Ep. 31: Designing a Productive, Efficient Schedule that Works for You!
Outside of dentistry, there are very few business where scheduling plays such an enormous role in the business’s profitability, efficiency, growth, and general stress levels. How you run your schedule can truly mean the difference between success and failure. So in this episode, Jeff brings on special guest Chris Menkhaus to cover some key points of the scheduling methodology we teach here at MGE.
Topics:
:44 – What type of office do you want to be and how does that affect your scheduling protocol?
9:44 – Having enough time to present treatment
14:37 – Getting new patients in quickly
20:17 – Creating policy on how you schedule production
24:10 – Why you actually WANT some open time in your schedule
36:27 – What to do if you’re running behind
Links:
The Art of Scheduling Productively Seminar - https://www.mgeonline.com/scheduling-livestream
Learn more about MGE - https://www.mgeonline.com
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Questions From This Episode
What's the actual difference between a high value procedure and a high value appointment, and why does that distinction matter?
A procedure like a crown or an implant is traditionally treated as automatically high value, while something like six composites gets filed as secondary. But an appointment worth six composites can be genuinely high value too, it's the actual worth of that specific appointment that matters, not a fixed category the procedure type falls into. MGE deliberately updated its own scheduling terminology from high value procedure to high value appointment to correct exactly this kind of miscategorization.
Why shouldn't a practice fill an open primary time slot with something small just because it's available?
Because that block exists specifically for the appointments that generate the most value and matter most to the practice, and it's usually also true that higher value procedures tend to be more urgent to a patient's actual health. Filling it early with routine work, a denture reline or a couple of fillings, means there's no room left when a real primary case or a genuine emergency comes in later, and that patient ends up pushed out days or weeks instead.
What should a practice do if hygiene is fully booked and new patients aren't getting seen fast enough?
Block the first appointment of the morning and the first appointment after lunch specifically for a consult or a new patient, giving the schedule some built-in flexibility. If hygiene is consistently booked out months in advance, that's a genuine signal to add another hygiene day rather than waiting until things feel even more overwhelmed, since opening that additional day will almost always fill on its own.
Why recommend no appointment under an hour, at least when a practice is first implementing this system?
Because appointments are often scheduled around how long a procedure alone would take in isolation, not accounting for the doctor also needing to step out for a hygiene exam or check on another patient in an adjacent room. Building in that full hour protects against running behind and rushing the patient in the chair, and if the visit actually finishes early, that reads as excellent service rather than a scheduling failure.
What's the actual fix for a patient getting upset about a schedule running behind?
Simple, proactive communication before the patient starts to notice or grow frustrated on their own. Letting someone know early that the doctor is finishing up an emergency and the practice is running about ten minutes behind, with reassurance that they're still doing everything possible to get the patient out on time, resolves the situation the overwhelming majority of the time. Patients aren't usually upset about the wait itself, they're upset that nobody told them anything was happening.
Episode Transcript
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Jeff: Outside of dentistry, there are very few businesses where scheduling plays such an enormous role in the business's profitability, efficiency, growth, or general stress levels. It's genuinely a case where how your schedule is constructed and how you run it can have everything to do with whether your practice succeeds or struggles.
Jeff: So we're dedicating this week's episode to that subject, constructing a dental schedule, specifically how to build a profitable, efficient schedule that actually works for you. I'm joined by Chris Menkhaus, our Practical Implementation Director here at MGE. You may remember Chris from episode 14, on how much a general dentist should produce per day. Chris is in charge of anything related to implementation and coaching at MGE, all of our Power Client Managers report to him, and he's one of our more senior consultants, with over 20 years in the dental industry, including running multiple multi-doctor practices himself. The first practice Chris helped build was doing 6 million a year, and the owner doctor didn't even need to be on site.
Jeff: Chris, you're all set over there?
Chris: Thank you, excited to be here.
Jeff: When we were putting this episode together, since there's a lot to cover on scheduling, we figured the easiest approach was, what would you actually walk a newer client through. You had a whole list, seven or eight points, so I figured I'd just let you go through it.
Chris: Sounds great. So, I'm a new client, here we go. The first thing really is deciding what kind of practice you want to have. At MGE, we're generally going to be patient-centric, meaning genuinely getting patients healthy, doing all the dentistry they need to get back to full health, then having them return every three, four, or six months, however you've designated.
Chris: One factor that plays into this is which insurances you participate with. If you're a Medicaid provider, or in an HMO in your state, there are times that becomes genuinely difficult to maintain that patient-centric philosophy, so that's part of the evaluation. What kind of office do you want to have, and deciding to be patient-centric. For our purposes, that's what most of our clients want, and honestly what most dentists want, very few doctors got into this purely for money.
Jeff: Right, you don't see many people who got into dentistry wanting to work four chairs at once, running back and forth, never getting to eat lunch.
Chris: Exactly, the 80-patient-a-day schedule is a dying breed. So for our purposes, let's assume patient-centric. Part of that also involves the actual value of the insurance plans you're taking, because there's a real cost to doing business. It has to be genuinely efficient if you're participating in plans, and ideally, eventually, you won't participate at all. But even while you are, that affects your schedule, because if your crown fee is $1,400 but you're only collecting $700 on that plan, you've effectively cut the value of that one-to-two-hour procedure in half.
Chris: So the first thing we emphasize is scheduling for patient experience. Customer service is primary here. Schedule too little time and that's a problem. Schedule too much time and you get that classic situation, the new associate doing a beautiful two-surface filling that somehow takes three hours. Beautiful filling, but that patient's never coming back.
Chris: What we want is a proper balance, hygiene time where the hygienist genuinely has room to educate and talk with the patient, not rushed, but also not excessive. And real time for the doctor to come in, do the exam, and discuss any necessary treatment. As a stopgap, sure, you can always bring someone back, but there's nothing service-wise worse than alarming a patient and then telling them to think about it for a week before you'll even discuss it.
Jeff: Right, if they don't have time to present that day, obviously bring them back.
Chris: Absolutely, and we covered this in a recent episode, building consult time into the schedule. But to clarify, since some people hear that and assume they need to bring everybody back for a separate consult, that was never the idea. If you have time to present today, present today.
Jeff: For most conventional, simpler treatment plans, 20 minutes, maybe 15, is usually enough.
Chris: Absolutely. If we're talking an all-on-six, or three implants and four crowns, that's a bigger discussion. It comes back to the size of the case, and honestly, what type of office you're running, some of our clients lean heavily into implants, and that's naturally a longer appointment, a lot more time, we're talking $50,000 to $70,000 cases versus $3,000 to $7,000.
Chris: Part of this too, and I don't want to go too far into other subjects, is doing quadrant dentistry where possible, grouping appointments together so you're not making the visit too long or too rushed. Usually a patient appreciates a longer single appointment if it means fewer total visits.
Jeff: Can I ask about that specifically? We were going over points recently that we wanted to clarify with clients, and quadrant dentistry was one. I first heard that term back in 1992, so I assumed everyone was doing it by now, but you're saying you're still seeing plenty of newer clients who aren't. Just to clarify, if I need two crowns and three fillings, am I being brought back for two separate appointments in some of these practices?
Chris: In certain cases, yes, genuinely. We're seeing that as a real trend, and some of it comes down to bad scheduling, honestly all of it does. Part of it ties into our next point, having time to actually present and get the case accepted. Because once treatment is accepted and financial arrangements are made, which we've covered in other episodes, now you can schedule what's actually most efficient for the patient, ideally the whole treatment plan together.
Chris: And since neither of us is a doctor, when I say quadrant dentistry, it really just means whatever a doctor feels comfortable combining into a single appointment to reduce total visits and make things easier on the patient. There's real clinical latitude there, what one doctor's comfortable with, another might not be, that's entirely the doctor's call. Even in hygiene, I'd say about half our clients have hygienists who prefer doing all four quadrants of an SRP in one visit, since when they explain the choice, one visit or two, most patients pick one, even knowing they'll be numb everywhere.
Jeff: Really?
Chris: Really. Others just don't believe in that approach, and that's fine too, this isn't one-size-fits-all. But it's worth keeping in mind, especially with lingering COVID considerations, fewer touch points is easier both on the practice and the patient. In most cases it works better for everyone, patient and doctor. Fewer appointments, higher production, more dentistry actually getting done, and most importantly, more people getting genuinely healthy.
Jeff: I'd personally appreciate that more as a patient too, just get it done in one visit rather than three.
Chris: Same here. Next point, and we touched on this already, making sure there's actual time built in to present treatment, both in doctor time and hygiene. A lot of clients will assign doctor time on their software for any appointment type, usually in 10-minute units, one to two units of doctor time for every hygiene patient needing an exam, maybe three units for someone needing an SRP, since a standard prophy usually runs about an hour, maybe an hour and a half for scaling and root planing.
Chris: You typically don't need to separately account for assistant or hygienist time within a hygiene appointment, but accounting for that doctor time specifically matters so the doctor doesn't get overbooked. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, if there's no time to present treatment, it doesn't get accepted, and then you're scrambling for production later. Even for the exam itself, say you've scheduled 20 minutes for a new patient exam, that has to actually be built in, since it's inherently variable, sometimes you walk into a room and there's nothing needed at all, other times it's a large case you won't have time to close that same day.
Jeff: But close it that day if you genuinely have time.
Chris: Right, bring them back only if you don't. But if that 20 minutes isn't accounted for at all, that ripples forward across the whole patient experience, you're running late, everything gets rushed, either the procedure in the chair or the person waiting for their exam. And dentistry has historically ranked as one of the top fears in the country, so telling someone who worked up the courage to come in that they now have to come back again, only when it's genuinely necessary, but you want that experience to feel pleasant, not rushed.
Jeff: That connects to customer service more broadly, and this is really about the new patient specifically, their first contact with you. If my appointment's supposed to end at two and the hygienist tells me the doctor should be in shortly, and it's already 1:40, and the doctor doesn't actually walk in until 1:55, running over from there, that's just bad. You don't feel important, and it sets a poor precedent right at the start of the relationship, since I don't have much of a connection to the doctor yet at that point.
Chris: Good point. One related note, especially given how hard it's been in some areas to find hygienists the last couple of years, that's really its own episode, and we've actually done one, with a video too, six escalating steps that end, if I remember right, with bulk mailers to every hygienist in the state. We've seen more practices lean on assisted hygiene when short-staffed, a hygienist working two columns with an assistant. I don't have an issue with that occasionally, if someone's out sick short-term. But for offices running that way for months at a time, retention rates drop. The number of patients needing perio treatment mysteriously drops too.
Jeff: Interesting.
Chris: It's genuinely just patient experience, people aren't getting the same time, attention, and education, even with heroic effort on the team's part. While a hygienist is taking X-rays and doing perio probing, they're talking with the patient the whole time, that conversation doesn't happen the same way when someone's rushing between two columns.
Jeff: That makes sense.
Chris: One more piece that ties into having time to present, time for new patients to come in for consults. You'll look at your own new patient volume and how much you realistically want to grow it. The normal guideline is getting a new patient in within 24 to 48 hours.
Jeff: For the actual new patient visit itself?
Chris: Right, being able to get someone in within that window. Think it through as a consumer: I call your office, I just moved to the area, I'm looking for a new dentist, I need a cleaning. You want me on the books within 24 to 48 hours.
Jeff: So if I call and you're saying you can get me in within a day or two.
Chris: Yes, because the show rate drops dramatically after the second or third day. If I schedule someone a week out, I'll do everything possible to confirm them and make sure they show. If you're calling me and I can see you literally later today, I'd put that at close to a 90 percent chance you show, versus something closer to a coin flip a week out. And a lot of urgent situations genuinely need same-day or next-day care, someone calling with a toothache is often finally confronting a real health concern, and getting them in quickly is simply good service. Nobody likes being put in a queue.
Chris: And consult time works the same way, if you run out of time presenting a bigger case, or you're routinely doing larger cases, you want that time already built in, so you're not stuck saying, we're going to start addressing your gum disease, but there's some structural stuff we need to talk about when you come back in April.
Jeff: Can I unpack a couple of things you said there? I've actually had this exact conversation with prospective clients before. So you're saying a new patient initial needs to happen within 24 to 48 hours. Who actually sees that new patient, does it have to be the doctor?
Chris: Doesn't matter to us, some practices route them through hygiene first for the initial workup, others prefer the doctor see them directly, either works.
Jeff: Right, but when I explain this to someone, I often get, I just don't have time in my schedule, and it becomes this whole thing. I've talked to practices where new patients are booked out three weeks, and there's this idea that being that booked out is actually a good sign. But as you're saying, and this is completely true, the longer you push someone out, the worse the odds they actually show, especially as a brand new patient with zero existing connection to the practice. Unless I'm a direct referral, if I call and can't get in for three weeks, I'm probably calling the next office on my list.
Chris: Absolutely, unless the patient themselves doesn't want to come in sooner, that's a different story. But how do you actually solve that if you're genuinely slammed, hygiene booked four months out, only occasional new patient openings?
Jeff: Right, what do you actually do?
Chris: A few options on an immediate basis. Even if I'd prefer routing new patients through hygiene, if hygiene's fully booked, I'll block the first appointment of the morning and the first appointment after lunch each day specifically for a consult or a new patient, giving myself some built-in room. And if you're that booked out consistently, you should genuinely be looking at adding another hygiene day. It's always easier to be a bit proactive and open that capacity ahead of need, there's a bit of a build-it-and-they-will-come element, when you open those days, they fill almost every time. People tend to think they have to wait until they're completely maxed out first, but it doesn't really work that way.
Jeff: So if hygiene truly has no room, block time on the doctor's schedule instead, first thing in the morning or right after lunch, same as consults.
Chris: Right. And what if there's no actual consult to fill that slot that day? Fine, you use it for a new patient instead. What we'll usually do early on with a client is have them run the math: say there are four weeks, five days a week, 20 working days, and you want 40 new patients a month, that's roughly two new patient visits a day you need to allocate in hygiene on average. That's how you actually book it out. Then you factor that against your active patient count and how many hygiene days you should realistically have, which tells you whether you need another hygienist, or whether you're actually fine as-is if you're still a newer practice.
Jeff: That answers the question I knew I'd get about half the time, which is where do I actually put them.
Chris: Exactly. Now, you'll also want some clear policy for how production itself gets scheduled, and this is genuinely relative to how a given doctor likes to operate and which procedures they perform. We see close to a 300 percent time variance between doctors on the exact same procedure, one finishes start to finish in an hour, another takes two and a half, both can be very successful, what matters is that it follows your own philosophy consistently.
Chris: With that in mind, we generally recommend a balance of high, medium, and low value production, not a new concept, we cover it in depth in our scheduling seminar. But the real challenge is execution, actually having the policy in place and followed, and being genuinely specific about what counts as what. It's easy to default to, a crown is automatically high value, and I'm not knocking milling here, plenty of great clients of ours mill chairside, some even teach it. But say an $800 crown sent to an outside lab takes about an hour start to finish, that's $800 an hour. If instead you're milling it chairside and it takes two hours, which is fairly typical, that same appointment is now a $400-an-hour appointment. Not necessarily a bad thing, just something to factor in when you're thinking through times, values, and insurance participation to make sure you're actually hitting your own goals for how many people you want to help.
Jeff: It's an interesting point mathematically too, since lab fees have dropped significantly, they've ticked up a bit recently with inflation, but if I'm spending somewhere between $60 and $120 with a good lab and bringing the patient back for a well-fitting crown from a solid scan, that delivery visit is usually done in about half an hour. So you've taken an hour and a half total instead of two full hours, and spent maybe $120, though obviously you're already paying for the milling equipment either way.
Chris: Right, and plenty of our milling clients move quickly toward full fee-for-service, which genuinely works if milling is something you're passionate about, you just have to think it through a bit more carefully, since it doesn't work well against a standard PPO fee schedule.
Jeff: Which we've actually brought up recently in seminars and other episodes, one thing we're actively trying to move all our clients away from is heavy PPO participation, since long term it simply doesn't hold up. It's honestly a strange thing when you really sit with it, that an insurance company's fee schedule ends up dictating a doctor's clinical preferences, since the fees just keep getting cut.
Chris: It really is. Which ties into scheduling for production more broadly. I actually hate a fully packed schedule, on the doctor's side specifically. I love a full hygiene schedule, as long as the appointments are long enough to deliver a genuinely good patient experience and leave room to present treatment. But on the doctor's side, it's a real pet peeve of mine.
Jeff: So you actually want some open time built in every day?
Chris: Absolutely, that's when things are genuinely productive. Load a doctor up with 16 patients in a day and they're on roller skates the entire time, barely time to breathe over a five-minute lunch, and most importantly, not many people are actually getting healthy, hygiene doesn't have time to talk to anyone, and you end up doing a lot of single-unit procedures, come back again, come back again. The longer that runway stretches, the greater the chance something in life interrupts it and the patient never finishes the treatment plan they were genuinely committed to. It's also just not a great experience for staff, those offices tend to run through lunch and run late constantly, and while that's occasionally unavoidable in healthcare, most doctors and staff alike have families they'd like to get home to.
Chris: So I'm fully supportive of staying late occasionally for a real emergency or a time-sensitive big case, but as a standard, everyday operating basis, there's no real reason it should be routine. Schedule efficiently, have your high, medium, and low value time clearly defined and named, spelled out clearly for whoever manages the schedule. Keep it simple. Personally, and for most of our clients, if I have open high value time, I'm not filling it, even the day of, because usually at least half my hygiene patients that day need something anyway.
Jeff: That's an interesting point, and it's actually one of the clarifications we wanted to make. We even changed our own terminology in the scheduling seminar, it used to say high value procedure, and we changed it to high value appointment.
Chris: Right, because if someone needs six composites, that could easily be a genuinely high value appointment too, even though composites typically get filed as secondary. Once people take that category literally, crowns, implants, veneers, inlays, onlays only, they end up chasing what feels like a mythical, elusive case instead of just running their usual mix and accepting that some open time is completely fine. It's really about the value of the appointment itself, not a fixed category the procedure falls into.
Jeff: So to your earlier point, say my primary time runs three and a half hours in the morning, with 40 minutes to an hour of consult time built in, and there's still an hour or ninety minutes open. You're saying don't fill that, even the day of, since there's a real chance hygiene turns up something that needs the doctor, or one of those morning consults decides to stay and do the treatment right then if they happen to be free that day.
Chris: Exactly. It's a bit of a game of chicken, whoever caves first loses. What we consistently see is the moment someone says, it's four o'clock the day before, just go ahead and fill that opening, that's exactly when clients come back to us saying they feel plateaued, constantly busy, running late, and genuinely miserable, without realizing they've clogged up that high value time with medium value work. Then a genuine emergency comes in, which, not coincidentally, is often also the most urgent to a patient's actual health, and now you're booked out two weeks, or a week, with fillings sitting in what should have been your highest value time.
Chris: So we like real openings there. Now, this next part won't apply to every practice, but depending on size, when clients first start implementing this, we'll often tell them we don't want to see a single appointment on the schedule under an hour.
Jeff: Interesting.
Chris: The reason is that appointments often get scheduled purely on how long the doctor could technically do the procedure in isolation, without accounting for the fact that the doctor also has hygiene checks and other patients to step in on. Otherwise you end up right back in that bad patient experience, running behind. If a patient expects 90 minutes and gets out in 70 because the hygiene check went smoothly, you're a hero. But if you've sold a $5,000 case in hygiene and the patient still gets out in 90 minutes as promised, everybody wins, the hygiene patient got genuinely healthy, and the other patient got in and out exactly as expected.
Chris: Here's a related pattern worth watching for: as you're organizing the schedule, you'll naturally add a 30-minute adjustment or post-op check, then another, then a third, all back to back. Come three o'clock, when you've got three of those stacked together, those start dictating your whole schedule. Now you've got a patient in another chair wanting to go ahead with a proposed crown, but you don't have time, because of those three post-op checks. Or a hygiene patient you'd love to present a case to has to be brought back for a consult instead, for the same reason. Yes, those checks usually only take ten minutes, and to be clear, we're always teaching this with an assistant present in every room, never leaving a patient alone for 20 minutes, but when you're structurally expected to be in and out of a full hour appointment, and you actually are, usually earlier than that, that specific appointment stops derailing the rest of your day, since those small no-charge appointments are often exactly what throws off an entire schedule if they're not handled efficiently.
Jeff: I imagine most of our full scheduling seminar goes far deeper than something that translates well on a podcast, walking through actual schedule blocks visually.
Chris: Right, that's genuinely hard to convey purely by audio. We do have training on this on DDS Success, our online platform, and if you're not yet an MGE client and want to learn more, we run a free virtual seminar called the Art of Scheduling Productively. And if you are already a client, the full system gets laid out over two days at our in-person Scheduling for Production seminar.
Jeff: I think that's a great point to add, since even something like a consult, ideally I'd want that as a full hour too, even if it wraps up in 20 minutes and the patient's satisfied and on their way.
Chris: Right, though it can get a little tricky, since consults are inherently subjective. Say I simply ran out of time, and a patient needs three crowns, a $4,200 case, I can't present it today, so I bring them back. I could probably close that in 20 or 30 minutes.
Jeff: You might not even need a full chair appointment for that.
Chris: Right, if you're doing it in a consult room rather than an operatory. But I see what you're getting at, this is exactly where it can go sideways if the whole system isn't well understood. We talk about primary time in the mornings for high value appointments, and if the office policy says any open primary slot can be filled with anything, then you walk in at 11 o'clock on what's supposed to be primary time and you're doing a denture reline or two occlusal composites, since that's simply what got scheduled into the gap.
Jeff: So I agree with keeping this simple. Once you start layering in ideas like a full-hour consult or grouping procedures a certain way, if the team isn't already genuinely fluent in how the whole system is meant to work, that's a lot of change at once.
Chris: Really good point. I'd start basic, very simple, and if you're already an MGE client who's implemented a lot of this, some of what I'm describing might already be behind you, or you might be doing it differently and that's fine. But say I've got a full hour consult and the patient agrees to treatment after 40 minutes, great, we're both happy, and depending on time and case type, say an Invisalign case, I might even be able to start something right then.
Jeff: Right, but circling back to your earlier point, none of this works if the underlying fee schedule is completely upside down, that's its own separate conversation on policy entirely.
Chris: Exactly. So, to be clear on full schedules: full hygiene, genuinely, that's quantity, we want hygiene full, with enough time built in to do it right. Full doctor schedule, not so much, that's where we want quality and precision instead. Quantity on one side, quality on the other. You'll have some real openings on the doctor's side, ideally none on hygiene.
Chris: One more thing worth covering: how to actually execute the schedule once you start running behind, since this is usually where staff start improvising on their own if there's no clear policy. It's worth having simple guidelines, when do we squeeze in an emergency, when don't we, when do we do same-day treatment, when do we not. It matters because this is healthcare, you're not assembling water bottles on a line, you're going to run over sometimes. A lot of clients build in a rotation, say Tuesday and Thursday, this assistant covers if we run late, Monday and Wednesday, someone else does, so everyone knows in advance whether they might need to text a spouse about picking up the kids or dinner that night.
Chris: Having a policy on that, on new patients, just a handful of basic policies, keeps the whole day running smoothly. And ideally, one single person should own the entire scheduling function, not someone juggling eight other responsibilities. That's genuinely something worth working toward, though if you only have three staff total, it might take some time to get there. It's a bit like having three great chefs all working the same pot at once, it's probably not coming out well. One person needs to be responsible.
Chris: Related to that, keep changes funneling through that one scheduler, even when it feels like a minor annoyance, an assistant thinking, I could just add this to the appointment myself right now, no, have the scheduler make that change. It takes thirty seconds to a minute, but it keeps that single point of control intact.
Jeff: That makes sense.
Chris: One more thing that gets missed constantly: when a patient gets upset about waiting, it's almost never actually about the wait itself, it's that nobody told them anything. Something as simple as, Dr. Smith is finishing up with an emergency, he'd do the same for you, we're running about ten minutes behind and doing everything we can to still get you out on time, resolves it 99 times out of 100. It's specifically the silence that turns a ten-minute wait into a frustrated, watch-checking, phone-texting patient.
Jeff: That's a fair point, and something not to go too far off track on, but I've genuinely noticed customer service overall seems to have taken a real hit since COVID, everywhere, restaurants, phone calls. I was talking to my wife about this recently, calling a car insurance company, and it's just endless automation instead of an actual person helping you.
Chris: Completely agree, it feels like it's become almost acceptable to have poor customer service now, blamed on staffing shortages or whatever else, but patients simply don't come back after that. And it really comes down to simple communication, people think it requires some kind of mastery, it doesn't, it's genuinely the same courtesy you'd extend a friend or business associate if you were running 15 minutes late, you'd text them. That's really all we're describing here.
Jeff: Obviously if they're already sitting in the waiting room you're not going to text them directly.
Chris: Right, you just walk over and say it in person at that point. But it really is that simple, and most of the time the patient will be completely fine with it.
Chris: I think that covers the points I'd want to start with here. And it's always going to be a fluid, ongoing activity, there's no such thing as fixing your schedule once and having it stay perfect forever. You build it in layers. I'd take whatever resonates most for your own office, implement a few things, see the change, then move to the next few. Keep going, stay focused on the patient experience, and you'll genuinely see it show up in your results, and in your patients.
Jeff: That's great, Chris, it was genuinely a pleasure having you on, we'll definitely be doing more of these together.
Chris: Thanks for having me, Jeff, I really appreciate it.
Jeff: I think that does it for this week, folks. I hope this helped. If you have questions about MGE, we offer a free practice consultation, call us at 800-640-1140 or find us online at mgeonline.com. If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, don't forget to follow or subscribe wherever you're listening. Thanks so much, and we'll talk to you next week.