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Overscheduling patient appointments is a widespread problem for dental offices across America. Packing your workday with too many patient appointments can cause some serious harm to your office and its reputation.
How Does Overscheduling Dental Patients Impact Your Practice?
To successfully run a dental office, you must provide your patients with a positive experience and high-quality care. However, some dentists focus more on profitability than patient satisfaction, and one of the most common problems resulting from that mindset is overfilling their schedule.
Consider the following reasons why patient overscheduling is harmful to your dental practice:
Long Wait Times
Nobody wants to arrive on time for their dentist's appointment and spend the next hour sitting in a packed waiting room. One study showed that long wait times1 negatively affected dental patients' satisfaction levels, with first-time patients being the most dissatisfied and unlikely to return. Think about it: Would you want to go to a dentist that you knew had hour-long wait times? Of course not!
Rushed Work
If your patient schedule is overfull, the only way to ensure that you see every patient is by working faster. But, as you know, rushing your work often leads to mistakes, unhappy patients, an increased stress level, and poor quality of care.
In healthcare, making a mistake can have severe repercussions for you, your patients, and your business. Of course, patients must give informed consent before any treatments or procedures, but that doesn't provide comprehensive protection against you for making a mistake due to carelessness.
No Breaks
Another inevitable result of a packed appointment book is that both you and your staff have to sacrifice your breaks or, at the very least, cut them short. Remember, an unhappy employee is one who has to work through their lunch break! In addition, if your staff members are unhappy, they are more likely to become irritable with patients, negatively affecting your practice.
Poor Feedback
Receiving poor feedback and negative reviews is one of the most significant impacts overscheduling can have on your dental practice. One of the first factors potential patients research when looking for a new dental practice is reviews and feedback. If you're receiving negative feedback because of long wait times, poor quality of work, and overworked front desk staff, it will undoubtedly affect the quality of your business.
How Can Your Dental Practice Stop Overscheduling?
How can you fix this problem? Let's discuss a few solutions:
Adjust Your Appointment Schedule Blocks
If the time you spend with each patient tends to exceed the allotted appointment time on a regular basis, you may need to spread out your appointments by 5-10 minutes each. Seeing fewer patients per day will give you higher-quality time with the patients you do have, which can improve retention and lower stress levels in your office.
Online Dental Scheduling
One of the best ways to avoid overfilling your appointment book is by upgrading to online dental scheduling by Dental Intelligence. With our Online Scheduling, you can let patients book their own appointments directly into your management system. Plus, it frees up your staff to devote time to other important tasks.
Use Appointment Reminders
Another effective way to streamline your scheduling practices is with appointment reminders for patients to help them remember their upcoming procedures and routine appointments. No more of those little scheduling cards that get thrown out or lost! Use texts instead.
Consider a Dental Scheduling Coordinator
Instead of overburdening your office staff with all the administrative work, why not consider hiring a dental scheduling coordinator? A scheduling coordinator manages the entire flow of your workday and scheduling practices. Then, you can rest easier knowing that your workday will be smoother, more efficient, and more productive.
Invest in Your Dental Practice with Dental Intelligence
Overscheduling can harm your dental practice in more ways than one. From negative reviews, unhappy patients, and overworked staff, your business will gradually see the adverse effects of poor scheduling habits.
Instead, consider upgrading to Dental Intelligence. Our advanced software solutions provide the tools and resources dental professionals need to improve the quality of care and streamline their practice. Reach out to us for a demo of our Online Scheduling and other tools.
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