Time You Didn't Know You're Wasting

I've had a lot of doctors sending me their schedule so that I can give them some feedback on how to maximize their time and look for opportunities to improve. What strikes me when I look at these schedules is two things. Number one, there is a lot of time dedicated to wasting time. What do I mean? I've traveled the United States and worked with dental professionals in every region of this nation and what I have found is that most dentists and hygienists don't really know how long a procedure will take, and because they don't know, there is a lot of extra time added to appointments that is needless. Take for example the 1-hour cleaning. Very few people need an hour for a cleaning if they are a healthy adult. Read that again. If they need an hour, either they talk too much and you can't get them to stop to do your work or they have a gag reflex and you have to take it slower than you like. Anyone else who needs an hour cleaning does NOT have good oral health and needs to be scheduled for a deeper cleaning and perio maintenance. And yet, schedule after schedule reads, 1-hour prophy, 1-hour prophy, 1-hour prophy...

If you see 8 prophys a day with healthy adults, and you could do them all in 50 minutes each, this would save you 10 minutes on every appointment. Add that up and you have 80 extra minutes. Now I have some offices tell me they don't like the extra 10-minute units that causes on the schedule sometimes, but here's the rub. You can either waste 80 minutes a day or just 20, but you have to make that choice. Fifty-minute prophys also eliminates the bottleneck at the front desk becuase people are leaving at different times. When I see nothing but hour-long appointments on a schedule it tells me that there are people waiting at the front desk on the way in and on the way out. Now consider that people are far more likely to make a mistake when they are running behind and sometimes for the sake of catching up, you have to realize that cramming patients through the front desk all at once could be the reason you don't produce and collect more. There is not sufficient time to prepare for and talk to patients about future treatment as they are leaving the office.

Human nature is that you will take all the time you are given, so it is likely that you don't see the time you are wasting, but take away 10 minutes and you will see that things can move faster without forsaking the patient experience. Think about it. Do you think your patient would mind if you save them an extra 10 minutes?

The second thing I see is that there is not a plan to produce. When you line up the days next to each other, most office's schedule looks very different. One day has a lot of production on it while the next three are very low in production. There are new patients on some days and on many others there are none. Beginning to maximize your efficiency starts with two steps. Step one is to discover just how much chair time it takes to do your procedures. Get granular with it. Ask yourself, "Could we shave off 10 minutes here if we needed to?" Partner with your team to write down a list of procedures you do most and how much time it takes to do them all. The second step is to save time for the things you want. Read that again. If you want to improve production, you want more major work on your schedule. Save time every day. You want more new patients on your schedule. Save time for them everyday. If you do this right, you start to manufacture your days so that there is always a sufficient amount of production on your day in the time that you need it (no more and no less) and you are seeing more new patients throughout the week.

Use your schedule to drive your success. For more tips on this download my free book on all things scheduling for dentists on the Apple Book Store. Just search for my name. If you want to go pro, PM me "video" and I'll send you the recent webinar I did on Scheduling that has helped so many offices start to revolutionize their schedules.