How Many Patients Do I Need? with Angela Heathman - a podcast by ACT Dental

How Many Patients Do I Need? Episode #395 with Angela Heathman
To be a profitable practice, you need to have the right number of patients. But how do you know how many are too much, and how many are too few? In today’s episode, Kirk Behrendt brings on Angela Heathman, Lead Practice Coach at ACT, to discuss how many patients a practice should have. Kirk and Heather talk about when to add a new doctor, the dangers of exhaustion, tips on how to get the most out of the patients you have, and much more. To answer the question “How many patients do I need?” listen to Episode 395 of the Best Practices Show! 
Main Takeaways: 
More patients doesn’t mean better. 
Determine what you want out of your practice—how much do you want to be working? 
For one doctor working four days a week, 1200-1500 patients is the capacity.  
Capacity for hygienists is around 750 patients. 
A doctor’s schedule should be full 95% of the time, and a hygienist’s 92% of the time. 
You can expect to lose 15% of clients due to natural causes—figure out how many you need to add to offset that. 
Quotes: 
“If you are a single practice and had 3100 patients, I would expect that you would be exhausted. I would expect that you would be exhausted or that your patients weren’t really getting probably the standard of care that you really wanted them to, because you probably just don’t have the capacity in your office to take care of that many folks. The simple answer is usually about 1200-1500 for one doctor working four days a week.” (03:50—04:20)“Typically, that office that has 1200-1500 patients has two full-time hygienists then, working four days a week. So, the number that we think about for hygienists is usually around 750. Again, longer story is that it could be anywhere between 750-1000, but typically the offices that we’re coaching are spending 60 minutes with their patients, they’re doing perio, which means they’re needing time for scaling and root planning, and also three and four-month re-care appointment, so that’s why that number is more around 750 instead of 1000.” (05:23—06:00) 
“You can be anything that you want to be, but figuring out how to make that work for your own life is what’s most important, and a lot of times you don’t have to do that, and sometimes we get kind of caught up, like you said, in the ‘more, more, more,’ but you can have a very good life and not have to do that if you don’t want to, so figuring that out first is important.” (07:02—07:24) 
“If you’re feeling like ‘Oh, we need to add more hygiene hours, we need to add another hygiene day,’ one of the things you’ll want to look at is your capacity; like how full is your schedule already? Because if you’re measuring that and every day you have two hours of open time, then I would argue that you don’t need another hygienist—at least not right now—first you need to fix that problem of having all the open time.” (08:18—08:48) 
“I always want to look at [capacity]in terms of percentages. So, for a hygienist we want their schedule to be full about 92% of the time, and for a doctor, 95% of the time. And so, what that shakes out to in the matter of a week is only about two cancellations—so only having about two hours open to really hit that benchmark.” (10:21—10:50) 
“One of the things we coach our teams to do is something called an RFR. I would like to give credit to whoever started that, but I don’t even know who it was, but RFR stands for Reason For Return. So, making sure it’s clearly documented in your clinical notes the importance of why that patient needs to come next time. So, if next time you’re going to be taking a PA to check a tooth, or a pano, or looking at an implant, or something like that, putting a little something additional in that clinical note so that whoever is fielding that cancellation call can have something very tangible to refer back to. Like, ‘Oh, you...

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