Make Your Schedule Work For You

Does it seem to you that most of your days are spent doing “assembly line” dentistry? Do you have little time for the more rewarding dentistry you want to do – and that patients need?

You're not alone. As a practice matures it's easy to become stuck in a cycle of just keeping up with routine dental work. A practice can actually reach the point where the schedule is filled with short appointments with little room to accommodate the more complex cases.

You feel busy, because the days are full and booked way out, but the productivity is not what it could be because you are diminishing the value of your time. You're not doing patients any favors either by making them wait longer for important treatment. In fact, the longer they have to wait, the more likely they are to lose interest and change their minds.

The obvious answer is don't go further out in the schedule to slot in the high-value work. Devise a template that reserves a certain amount of time each week for performing the kind of dentistry that gives patients the opportunity to receive timely treatment for major work. Doing this will also help you meet the revenue goals that keep the practice healthy and thriving. If a patient says yes today to major treatment, you want to be able to seize that momentum and get them booked to return as soon as possible.

I know it sounds risky to reserve that time every week without knowing what will go into it. It's always easier to just let the schedule fill up with whoever comes into the practice. But trust me, if you reserve time for larger cases, you and your team will usually find the cases to fill it.

If it really comes down to it and those blocks in the schedule are threatening to sit empty, it usually doesn't take more than a few phone calls to fill them up again with the routine stuff. The fact of the matter is if you want to do more comprehensive dentistry, you have to give it priority in your schedule.