The Essentials of Dental Scheduling

Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:00
Welcome to Dental All-Stars. I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Star Dental Academy. And with me is Larry Gazzardo, our head instructor at All-Star Dental Academy. And we’re talking about the essentials of dental scheduling. Please welcome Larry Gazzardo. Hey, you know what? There’s nothing more important in a dental office than a well-run schedule. You love scheduling. You only have to be in dentistry about, I don’t know, five minutes before you realize that we live and die.

00:29
by our schedule. So there are some basic fundamentals that we have to put in place. They’re not that difficult, if I may. First of all, you’ve gotta know how long it takes. Before you go, I’m gonna give you some topics I want you to discuss, and you go at it. You ready? I’m gonna tell you what you’re gonna cover. So this is an overview, because we talk a lot about this in our course, and you can learn more about that at alls our online training program. We’re…

00:59
Scheduling is one of our foundational courses. So with scheduling, the big ones, I’m gonna throw it out here, pre-blocking or block scheduling. Yeah, okay. So give some there, maybe you can make a note here. Daily production goal, we’ll talk about that. Emergencies, broken appointments, re-evaluations, just to highlight some of the bigger modules. So maybe you can be able to get to all of them, but you can kind of talk about that.

01:27
And there’s some other areas as well that you talk about in the program. And I just wanna be, again, we’re talking about the essentials, but to make sure we notate them, the flexibility in the schedule, early late patients, confirmations, right? So those is a lot of areas in scheduling. So Larry, tell me, and you can always come back to me. I mean, I gave you a lot of them, but tell me about the essentials of scheduling, of dental scheduling, and see if you can.

01:57
for the listeners address some of these issues, especially block scheduling, broken appointments, I dare I say that, and others, and why that’s important and what you need to know about the dental scheduling. Yeah, yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of legs and a lot of moving parts to a well-run schedule, and the more complete your care that you’re delivering in your office, the more essential all the smaller nuances become, because it’s very, very important. Any dentist who’s ever needed to be in two places at one time.

02:27
you know, or I’m trying to do a prep and somebody has to do a hygiene check, it knows what I’m talking about. And of course, all of this is disruptive, not only to you, but it’s disturbing for patients. And it affects their experience, which we’ve been talking about today as well. And it affects their ability to refer to your office, because they, along with flawless performance in your office, they want a seamless experience. That’s right.

02:55
No stopping and restarting and all of that. So most important thing is, number one, we have to know the time units. We need to know how long does it take to get every single procedure done in your office? And sometimes you gotta get a stopwatch out. And I like clients to time their procedures over maybe a two or three week period, because what we’re looking for is a standard average time unit that should take into consideration.

03:22
if we have to stop and go get something else, or somebody doesn’t get numb, or maybe chats a little bit too much, you know what I mean? Because we don’t want to keep altering the schedule for these reasons. And then if you get a super chatty Cathy, then we might have to put some extra time on the schedule. Or if you get an unusual person who just doesn’t get numb, you know, for whatever reason, then we could put some extra time on the schedule. But the time units that you choose should fit like 99% of your patients.

03:52
should fit into that time unit. Now with block scheduling, one of the things that you talk about in the program, because block scheduling, pre-blocking, I like it, I don’t like it, it is a fundamental time management process that is not only dentistry that does this. No, actually we learned it from other businesses. Right. Other industries. It’s just mathematics. I mean, gosh, there’s this great industrialist that we learned in high school, whatever,

04:21
reinvented scheduling and production and so on. So you essentially have like procedures together, you’re batching tasks, it’s just more efficient. So when you say block scheduling doesn’t work, it always does, but it’s gotta work to two things, right? Production and be more effective and also to what you enjoy as well. The schedule dictates your priorities. And there are some dentists that want more time.

04:50
that like it a certain way, that are fresher in the morning or the afternoon, and you’ll block that way, we’ll make recommendations. But we also know in terms of productivity, there is certainly some information that has been proven over time. Block scheduling works in conjunction with your time units. They work together. What we teach is a simple blocking method. We also teach all different other ones, but the one that we recommend.

05:16
most frequently is the method that provides the office with the most amount of flexibility. Because that’s what everybody always tells us they want, is they want flexibility, and next they want consistency with achieving their goals. They don’t like a lot of up and down, and I don’t blame them for that. And so what we do teach is that you divide your procedures into two simple categories, primary care and secondary care, and then you reserve a block of time every day.

05:46
to get your primary care done, and then we reserve a block of time to get your secondary care done. So you’re not mixing the two procedures together. So basically that’s what we teach about pre-blocking and all that. There are other methods and we talk about that, but the one that gives the most flexibility and the most consistency with achieving goals is pre-blocking. Right.

06:14
And you spend like an hour. You spend an hour on that. Yeah. Well, and then you have to know how long it takes to get your procedures done. And then you have to know who does what during your procedure. Because to get your schedule to work, you’ve got to adequately utilize or efficiently utilize your staff. That makes sense. More than likely, your dental assistant or FDAS are becoming popular. If you don’t utilize them correctly, you’ve made a poor investment.

06:44
in hiring those team members, but they’ll help you become more productive. So got to know the time units and we’ve got to know who does what during the procedure. When you start to discover who does what during the procedure, you may start to learn, well, this person doesn’t know how to do that. You know, so that’s why training is always so important in a dental office because these people can be trained to scan, to upload, you know, whatever it is, pack cord, you know.

07:14
You’re an amalgam or I’m sorry, carbon amalgam and maybe cure a composite, whatever it is that their state allows there to do. But that’s why you gotta have that kind of training and all that. So I threw a bunch of stuff that you cover in the scheduling course at All-Stradental Academy. Tell me, so block scheduling is a key one essential. What else would you pick from that list? Give me two more essentials. It all fits into goals, okay? Because in a dental practice, we have to generate a certain amount of

07:44
revenue over the course of the year. And we’re not like retailers. You know, retailers know I don’t do anything all of July and August and maybe even a little bit of September because I know come October, November and December, whatever I didn’t do then, I’ll make up for it. We don’t have the ability to do that. Every day we don’t do something, we’ve lost the opportunity to be able to do it again. So we have to have goals because then we want to

08:12
chunk it up. Then we teach again how to do this, but how to come up with a daily goal. We don’t come up with a monthly goal because dentists don’t all work the same number of days every single month, but they do work every day they work. They should expect to generate a certain amount of revenue. How pre-blocking helps you is because the way we do primary care and secondary care, we know that you can get 80% of your productivity done in your primary care session.

08:41
When that’s finished, you’re gonna have 80% of your goal done. And so now you know whatever’s left over. In half a day. Yeah, well, whatever’s left over for secondary care, I’m gonna either hit my goal or I’m gonna go over it. But it teaches the staff not only where to schedule things, but it teaches them how to schedule it because they know if I wanna get that 80% in my primary care, I can’t give things away until I’ve got my primary care schedule.

09:11
Right. And so I see how we’re building on it. So we have block scheduling as a technique. And then from there, you have a goal to be able to utilize the tactic or the skill to do that. You have to have a goal. And that’s the idea of Delhi production goal and so on. That makes sense. Well, we need that in a dental practice because we don’t have the ability, say, if we miss something today, we don’t have the ability to work two more hours. You’re not gonna be able to make it up. It’d be very difficult to make it up.

09:41
And certainly you’re not gonna make it, as time goes by, it gets more and more infeasible to impossible to make up what you lost. And so you have to think about like, obviously, for the year, how much time I’ve been taking off, how many times do I plan to work, and then estimate how that’s gonna happen in terms of what you’re able to produce. But it is like a factory, because a factory has a certain level that they can produce every day. And if you lose that production, you’re not gonna be able to turn on the machines. I mean, this is finite.

10:11
how many days the machines are operating, how many are producing, you’re not making that up. No, no, because when Macy’s wants to sell more, they just open up on Thanksgiving Day. Right, they have inventory and they just say, I’ll sell it all here. You can’t, you’re not gonna work more hours. They’ll open up more hours. And I’m like, we could do that, but would it be feasible? That would be terrible. What would that do to your quality of life if you had to come in on evenings and Saturdays and all that?

10:36
So if you move along with the logical progression of having a good schedule, people have to show up. And so that means you can’t have broken and changed appointments. So the key here is you can teach people to keep their appointments and not even consider calling you to change or worse, that they’re not gonna show up. And you do that by putting a system in place that teaches them and doesn’t make them seem as if though they’re being.

11:06
punished because if they feel like they’re being punished, they will retaliate. We know this and, and they will not be compliant in the future. And so we teach them. And so you actually don’t get broken and changed appointments because people know I’m not going to do that. And it’s a process and people can learn. We use a lot of examples, you know, in our courses of how we know that this is true. But that’s why again, there has to be time as a part of your scheduling for training.

11:35
because there’s got to be time in your schedule for meetings. I like what you said earlier, if we don’t have time to do it right, when are we going to have time to do it over? So people will say, I don’t have time to train. And I’m like, well, but you’ve got time to skip dinner, you know what I mean, with your kids, so that you could do something that didn’t need to be done because scheduling also affects your emergencies and how you handle them. If that’s not done correctly.

12:02
then you are working through lunch, which is not ever a popular option for your team. Or you’re making somebody work past closing hours and they’ve got a kid sitting on the curb or a dog that’s gotta be walked or something like that, or a wife who’s just, the roast is burning in the oven kind of thing. And so how you handle emergencies can make or break your schedule as well, but it’s a communication process. There we build on the great call process. We still use that.

12:32
the formula from there to work with our emergencies, because most of them probably don’t need to be scheduled on the same day that they call. But if you don’t use the process, the patient won’t think it was their idea. And if you think you’re gonna push them into a time, they probably won’t accept it. It’s better when they agree, like, I’m so glad I called you, and I’ll take that time that you’re gonna give me. But that’s what makes emergencies work.

12:59
If you’ve got a pre-blog time in your schedule, that’s one issue, but it’s eating up good productive time for you to do that, you know? And if you have to interrupt your schedule to see somebody that really was in an emergency, that creates a whole nother host of problems for everybody else in the office. So- That makes a lot of sense. How you handle broken appointments, how you handle emergencies, it’s all an adjunct to your scheduling.

13:28
Who needs to be trained in scheduling in the office? Who needs to understand these concepts? They’re gonna hate my answer. Okay. But you’re gonna understand this. Every single person who works in the office has to know how to do scheduling. They may not be the person who actually types the name in the computer and puts the name up on the screen, but they have to understand

13:58
how the schedule works, meaning the time units, who does what, primary care, secondary care. Because when they don’t understand how it works, if you have a conflict like this front and back in your office, it’s because you have two groups who don’t understand what the other group is doing. And so if the clinical staff doesn’t understand the technique of scheduling, they always think the people up front are like doing it to them. And it’s like they’re not.

14:27
They’re just following the technique. But if we follow the technique, everybody participates in how the schedule is happening. Meaning, we get out for lunch and we get out at the end of the day. And that’s what. That makes a lot of sense. We don’t feel like a dish rag and we have money to put in the bank. That’s right. And kind of building on, we talked about in the five P’s of the patient experience, which is another course that we teach in our online program, is…

14:54
Again, the scheduling is why everybody needs to know scheduling because we don’t want a hitch in flawless performance. We don’t want a hitch in that process. And conversely, we want we want a beautiful patient experience, an all star patient experience. And and it’s got to work for two people. It’s got to work for the patient where it’s flawless. And it’s got to be flawless for us. We have to enjoy it. They may love it.

15:23
they’re coming in at 8 p.m. at night, but we’re not. So scheduling is, even before scheduling, what do you want out of life? How do you wanna practice? How do you wanna work? What do you wanna make? How do your team wanna respond? Right, and we get all that through our schedule. That’s right. And you have to understand that when you make a change to the plan, and stick with the plan, start with what I want, work with a great coach like our coaches, or Leir Gazardo.

15:53
and get a plan that fulfills your life goals and stick with the plan. You know, boring, simple, stay with the program. You start getting too clever, you start messing up the machinery. Ooh, let’s change this. Let’s make an exception. Right, if there’s too many components, then people can’t follow it. Correct. Because there’s too many what ifs and if it’s Tuesday or if it’s after four and all this. No, we teach a very simple process, but that’s why I think

16:22
we get very compliant students at All-Star because they go, oh, that makes sense. I see how I can get out for lunch if I do that. I like what you’re saying, because it kind of, I’ve been known, and I say this because I work on this to myself, because I’ve been known to be non-compliant and change things, and then I keep getting reminded by the life that you gotta be compliant.

16:51
come back to what works. And if you look at those that are successful in multitude of things, it’s they stayed with, they found a process that works, modeling what other people are doing. We’ve been doing this for All-Star, we’ve been doing this for over 10 years, you’ve been doing it for 30 years. Yeah, yeah. That’s why we grabbed you from the floor, I remember from yesterday, the Florida Dental Association, a big lecture. And so.

17:19
tried and true and then you learned it. I remember you told the story about years ago when you’re a little spud consultant and you were learning from others. So it’s being passed on, but it’s sticking with it, what works and you’re talking about the all-star dentists, like they’re like, let me do what works and be compliant. And I’m just, I say compliant, like it’s a bad thing. It’s done for you. Why have to do unnecessary thinking?

17:49
Correct. Because if you follow the guidelines, you will get the results that you’re looking for. That I can almost assure you. You will get the results. And anytime you have a day where you go home feeling like a dishrag and there’s no money to put in the bank, I will almost guarantee you, you did not follow a guideline. And you did not follow productive scheduling. You did not follow the essentials of scheduling, something broke down. What we often say is look, if there’s a problem, look back at the system.

18:19
And then, and then you can all, it may, it’s usually a system problem. Sometimes it’s a people problem. Usually a system, 80-20, usually a system, sometimes a people. Well, it’s just a person who’s not following the system. That’s right, that’s right. Or not capable, either that they don’t want to, or they’re not capable. And then, if they’re, and then you always want a question to make sure what is your dentist listening, what is your intention, what do you do, what are you doing to not follow.

18:47
what’s being done. Well, the doctor also has not to cut you out, but the doctor has to understand how the schedule works too. Otherwise the team will tell you what you’re asking for isn’t possible, which I will assure you is not true. It is possible. I see it and you see it too. And you know, you have to be polite about it, but it…

19:10
As you said before, and I guess you want to hate to hear it, but everybody’s got to be trained on these skills. All Start Dental Academy is a skills-based online training program and coaching program. Everything we do, we have skill-based, and yes, there are certain role-based functions in training, but 80% most of it is skill-based, and everybody has to understand it. And again, it comes back to the patient experience. If you want a choreograph, an amazing routine, synchronized swimming.

19:39
or even race car drivers, they have to stop, the pit has to change the car quickly, everybody’s gotta be trained. You can’t, if the driver doesn’t know what they’re doing, he doesn’t know when to stop. So then it’s like, you know what, I don’t have to know, I’m just a producer, yeah? That you don’t know what the right hand, left hand is doing, everybody’s gotta be synced together and trained with respect to the schedule being part of the patient experience. Well, Larry Gazzardo.

20:05
Also known as the head instructor at All-Star Dental Academy. Also known as the schedule doctor. Also known as a dentist, but you’re not a dentist, but that’s pretty funny. Thank you so much for joining us. And for those that are interested in the scheduling that we teach, you can go to alls learn more about our online training program, learn about our coaching. We also have a free webinar that you can go to on the website or go to alls backslash webinar.

20:34
and I do some in the webinar, do some training on phone skills, on patient experience, on scheduling, and so on. So definitely take a look at that. And of course, follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, share it with your friends. And until next time, go out there and be an All-Star.