Is Your Dental Practice Hitting a Production Bottleneck?

Every dental practice encounters obstacles that limit how much dentistry they can produce. No practice can achieve infinite production. At Proveer Practice Management, we help dentists overcome these bottlenecks to achieve significant gains in productivity.

What’s Your Bottleneck?

The crucial question is: What is holding your practice back, and what can you do about it? To find the right solutions, it is essential to determine whether your bottlenecks are demand-oriented or capacity-oriented because the solutions for each are very different.

Demand-Oriented Bottlenecks

A practice with demand-oriented bottlenecks is one that sees all the patients willing to visit and completes all the dentistry patients are willing to pay for, but the schedule is still not full.

Here are some ways to address demand-oriented bottlenecks:

• Increase Patient Numbers
  • Ensure you have a great website and online presence.
  • Consider external marketing.
  • Treat patients well so they will return and refer others.
  • Ensure patients know you welcome referrals.
  • Ensure a great experience for new patients from the moment they call.
  • Minimize judgment by front desk team members about whether a patient is a good fit for the practice.
  • Track your referrals to understand what is effective and what is not. Then, make adjustments.
  • Consider joining a PPO (but proceed with extreme caution!).
  • Merge with another practice.
• Do More Dentistry Per Patient
  • Carefully define your treatment planning philosophy and ensure your communication with patients aligns with it.
  • While you do not want to be a “procedure pusher,” you also do not want patients to miss out on opportunities for healthier mouths or more beautiful smiles because their dentist did not communicate effectively.
  • Offer more services in-house (this may require continuing education).
  • Ensure patients due for recall are invited to schedule (without being pushy).
  • Ensure patients with outstanding treatment are invited to schedule (without being pushy).
• Bill Accurately for What You Do
  • Bill for all services rendered, including limited exams and cores.
  • Periodontal maintenance should not be billed as a prophy.
• Save Time and Money
  • Consider reducing practice hours.
  • If there are not enough patients to fill four days, consider reducing the schedule to three days.
  • We have multiple clients who have reduced the schedule to three days without a negative impact on production by being more efficient with their time.
  • Reducing hours has forced practices to be more efficient with their resources and, in some cases, opened up a day for the owner to earn extra money as an associate elsewhere.

Capacity-Oriented Bottlenecks

In contrast to practices with demand-oriented bottlenecks, practices with capacity-oriented bottlenecks have plenty of patients but lack the capacity to do all the dentistry that needs to be done.

Interestingly, many practices with capacity-oriented bottlenecks have adopted less-than-ideal habits to accommodate the limitations, which leads them to believe that everything is in balance.

For example:

• Recall and treatment plan follow-up efforts are minimal or nonexistent because the schedule is already full.
• Doctors tend to recommend treatment only when it is urgent because it takes time to explain to patients who are not in pain why they could benefit from treatment.
• New patient phone calls go unanswered, or the caller is made to feel less than welcome.
• A lack of customer service persists because there are plenty of patients to fill the vacancies left by unsatisfied patients.
• The practice’s online presence is neglected or has red flags that scare away referred patients.

Whatever the cause, here are possible solutions to capacity bottlenecks:

• Space
  • Add operatories.
  • Employ strategies for multiple providers to more efficiently share operatories.
• Equipment and Materials
  • Invest in equipment or supplies that reduce procedure times or increase clinical reliability.
  • This investment can easily pay for itself.
• Workflow and Room Turnover
  • The minutes between patients are capacity. Room turnover, instrument processing, and operatory setup are where a schedule quietly loses a column.
  • Look at the handoffs — hygiene to doctor, doctor to front desk, treatment plan to scheduling. A handoff that waits is a room that waits.
  • Have the next patient’s chart, imaging, and materials staged before the room opens up rather than after.
• Speed and Efficiency
  • Dentists work comfortably at different speeds due to differences in talent, experience, training, protocols, social inclinations, and opinions on what level of quality is acceptable.
  • Doctors should evaluate themselves for opportunities to improve. A small improvement in speed and efficiency can make a big difference over the course of a year.
• Staff
  • Staff wages, training, and other costs add up, but investing in a productive team member is typically profitable.
  • You do not want to miss out on six figures of dentistry due to the lack of a five-figure team member.
  • Before adding one, run the arithmetic for your own practice: weigh the wage and benefits against the additional production the extra capacity would allow, and then against what you actually collect on it.
• Schedule Hours
  • If the above factors are optimized and the schedule is still full, consider adding hours.
  • Practices invest in equipment, rent, IT, compliance, utilities, and other fixed costs for use 168 hours per week but often only schedule patients 32 hours per week.
  • That investment sits idle for the remaining 136 hours of the week.
  • If the practice produces roughly $1,000 per hour, adding one hour to the weekly schedule works out to about $50,000 of additional annual production. That is production, not cash — what reaches the bank is that figure net of write-offs and your collection rate, so run it against your own numbers.
• Associate
  • If you don’t want to work all those extra hours yourself, consider hiring an associate to handle the excess patient load.

Every practice faces at least one bottleneck that limits production and practice success. For some practices, simply identifying bottlenecks and working on solutions is the “low-hanging fruit” opportunity that can lead to a leap in results.

No two practices are identical, and neither are the bottlenecks they face or the ideal solutions. The process requires thought, time, and communication with the team.

For practice owners who do not want to go it alone, companies like Proveer Practice Management are here to help.