The dental health care process has five steps:
Evaluation: collect data.
Oral hygiene diagnosis: interpreting data as a coherent description of a patient's condition can be solved by a dental hygienist.
Plan: identify the techniques that will address the problems in oral health diagnosis and the order in which these technologies are applied.
Execution: execute the plan.
Evaluation: determine the effectiveness of the completed work.
Mueller - Joseph and Petersen describe the oral health care process as a cycle in which oral hygienists may pass these steps many times. In months or years, the dental hygienist may have assessed his or her work several times, changing the number of diagnoses and plans as the patient's condition changes.
