Scheduling

Last-minute cancellations and no-shows can undermine your best efforts to increase production, leaving unfillable gaps in your schedule. This will always be a problem, as it is for other types of businesses, but with diligence and the right systems you should be able to reduce your no-show rate to 1% or less. Strategies for encouraging patient compliance in this area range from building value for appointments beforehand to initiating patient “re-training” afterward. All are worth implementing, but none can match appointment confirmation techniques for immediacy and effectiveness.

There are only so many hours in a day, but that doesn’t have to limit your practice’s production capacity as much as you may think. Using a combination of proven scheduling techniques, you can increase daily production without working longer hours. It’s all a matter of timing and team coordination.

No other office management system influences practice success more than scheduling. It shapes everyone’s day and has a direct bearing on both productivity and stress levels. For these reasons, many dentists have adopted an “ideal day” work schedule template to guide their front desk coordinator in scheduling patients.

In many areas across the country, competition for new dental patients has increased dramatically in the past several years. Delayed retirements, more dental school graduates and the spread of dental management organizations... combined with reduced demand for oral health care… have led dentists to rethink how they are accepting new patients and their handling of calls and scheduling.

An efficient scheduling system keeps everyone in the practice—doctor, staff and patients—moving at a steady pace and showing up in the right place at the right time. However, if your scheduling coordinator allocates the wrong amount of time for various procedures, the entire system will break down.