Yes, I know, it’s the most beat up topic of them all. “Why can’t my days be more productive?” Or, “Why are some days slammed full and others left with empty slots?”
Some people have more schedule issues than others but ultimately every result that comes through your practice passes by way of your schedule.
Whether it is new patients being placed at a time you can’t give them attentive discussion and diagnosis or it’s that you are so busy with so many patients that you feel like you are running around on roller skates.
The reality is no schedule ‘template’ is ever going to be perfect because the schedule changes. The practice (along with the people inside) is dynamic, not static. Therefore, the only way to develop consistency with it is by staying ahead of its movement and making adjustments based on your goals.
While I can promise you that every major jump in sustainable production does require a higher value approach to your time and your time boils down to the schedule, the schedule does not and should not have direct implications on your collections.
If you are reading this and have studied me for any length of time, you should fully grasp my concept of separation between schedule production and collections. If you are still dependent on your schedule for collections because they are anchored exclusively to your production then that’s a different problem and a sad situation to be at the mercy of.
You want your collections to be attached to creation not production. In other words, diagnosis, pre-scheduled, and pre-paid treatment so that you do not run into the vicious cycle of producing to collect.
Obviously, within reason, there is often going to be some money possibly still owed and yet to be paid depending on the size of and comprehensiveness of the case. Yet and still, production must be separated from collections and vice versa; otherwise you will forever be at the mercy of your schedule.
All that to say, the schedule does dictate the flow of your practice. Regardless of whether you are doing a few thousand a day or tens or twenties of thousands of dollars per day – it is about how to create the dentistry to fill the schedule. However, that only happens by having guidelines and parameters around filling the schedule in the first place.
Because the tactical dynamics for every practice are often different between doctors’ preferences and practice models, I will stay big picture here.
There are obvious things like… produce in the morning, structure anchor appointments, don’t fill unproductive appointments in the primary column, don’t chop apart visits so that you end up with small procedures, and limit your longer available compartments of time for high-dollar, comprehensive work.
Often I see busy practices make the mistake of not being able to turn treatment plans over or not being able to get patients with large production opportunities started quickly or they run out of spots for new patients.
Today, and for the next several weeks, we are talking about creating CONSISTENT success. So that it’s not a good month, a bad month, a good week, a bad week, a good day, a bad day.
Yes, we want great big victories, record setting numbers, and ‘best ever daily’ production and collections; but more than anything what we all want to see is no down days. We want some balance that naturally and automatically puts you ABOVE your goal simply by DAILY AVERAGE that you are able to keep consistent throughout your months.
This requires three major focus points and principles to be followed…
1st – There is nothing more important than the schedule of the future, tomorrow morning, this afternoon, the next few days, next week, for some people a month from now.
There are always exceptions, no question about it, but as a general rule, the most successful practices (who are consistently the most profitable), have their schedules dialed in weeks into the future so they have a long runway to course correct and to maximize day by day because there is demand built out.
There are practices that are marketing driven and doing very big cases with a sophisticated patient experience and selling process that might be more erratic with the schedule in terms of stability but more dynamic in opportunity and accelerating patients through treatment.
That said, the point of this is who owns the schedule and what are they doing about it. Your focus on the schedule should be all the way into the future as far as there are patients in your schedule. You are diagnosing today in order to fill the next available slot no matter how far out it is. From that moment backwards, every single day must be held accountable to your decided upon schedule guidelines and goals.
How many days are scheduled to reach your goal that have not yet happened? That is the question. If they are not, what is available to fill up, adjust, move around ANY given day in order to bring it to the goal and create the consistency we are talking about.
Which leads me to the second point.
2nd – If a day has not yet happened then it can be controlled. I see it all the time that there are schedule issues that practices keep living through when in fact there is no need. Just because the schedule is screwed up a week from now or just because there are holes in three days or whatever the case may be – it doesn’t have to stay that way.
The best practices develop and adopt the philosophy that we will maximize every day and every patient opportunity. If a day has not expired yet, if it is not over, then there is still time to do something about it.
This is my mantra that you can’t get any day back. You must make the most of “today” and that is why points 1 and 2 are so critical. Take responsibility for the future and have foresight on everything that has not yet happened. That includes taking ownership of TODAY; literally and figuratively.
Now, this must be one single person who is ultimately responsible to make sure every day is as perfect as possible – whatever that means to you – but no one is off the hook for the actual schedule; both the dynamic flow and the opportunity creation of it.
Everyone owns the consistency and the accountability of the schedule dynamics and ultimately the outcomes.
This leads me to the third point.
3rd – You must have ‘some’ guidelines. This is where every practice is different. They have different types of new patient visits and exams, some consults, some comprehensive, some work ups and records, some presentations. Sometimes there are same day crowns or same day procedures, some times there is hygiene on day one for a new patient or there isn’t.
The bottom line is the “perfect day” might be different based on the day of the week or the doctor dynamics in the day. It is important that you have your own flow and outline – not an exact template that boxes you into something that is not practical or realistic but something that is grounded in principles and sets you up for success without limiting you from achieving the first two points that I have talked about.
The one thing I can promise you about the schedule is that very few days will ever be perfect but any day holds the possibility for you to come out ahead with even just one single patient victory.
In order to prevent anxiety and stress, there are secrets of scheduling that allow you to have demand built up and for you to be in control of it without collections being link to it.
This has more to do with the opportunity that is available in the schedule than it does the actual production dollars. Of course, the more you are dependent on insurance the more your schedule of the future must be strictly disciplined in order to not have days you have to play catch up on.
Lastly, when it comes to consistent schedule success, know that with every evolution of growth, change in clinical scope, whether specialty practice focusing primary on one type of patient care or a general practice focusing on many things, you will always find the need to revisit your schedule frequently and to assess how close to “state of ideal” you are achieving. The more often the schedule is paid attention to and constructively talked about, the more consistent you will become.
The most important part of scheduling is to embrace the fact that nothing just happens; only the things that you let happen or that you made happen.
Success with the schedule requires a full court press with everyone keeping the most important objective in mind: winning the day by beating your daily goals and having a schedule that is conducive towards creation because you can’t get the day back.
Now, you have a lot to talk about and go to work on with your consistent success through Effective Scheduling. Next week, we’ll dive into how to fill it up and crush your daily goals to achieve record months with a surplus demand of dentistry.
Your schedule will be busting at the seams with cases you want to be doing more of and you’ll build the future schedule like never before.
