Scheduling is Time Management

The success of any company is often tied to the time management system. Time management will, to some degree, control the customer experience and all other operational systems. For example, even a company with the best products will struggle if it cannot develop the products quickly or deliver them on time. Many companies with excellent products have faced significant challenges because of wasted time contributing to higher overhead, and lower profitability has kept those excellent products from being enough for the company to be successful.

The same is true for dental practices. In a dental practice, the time management system is referred to as the scheduling system. A mathematically designed schedule, based on scheduling principles that will be taught in this course, will allow a dental practice to reach its real potential. In an era where overhead is higher than in the past due to technology and staffing costs and inflation, scheduling is more important for dental practices than ever before.

Unfortunately, many practices simply have scheduling “habits“ rather than having principles that allow them to design a schedule that creates the right level of patient appointment availability, patient flow, production, and efficiency, which all allow for a low-stress profile. Having a highly efficient, smooth-running practice, which starts with having a well-designed scheduling model, is often the antidote to stress levels that feel too high in the practice.

Prior to computer software scheduling, dental practices used hardcopy scheduling books, and most practices never thought about the reality that they always scheduled in 15-minute increments. A patient appointment could be 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, or an hour. This was accepted simply as the way it was without ever asking why. The answer, which makes many dentists laugh when they realize it, was that all of the manufacturers of the hardcopy scheduling books printed each day scheduled in 15-minute units. It wasn’t until the advent of computer software for dental practices that dentists began to realize that all appointments did not have to be in 15-minute units. This potential time savings, which will be explained as one of the most important opportunities to increase practice production for dental practices, was significant in reaching practice potential.

In this course, we will analyze scheduling based on the number of doctors and hygienists that work in the practice and for how many hours. We will refer to this as “per provider” in order to understand that a one-doctor practice may follow the same principles as a five-doctor practice if we look at scheduling design, production, efficiency, and other factors on a “per provider“ basis. By analyzing scheduling techniques and measuring results per provider, we can get a realistic picture of how efficient and effective the scheduling system is. As an example, if one doctor can save one hour a week, then five doctors can save five hours a week, assuming they are working the same number of hours, and the schedule has been redesigned. However, there are mitigating factors, such as the speed of each doctor, which will be discussed in our next section.

Practices must never underestimate how important scheduling is to their success. It is estimated that most dentists could reach financial independence 10 years earlier if they have the right scheduling design and operational systems.(ref) In an era where the average retirement age of a dentist is currently 69 years of age and moving quickly towards 70+, it is more important than ever before to design a schedule over the course of a dentist’s career to allow the practice to maximize potential. Although this is not a course on dental practice finance or dentist’s personal financial strategy, it is important to understand that the higher level a practice performs the faster, the trajectory is toward reaching financial independence.

Furthermore, higher performing practices can create compensation models and offer bonus systems that lower performing practices won’t have the opportunity to provide. Scheduling is the starting point of increasing practice production, maximizing, efficiency, and effectiveness of all systems, and contributing to excellent performance throughout a practice career.