It's a sad fact that virtually every dental office believes that they are out of storage space. Every week, our clinical trainers are in offices around the country helping them transform their performance and the nearly universal statement is made that the practice simply has nowhere to put anything!
Let me start at the end and then work backwards from there. I'd like to assure you that we always find a way to make room for the items necessary to create a thriving practice. Always.
Simultaneously, if you are designing or expanding your practice, I strongly suggest careful planning for the practice’s future growth and the need for future technologies to be carefully taken into account. In our experience, most offices have no real idea how to figure that out!
The Customer Care Center at Perfect Smiles Dentistry in Seekonk, MA includes cabinetry for bulk storage
Every dental office has certain requirements for storage. That seems pretty obvious. These areas can be divided into clinical dental supplies, administrative supplies, lab cases, and in most cases, a certain amount of holiday decorations. Straightforward math can be applied to the first three of those and appropriate planning can accommodate the last one.
What I'll discuss here are the needs for offices that have progressively increased their customer service offerings and have storage requirements that result from these extended business decisions.
We commonly find that there are three areas of practice service expansion that cause a need for increased or disproportionate storage needs. Those areas are merchandising, marketing (which generally is internal in nature), and patient comfort offerings. There is some overlap between these three areas, but for the sake of clarity, it's better to discuss them individually because where things might be staged or stored can be quite different for each.
Once you know that your office is to be designed with these features, it is fairly easy to plan in the extra storage for these amenities and to do so in a highly functional way. If this planning is not baked into your plan at the onset then, even when storage can be created, it may be in a sub-optimal location. And obviously the biggest challenge is when we want to make these service additions in an office that was never designed for this level of function. So, before I go any further let me make sure to show you some things that we've actually created exclusively for our customers in order to be able to remediate this problem in existing offices.
Use vertical space to increase your dental office storage
We frequently visit offices that are completely out of storage space, yet have nine or 10 foot tall ceilings. Doctors pay for a lot of air that they can't use, and many times, just by adding hydraulic pulldown shelving, we're able to double or sometimes even triple the amount of storage capacity available.
Dental sedation patients require optimum comfort
By better understanding the math of storage, you'll be able to make these calculations on your own, hopefully when planning your new or expanded office rather than trying to fix a place that is completed without this capacity. For many offices it's simply a question of having a realistic approach to the needed volume of storage. Let me give you an example.
We do a great deal of sedation at my two dental practices. Sedation patients tend to get cold during their visit. There's nothing like a cozy blanket, and even better, a chair with built in heat and massage (Did you know that we were the first company to make these a built-in feature?) to make this a great experience for the patient. But, if we're going to do this, we'd rather not be in the blanket-washing business, and we'd love to send them home with a nice cozy reminder of the transformation of their smile that just occurred. So if our practice does 40 sedations a month, the volume needed for storage is significant. In addition, there is an ordering volume for these products (in this case, 250) and so that must be planned in somewhere. Maybe the bulk isn't stored within the office. Personally, if I were in Manhattan, the last thing I want to do is pay for Park Avenue real estate to store blankets!
Where do you store the dental merchandise?
Another example of increase storage needs arises in the merchandising area of practice. There are some fantastic doctor-only mouth rinse products that we feel many patients will greatly benefit from. If we see 40 patients a day in hygiene, and one of these rinses is pertinent to half of those patients, the daily volume is large. One of our dental office clients in a dense urban area has found that it is more economical to have products shipped from a warehouse to the home rather than the cost and logistics of dealing with resupplying each of their offices on a weekly basis! I know this sounds crazy, but you can understand that at a certain volume, merchandising becomes more of a headache then an opportunity if you're not careful. You need a plan, and you need space.
Use mobile carts to avoid duplication of dental technology
Another opportunity to create additional space is by mobilizing technology to eliminate the need for duplication of specialized technology in multiple operatories. Two decades ago, when I saw this trend happening, my company created mobile units called RapidCarts, and designed optimized space for their deployment within our dental office designs. Because these alcoves, or bays, are always stationed close to the main treatment corridors, it became an ideal location to add additional capacity for certain amounts of bulk storage as well. Items that might be needed on a grab-and-go basis. This is the kind of thinking that's important as you contemplate your new or improved facility.
A conveniently located mobile cart bay allows for easy deployment of technology within the dental office.
As you consider the opportunities for optimizing storage in your dental office, take a look at some of our client design work for inspiration. We would be happy to arrange for a tour of a client's dental office or to speak with you about any design or productivity concern that you have. We'd be happy to be of service.
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