maine.
As a Diplomat of AADOM in our distinction holders, she founded and led the main Dental Leadership Coalition. With a dental career spanning since 1997, she’s a certified dental assistant, an EFDA—which we’ll talk about today—and dental director at a local dental college, overseeing dental assisting and EFDA programs.
Recognized for excellence in office culture and management, she was a 2016 dental assistant of the year runner up and a 2023 dental office manager of distinction.
Welcome back, Stacey.
Stacey: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I am thrilled to be here and share this today.
Savanah: I’m so excited for you. And, this topic—so EFDA (Expanded Function Dental Assisting)—it’s a huge hot button right now for all dental managers and within the dental industry to really help beef up the schedule and our patient flow. And, I can’t wait for you to share everything about EFDA with our members today.
Stacey: Yeah. Thank you. This is definitely my passion. This is my niche. I love it. I love teaching it. I love watching the progress of the students and following them for years and just the growth that they’ve had and what they’ve brought to the practice is huge.
And the doctor feedback is extraordinary, you know, for what they can do to a practice. So, it’s very exciting, and I’m excited to get started.
Savanah: Well, hop right in. The floor is yours.
What is an EFDA?
Stacey: So, for just a little background, an EFDA is an Expanded Function, Dental Auxiliary or Assistant. And they can be kind of a backbone to a practice and help move forward with increased production and workflow.
Depending on what state that you’re in depends upon the certification and the additional training that’s required. So, in most states, you need to be a CDA through DANBY—so a certified dental assistant or a registered dental hygienist to be accepted to an EFDA program.
So, I can speak for my EFDA program that you have to have one of those two components in order to be accepted to the program and have at least two years of working experience beyond that licensure.
And then from there, all the programs differ in length of time and what they’re doing within the program and expectations. But once you finish and you get your board-state licensure, then from there the skills that you can do to bring to a practice are phenomenal.
It really equates to having an associate in a dental practice. So, if things are done right, you can progress the practice substantially.
Legal Scope of Practice for EFDA’s
So, we will kind of move on here. And the first and foremost is the legal scope of practice for the FTAs. And they can perform tasks that go above and beyond the basic responsibilities of a dental assistant.
So, depending on your state regulations, you do need to check and make sure everyone looks at the scope of practice under your board licensure. Before hiring an EFDA, you wanna make sure that they have their credentials.
And I always like having them show skills—the skillset as well—because you can have your licensure, but if you’re not utilizing the skills, you can definitely lose those.
So, you wanna make sure that they have all of their licensure up to date. And then you wanna make sure that the doctors on staff are completely on board with utilizing an EFDA.
It can be difficult because they have to let go of some of the responsibility that they’re used to. They have to be able to get up and walk away and have an EFDA come in and finish the restoration.
So, they have to have a huge amount of trust that encompasses the relationship between those two. And that is first and foremost what I always talk about in class and with consulting is that the relationship between the doctor and the EFDA is the foundation of making this work.
So, moving on. So, the state regulations and guidelines for each state—I’m going to list some different duties that EFDA’s are accepted in my state to do. And in surrounding states, they differ just a little bit.
There’s a couple of gray areas and when there’s a gray area on what’s allowed, it always comes down to doctor supervision and what the doctor is comfortable with.
Something we have to keep in mind is that an EFDA always works underneath direct supervision of a dentist. So, anything that they’re doing falls under the dentist’s license. So that’s why that trust and that relationship has to be very important because any procedures at all that go well, go bad—it all falls under the doctor.
So, all right. The most common practices that I see successfully use EFDA’s are general practices and pediatric practices. That’s been the most successful. I would love to hear from people that are using EFDA’s in other types of practices, but those are the two that I see most worthwhile.
Common EFDA Duties
So, here I have listed some of the common FTA duties. These are things that are basic: dental assistant duties, all the way up to some of the EFDA duties that can be delegated.
So, as we go through the list, something to kind of keep in mind is that each one of these procedures have a correlating code that can be billed out. And, obviously, that code is affiliated to a fee that can bring in profit to the practice. So, knowing your codes and knowing your fees is super important.
When you can productively utilize an EFDA and delegate these tasks, code it correctly, you can increase the profit of the practice easily by 25% if you can do the scheduling and the coding correctly.
It is a little bit to figure out. It’s a little bit of juggling. Sometimes it is trial and error because it comes down to the practice workflow and finding the right fit for your practice.
And not every practice runs the same, and not every doctor is going to delegate the same. So this is very personalized to each practice and how your EFDA is gonna be utilized.
So, coming through the list, we have basic registering patients, obtaining medical history. They’re charting teeth, they’re doing their vitals. You’re doing a perio-screening exam. This is definitely for the RDH’s that have their EFDA license, because, for EFDA’s, they’re doing procedures that are reversible procedures.
If you wanna think of everything from the gum line up is an EFDA. And then if you’re an RDH EFDA, you can go subgingival. So, some of these things pertain to the RDH EFDA as well.
As we’re moving down the list, the soft tissue exam, those things would be an RDH EFDA. Then we’re jumping into providing OHI Coronal polishing, fluoride varnish, applying the desensitizers, the etchings, the sealants, carries risk assessments—all of those things are huge preventative codes. They’re huge in bringing in production to a practice and providing the dentistry that is needed, especially in pediatric offices.
There’s such a shortage, I know, in this area of dental hygienists. So, in a pediatric practice, if you have an EFDA, you can really expand what you’re able to provide in dentistry.
I have a lot of pediatric dentists that are utilizing EFDA’s as a hygienist in a practice and then they come over and will do any scaling that’s needed, anything that the EFDA’s cannot do. Otherwise, they’re doing everything else during that visit, which is huge. It’s huge and it offers a lot more dentistry to be, you know, seen throughout the office.
So, we kind of call those preventative EFDA’s that are utilized that way. And a lot of the people graduating from school and getting out into the workforce, they know ahead of time that that’s what they’re gonna be doing is utilized as a preventative EFDA.
Then we have the restorative EFDA’s, and those are applying bond, doing your bases, your liners, making sure that any isolation techniques are done. And then they’re placing all the matrix systems. They’re filling the tooth, and they’re also then making sure that they’re checking the occlusion, they’re polishing, doing bite registrations.
We’ll kind of skip over here. They can be placing the cord, removing sutures, placing perio dressings. They’re fabricating temporary crowns, removing crowns in ortho offices, fitting and cementing stainless steel crowns, doing all of the ortho procedures, and that’s huge.
They can do bonding and remove bonding and everything like that. When you have Invisalign cases, your EFDA can really do 90% of the visits in a practice, because that’s within their scope of practice, as long as a patient doesn’t need IPR.
So, the interproximal reduction—if that’s not needed, then he EFDA can see the patient for those other visits. So that can be hugely utilized in an ortho and general practice as well.
Doing all of the scanning, constructing custom trays, fabricating Essex retainers, placement of attachments, doing the direct bonding of brackets, cementing the ortho bands.
And then of course we talked about checking the occlusion and adjusting. They’re placing separators, placing and removing the arch wires, the ties, assisting in the administration of nitrous. Again, you have to check on your state regulation for this because there’s a difference between monitoring nitrous and administering nitrous. So please check on your scope of practice for that.
And then emergency restorative procedures. So, this is an important one as well to look into because you can have an EFDA cover emergency call and depending upon, again, your state regulations, they can see patients on an emergency basis.
So that’s definitely a protocol that you would want to talk about with an EFDA. A lot of dentists like having that extra time that they’re not getting the calls and having to see an emergency off hours.
And then tooth whitening. So, this is also a big revenue boost for an office, and it’s something that, you know, an EFDA can do very easily. And these are just some sample procedures that can be done. And again, each procedure, there’s numerous codes that can go with each one, especially with the restorative obviously.
Benefits of EFDA Collaboration
A little bit about the benefits of having an EFDA and collaborating with one is that it definitely enhances the workflow efficiency. Delegating advanced procedures to them—it reduces bottlenecks in the schedule.
The dentist can come in, focus on the high complex cases while the EFDA is doing and managing all the other routine, restorative and preventative things in the office.
It improves patient care. The patients benefit from faster treatment with seamless handoff between the team members. There’s a collaboration ensuring all aspects of the patient’s oral health are addressed comprehensively.
I’m a firm believer in, you know, more eyes are better. So, when you have multiple people seeing a patient, you can pick up on things that may have been missed.
So that is very utilized. It has high team morale. It clearly defines roles. And the biggest thing I recommend is when either you have an EFDA or you are bringing on an EFDA, you wanna make sure that you sit down with a job description in detail, because you really should be treating them as if you’re onboarding an associate because they’re a provider, so you have to kind of have that mentality.
And your team members are gonna feel valued. They’re gonna have input, especially when they see someone going through school and they’re seeing the growth and what it brings to the practice. They love it. It’s good communication within the team.
And the fourth is practice growth. You’re going to see an increase. It does take time to show that, but it’s very efficient to have someone on staff.
And again, this isn’t for every practice. It has to be the right fit. It has to be the right relationship. But when it works, it works great!
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Sponsored by: CEDR HR Solutions
Learn About the Presenter:
Stacey Singleton, CDA, EFDA, DAADOM
Stacey is the Dental Practice Administrator at Harborside Dental and York County Pediatric Dentistry. Stacey resides in southern Maine with her family.
She has been in the dental field since 1997. She is a Certified and Expanded Function Dental Auxiliary. She also holds her Business Administration Management Degree from Hesser College and earned her Fellowship, Mastership & Diplomate from the American Association of Dental Office Management. Stacey has been certified by the National Oral & Maxillofacial Anesthesia Board and is an active member with AADOM where she is President of the Maine Dental Leadership Coalition.
Stacey is also a Dental Adjunct Professor at YCCC where she teaches dental programs. She enjoys volunteering within the local community and has a passion for the dental industry where she has been awarded numerous recognitions in office culture and management.
She was awarded Dental Office Manager of Distinction in 2023 and was Dental Assistant of the year runner-up in 2016. She has had the opportunity to have published articles, speaking engagements, and consulting guidance with other dental practices.
“Find your passion and stay true to its course.”
