If you’re not actively managing your dental appointment book and analyzing key procedure metrics, you could be adversely affecting your practice.

Let’s start by discussing how overly long dental procedure times could impact your practice.

How Dental Procedure Time Impacts Your Practice

The amount of time it takes to complete each procedure can profoundly affect the overall success and productivity of your office. For example, let’s say that the average times for routine dental procedures are higher than you originally planned. It becomes far too easy to have a sloppy scheduling mindset and unhappy patients when that happens.

Long Wait Times

One of the worst qualities a dental office can have is ultra-long wait times for patients. If your dental treatment duration rates are higher than they should be, the inevitable result is a packed waiting room and disgruntled patients. You should keep average times for procedures as low as possible without sacrificing the quality of care.

Fewer Appointments

If a dental procedure time takes longer than usual, you will have less time for other patient appointments. Of course, the key to a thriving and productive dental practice is effective time management, not overscheduling or cramming as many patients in each workday as possible. However, if you have to cancel on patients because you don’t have enough time to fit in their dental treatment, it will result in lower profits and unhappy patients.

Low Production

Low production rates are another common impact of letting your dental procedure times run over. In particular, it’s crucial to have a good mix of low-ticket treatments like cleanings and high-ticket procedures like root canals or dental implants. Improving your time management skills regarding patient procedures is one of the best ways to run a thriving dental office.  

How To Manage Dental Treatment Times for a Thriving and Productive Practice

Let’s discuss some actionable advice and expert tips you can leverage to keep procedure times down and productivity up.

Utilize Online Patient Scheduling

Switching to digital software systems for patient scheduling is one of the best ways to ensure that your procedures and treatments stay within their appointed time frames. For example, one solution is online dental scheduling by Dental Intelligence. It allows you to streamline your scheduling practices, prevent double bookings, and update schedule changes in real time. The best part is, patients can schedule online any time, anywhere.

Analyze Important Metrics

How can you determine if your dental treatment times are running over? You can start by measuring and analyzing key metrics. For example, you may want to spend two weeks recording the timeframes for each type of treatment and dental procedure. Which appointments take the longest? By gaining this valuable data, you can better understand how to mix your workday to maximize time efficiency and production.  

Set Daily and Monthly Production Goals

Your dental practice should focus on increasing cost efficiency while decreasing anxiety and stress for your staff and the front desk. For example, you can do this by setting daily average production goals that lead to higher monthly and annual goals. Here’s how you can do it:

• First, determine your specific monthly or annual production goals by the number of available working days within the particular period.

• Take that number and then decide how much growth you want for the following months and year: i.e., 10%, 15%, etc.

Now, you have a hard number that can act as a guide. As we said earlier, that will make it much easier for your staff to determine a good mix between low-profit treatments like cleanings and high-profit procedures like root canals.

You can use Dental Intelligence’s Metrics and Reporting to easily set goals and review your data. No need to run your own reports. Everything is already built out for you.

Switch to 10-Minute Increments

Although many dentists use 15-minute increments for their patient scheduling, you may want to consider switching to 10 minutes. It keeps your time management skills sharper and helps you cut appointment times. Consider this: If you have three dental assistants who manage to save even 15 minutes each workday during the year, your practice can benefit from 500 extra working hours annually!

Contact Us at Dental Intelligence Today

Are you interested in more ways that Dental Intelligence can help your practice and lower dental procedure time? Check out our blog to learn about the different types of dental office scheduling, tips for improving productivity, and how to streamline your workday. Reach out to us and schedule a demo of our advanced software solutions today.

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