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Welcome to Week Two of our Summer School series! In Week One we looked at ways to ensure your practitioner availability is accurate. This week, we’re exploring why that’s important and how it will help your practice!
As a dental practice, it’s vital to monitor how effectively you’re booking appointments, so you can quickly identify any issues and white space. Armed with this information, you can decide how to improve your hourly rate and overall revenue, so it’s essential that the data you’re working with is accurate.
Understanding Your White Space
The first step in keeping your calendar full is to understand how you are currently managing your availability and to identify underutilised time.
That’s where the practitioner utilisation dashboard comes in. This vital tool, accessed via the dropdown in the top-left corner of the main Dentally dashboard, displays how much of each practitioner’s working day is occupied with patient appointments. This comprehensive overview enables you to quickly identify underutilised diary space– so you can decide which proactive measures you need to take to optimise your time.
Regularly monitoring the practitioner utilisation dashboard with your team will empower you to make data-driven decisions to increase your revenue. This is why it’s essential to ensure practitioner availability is accurate, to avoid skewed data in your reporting.
Filling Your White Space
So you’ve got an idea of your utilised time, and you’ve identified underutilised white space that you want to fill. What’s next?
There are a few actions your team can work through on a daily or weekly basis, to follow up with patients and get appointments booked in quickly.
- A short notice waiting list – a list of patients who are happy to be contacted at short notice (within 48 hours of their booked appointment) about last-minute availability
- The ‘Unbooked Treatment’ report - an easy way to locate patients that need contacting because they have unfinished treatments.
- The ‘Lapsed Patients’ report - a report that identifies all patients that have not had an appointment since a specified date.
- The ‘Recalls’ report – use the filters to identify patients who are overdue and unbooked, and easily send manual recall communications.
💡 Top tip: Ensure your reception team are prioritising the most urgent white space today and tomorrow, to reduce the amount of time and money lost in empty surgery time.
Incorporating these handy tools into your team’s workflow will help you to keep on top of your white space – if you have a gap in your diary, simply pull up one of the lists and start contacting patients!
With your calendar availability accurate and the tools in place to keep it full, you can ensure that you maximise your hourly rate and overall revenue.
Thank you for joining us for Week Two of our Summer School series. Keep an eye out for next week’s blog, where we’ll be exploring the imaging experience! You can also reach out to our dedicated Elevate consultants to learn more about getting the most out of Dentally.
