Dental production per dentist

How much dentistry can a general dentist do in an hour? It depends on a number of factors including staffing and delegation of duties. A dentist with two or three hygienists and two or three registered dental assistants to whom all legally delegated duties are delegated can do a lot more dentistry than a dentist working alone doing his own cleanings. Proveer Practice Management has observed an order of magnitude difference in production per dentist across dental practices in West Michigan.

Production in a dental or medical practice

While there are many ways to think about production in a dental or medical practice, one way I find insightful involves the following loose decomposition:

Production = Number of Patients Examined X Production Per Exam

where the latter factor includes production associated with the exam itself and any treatment that follows from the exam.

Different dental practices serve different market segments and accordingly optimize their strategy toward the above factors differently.  Think spa dentist vs. medicaid dentist or single dentist practice vs. group practice or busy practice vs. not-so-busy practice.

In future posts, I will contrast approaches of one Grand Rapids, Michigan dentist office client of Proveer Practice Management, which provides dental practice management services in Michigan, with one hypothetical dentist in Grand Rapids and another hypothetical dentist office in Grand Rapids, Michigan.