When I worked in my practice, I was very protective of the schedule. I felt personally responsible for making sure we saw patients on time, met our production goals and didn’t run late into lunch or after hours. I know that I shouldn’t own all that responsibility and I realize now that it is just part of my OCD personality. My OCD personality did kick in when it came to organizing the schedule and the Dentrix appointment book allowed me to put in parameters to organize all the details.
Creating our ideal day as a team helped everyone feel they were part of the solution and when things didn’t work out it didn’t all fall on my shoulders. Through trial and error our team worked through different scenarios to make sure the day flowed nicely, and our team felt taken care of. The Dentrix Perfect Day Scheduling definitely saved the day!
Perfect Day Scheduling helps give your team a guideline to follow and creates an environment where there is little room for error. If you give your team an outline of where to schedule certain types of appointments, they will spend less time analyzing the schedule and asking questions. They will feel confident in their decision about where to schedule patients knowing that it fits within the guidelines of the practice’s ideal day. It’s a win-win!
My recommendation when setting up your ideal day is to go a little old school and print out blank schedules and then grab some colored markers to sketch it out on paper. Choose a color for new patients, a color for SRP, a color for high production blocks (crowns, bridge, etc), a color for medium production blocks (fillings) and then a color for no production (crown seats, delivery, etc). This way when the team is scanning the appointment book they will learn what the color is and it will be faster to scan for a specific type of appointment. Also, when you have Perfect Day Scheduling enabled in your appointment book you can use the Find New Appointment Time feature to search for a specific block.
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When sketching out your perfect day, look horizontally across your appointment book and map out your ideal day so your doctor is not scheduled to perform a new patient exam at the same time as a quadrant of resin composites. Make sure you are using perfect day scheduling to serve as a reminder to not triple book your doctor. I always start with blocks for new patients. Figure out what your goal for new patients is and make sure you have set aside enough to meet this goal. Then calculate how many SRP blocks you will need to take care of your new patients who will need perio therapy.
- NOTE: Just a reminder that 49.2% of adults have some form of periodontal disease so keep this in mind when calculating how many blocks you will need for patients who are diagnosed with periodontal disease.
- NOTE: If you are sending out impressions to a lab then you will need a delivery for every impression you take.
Now that you have completed your annual planning session and you are bringing your goals for next year into action these helpful tips on creating your ideal day will be very helpful. First, set your days and hours accurately with tips from our last blog post and then start mapping out your Perfect Day Scheduling.
