Understand Your Schedule to Drive Performance - Part 1
Submitted by Judy Larocque on
By Judy Larocque
When it comes to scheduling in a dental practice, most practices manage the day in a reactive manner rather than appointing in a way that is energizing, productive and meets the needs of both the patients and the practice: Daily changes create stress, dampens productivity and wastes time. The obvious troublemakers include no-shows, cancellations, time that was left open and appointments that are scheduled with either too much time or too little to complete the procedure. Other things that choke productivity is running late, same-day emergencies and scheduling the doctor in more places that he or she can physically manage without compromising patient care and patient relationships.
In fact, most doctors and teams can probably look at your schedule in the morning and know exactly how you are going to feel at the end of the day. You can identify who will call at the last minute to cancel, who will no-show and who will arrive late. For the most part, you know if the day is going to be an economic disaster; yet the pattern is repeated day after day. Keep in mind that once you have started the day, there is little you can do to change and you ask yourself, why does it continue to happen?
It happens because you’ve operated this way for years and you accept the status-quo. “What we accept – we promote”. It’s been programmed by the choices you and your team have made in the past.
It’s important to understand that a carefully planned and organized schedule is critical to success- it reduces stress, creates time and energy for meeting patient needs at the highest level and enables productivity and growth. Conquering your schedule is really about understanding that there are three key issues at play.
- Patient behaviors around appointments
- How you and your team make appointment choices
- The value of your time and the economics of the schedule.
To be continued…
- Part two - Conquering patient behaviors
- Part Three - Conquering appointment choices
- Part Four - Conquering the Value of Time
- Key performance indicators
To integrate these systems into your practice, participate with your team to our C.E. programBâtir sa pratique de rêve(French only)
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