Dental Op Turnover: How to Bust the Bottleneck

How long does it take your clinical staff to turn over a room? Have you ever wondered? When is the last time you took a video of the room turnover process? Never? It might surprise you but flipping an operatory once a patient is dismissed is the second of the BIG 3 bottlenecks in any dental practice.

When dentists ask me about Reboot Practice Productivity Training, I’m likely to respond by asking them what they know about lean manufacturing. You’re not alone if you don’t know much about lean. But for those who do, they can’t figure out what lean has to do with dentistry. Simply put, lean is a set of principles that improve the way we work by eliminating waste. You will have to check out my blog on 8 wastes. Anytime we can improve a process by always adding value to the finished product, you are practicing lean.

Now, let’s get back to the title of this blog. Room turnover is a bottleneck. How complicated can it be to transform your operatory from dirty to clean? The better question is how complicated do you make it? Remember my function blog? Think about it, the less time you spend performing mundane tasks that patients are not willing to pay for - like room turnover - the more time you give yourself to do the things that do add value, like dentistry.

Whether you want to believe it or not, room turnover is a system. It’s not a question of speed - how much faster can you get your assistants and hygienists to flail around the op spraying and wiping at random - but rather, it’s a problem of efficiency. Don’t hire more people, or pump them full of caffeine to get the job done faster; improve the process. How do you start? First, you have to look at it in action, because you can’t fix a process if you’ve never really watched anyone perform it.

Turning over an operatory is only one process of operating procedures in the clinical department of a dental practice. If every step in this process costs you $1.00, wouldn’t you want to reduce the number of steps if you could achieve the same result? Of course, you would.

Back to lean for a quick moment, because I want to introduce you to the concept of a Rate Limiting Factor. You may already be familiar with this idea - that most processes have a weak link that restricts how long the whole thing takes - but it’s important to understand that this concept affects almost EVERYTHING we do! So what’s the rate limiting factor in room turn-around? Believe it or not, it’s the time the disinfectant takes to work - about 4 minutes. Would you like to guess how long it takes to turn around an op in our practices? Yup - 4 minutes. Check it out the video below (we sped it up, but there's a clock to keep tabs)! We set up our ops for quick turn through smart design and equipment choices, and then train the staff (read - standardize) on how to get the job done in the most efficient manner possible. If you dropped your turn-around time to 4 minutes for every appointment in every room, how much time could you save on your schedule?

By the way - there is a new product on the market with a 3-minute broad spectrum kill called BioSURF. According to Gordon Christensen, BioSURF surface disinfectant outperforms all current competitors. The video turn-over is actually 3:09. We're almost there!

Lean thinking is part of our culture at Design Ergonomics. Reboot Training allows us to implement lean principles into dental practices across North America. We are experts in continuous improvement. 

If you’re not sure if your clinical department is working efficiently, shoot me an email. I’d be happy to perform an efficiency assessment at no cost.

Well, it’s Christmas. From my family to yours, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you a very, Merry Holiday!