New white paper demonstrates how reimagining the sterilization/resupply area for the age of automation will save small practices up to $64,000 annually—with an exponential rise in savings for larger practices.
Too often, items are arranged and located according to personal preferences, with space plans based on often incorrect assumptions about how people think things may work best together. Benco Dental’s Office Nucleus achieves the best interactions between people and things, placing sterilization and resupply next to each other, repositioning these two key areas to keep equipment and instruments closer to treatment rooms. Convenient touches include a “salad bar”-style area for the most frequently used items.
PITTSTON, PA — Benco Dental, the nation’s largest independent distributor of oral healthcare technology and supplies, today published a new white paper outlining its revolutionary Office NucleusTM dental practice design concept, as well as explaining exactly how practices incorporating it will benefit in terms of both time and money savings, and also demonstrating how it is integrated into a practice’s overall floorplan.
Download the complete white paper and watch the video here.
Derived from the lean manufacturing method popularized by Toyota, Benco Dental’s Office Nucleus stands as the first ground-up rethinking of the dental sterilization/resupply area since COVID changed dentistry. This workflow breakthrough makes practices faster, safer and more efficient. At a critical time when efficiency Is more important than ever—amid rising salary costs, difficulties in hiring and retention, busier patient schedules, and stubborn inflation—a solution that enables dentists to do more with less deserves serious consideration.
Benco Dental’s Office Nucleus design concept is a dual-room design that imposes order on instrument processing—one of the messiest and most chaotic parts of a practice—optimizing the flow of people and supplies, limiting the risk of cross-contamination and infection.
Seven Key Points About the Office Nucleus:
- #1: It REIMAGINES the sterilization/resupply area for the age of automation.
- #2: It REPOSITIONS sterilization and resupply next to each other, keeping the treatment process moving with everything close at hand.
- #3: It SEPARATES ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ into two individual rooms with a pass-through connection.
- #4: It AUTOMATES instrument processing to reduce team member intervention and boring, repetitive tasks by incorporating cassettes and thermal disinfectors, utilizing a highly efficient unit that studies show saves time and requires little training.
- #5: It REDUCES staff time and yields better inventory management, reducing operating costs and delivering significantly higher ROI over the life of a practice.
- #6: It SAVES MONEY, with even conservative estimates placing the Office Nucleus’s annual savings for a small office at about $64,000, compared to a manual sterilization setup and ordinary supply closet. The larger the practice, the greater the savings.
- #7: It PAYS FOR ITSELF, effectively offsetting rising wage costs and persistent problems like shrinking reimbursements.
Watch the 5-minute video hosted by Benco Dental interior designer Taylor Huber.
Developed in-house by Benco Dental’s team of CenterPoint practice designers, the concept was tested and refined over almost two years by a multidisciplinary task force located across the company’s three design studios in suburban Los Angeles, California, Dallas, Texas, and at Benco Dental’s corporate headquarters in Pennsylvania. The team included designers, former dental assistants and hygienists, logistics specialists and data analysts who ran both real-life and computer simulations aimed at optimizing the flow of people, instrument processing and inventory management.
“Dental practitioners are still relying on 1980s-era design thinking for their sterilization and resupply areas, which was conceived decades before the problems of 2024,” said Sucharita Ray, Benco Dental’s Director of Design. “The Office Nucleus not only addresses today’s challenges, it also does so in a highly cost-effective way, because it relies primarily on smarter design rather than construction and equipment that are substantially costlier than an ordinary steri-center layout. As a result, the Office Nucleus successfully upends traditional workflows, optimizing the movement of people and supplies.”
Developed by Benco Dental’s team of CenterPoint practice designers, the Office Nucleus concept was tested and refined by a team of former dental assistants and hygienists aided by data analysts.
For more information on incorporating Benco Dental’s Office Nucleus into a new practice design, or integrating it as part of a renovation, see your Benco Dental Sales Representative, call 1.800.GO.BENCO, or message us.
About Benco Dental
At Benco Dental, we believe that dental providers deserve a partner on their side. We’re proud to be a national dental distributor with a century-long history, strong distribution network, and a comprehensive range of products, solutions, and services. We offer the unwavering support that can only come from a privately-owned company with the flexibility to do what is in customers’ best interests, so they can focus on growing their practices and delivering the best patient outcomes. Our collaborations with the industry’s leading vendors, buoyed by the market’s best-trained sales and field service team plus our proven track record of agility, helps launch countless new innovations each year. Together, we are driving dentistry forward. Visit www.benco.com.
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