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Our studies have shown that, even in successful practices, significant time and energy are spent every day on unproductive effort, which delivers no benefit to the patient and no profit to the practice. We have found that careful planning and organization can free up this time and energy, which you can then use to increase your income, spend more time with your family, or could you imagine, play more. Offices frequently experience an immediate 30% increase in productivity once the new workflow is complete. Improvements continue well beyond this level as the operator becomes more adept at the system capabilities, often 2, 3, or even 4 times their existing level of productivity.

here are many metrics for office productivity but the two that we would consider most useful are production per patient chair and production per provider hour.

Production per treatment chair (sometimes referenced as production per op) is a useful measure of facility utilization. It is based upon a more industrial measurement that is used by factory managers. It is a very helpful way to look at productivity when facility costs are extremely high as, for example, in high rent locations like Manhattan or San Francisco.

What will increase the apparent production score is primarily hours of operation. Want a big number? Be open seven days a week. Steel mills want to measure this way because you don’t want to ever shut the blast furnaces down! For most dental practices this is simply not the primary problem. Staffing is.

Which leads us to our second method of measurement: Production per Hour, or “PPH”. To determine PPH, simply divide the monthly production of a provider by the number of hours they spent in treatment. This can be done by individual doctors – a helpful metric when bringing on new staff – or aggregated for teams. (Doctors/associates only - keep a separate measurement for Hygiene teams.) We are sad to say that the average PPH of doctors in the US is currently not much above $400. The result of this is lower doctor incomes, longer wait-times for patients, inadequate access to care and a lot of unnecessary waste.

Increasing the PPH of our clients is one of our primary goals. From clinical support to chairside, our systems are engineered to allow you do more dentistry in less time (and with less stress!). PPH numbers of 3 and even 4 times the national average are common for our clients.

Why are dental assistants burning out?