One day your production is great, and you go home feeling like you own the world. The next day your production is terrible, and you go home dragging your feet. Why can’t every day feel great? You lie sleepless at night worrying about your time management, bills to be paid and which seat you will be riding on the office roller coaster tomorrow.
There are some simple rules to follow to achieve a better balance to your days:
- Ensure that your admin team is using a plan to fill your days and not just putting patients in wherever there is an open space. Block out spots for appointments that will result in higher production (endos, major restorative of any kind and surgeries). When planning your day add in the appropriate number of spots for emergencies, new patient exams, no charge appointments and case presentation time. To do this map out your perfect week for your current practice and then add it into your scheduler. See how your team makes out building the week that you have created and then if it works recreate it again or make the necessary changes.
- Don’t overfill your pre-blocks with only high value production. This may seem counter intuitive, you want to ensure that you have spaces available for emergencies and new patient exams as well. A lack of emergency spots or new patient spots is often seen as a lack of customer service to the patients who need them.
- Always set aside enough time to properly present treatment, your treatment acceptance rates will benefit if the patient feels that you have explained the treatment thoroughly without running off before all of their questions are answered. Also, if you aren’t taking time to present treatment and are only filling your day with high value production you aren’t seeing patients to present new plans to. An extra ten minutes with a patient can often be the difference between choosing Option A and Option C in a treatment plan.
- It is helpful for your Treatment Coordinator to have a daily production goal. Everyone likes accountability and wants to know where they are going. Most software programs will allow you to attach the dollar value from the treatment to the appointment and in turn will allow your Treatment Coordinator to ensure that you have a schedule with balanced production. When setting a goal take your annual net production and divide by twelve, that will be your average production for the month and then add your growth goal percentage. You will then divide by the number of workdays in the month to give your Treatment Coordinator a daily production goal. For example, your net production is $1.1M per year and you want to increase to net $1.2M per year. Your goal is now $100K per month and over 16 workdays of the month is $6250 per workday.
- Knowing the break -even point in your practice each month is important for you to know how to set your goals. Of course, you always want to do better than break-even but if you take some time off or you have some lower production days you may need to know this figure. An easy way to complete this calculation is to take your year-end report from your accountant and divide your expense total by twelve to get your monthly break-even total. This would be the least amount that you would have to produce to not lose any money in the month.
These concepts may seem very basic yet there are many offices that still have many reasons that they don’t apply them to their days. If you have questions about any of these concepts or would like me to explain them to you in more detail, please contact me at your convenience.
