Division of Duties in a Dental Practice, Part 2: The Scheduling Coordinator by Sandy Pardue

Time is every practice’s most valuable asset and one of the most important systems in the practice is scheduling. The success of every dental practice starts with the schedule. It can create stress, or it can create great success.
Practice owners would like to avoid roller-coaster production numbers, broken appointments, poor patient retention, and growing unscheduled treatment lists, yet they often fail to appoint someone to remedy these issues.
Dental teams tend to be robotic when it comes to their schedule, putting patients on it without a plan and even without financial arrangements. When the team starts the day and learns there are holes in the schedule, it leads to the doctor having nonproductive procedures. As patients cancel and those slots are not refilled, production goals are not met.
There will always be chaos and unpredictability when everyone on the team is overscheduling and no one person has been appointed to be the scheduling coordinator. Most practices have never set up security levels in their software, so anyone on the team can undermine the efforts of the scheduler and call patients to come early—or even cancel them as they see fit.
Even after appointing a scheduling coordinator, the practice may still struggle if that person still wears other hats and is unable to focus on actions that align with the position, putting the schedule on the back burner when it should be the most important front-office function. Nothing else matters if the schedule is not full and productive.