Almost every doctor is interested in “Overhead Control.” When you look into it though, this is not so much a matter of “suppressing costs” as getting a good return on your resources (time, energy and money). A good net income – and overhead under control, implies good output for your inputs!
So, we thought it would be interesting to look at what the “output” is of a treatment room in a General Practice.
Doctor, divide your average gross monthly production by the number of treatment rooms you have (all your treatment rooms doctor, hygiene, “overflow,” etc.). What’s your number?
Here are the findings from our research:
- Average Production Per Treatment Room Per Month – $24,000
- 75th Percentile – $29,000
- 95th Percentile – $36,000
- Low – $15, 000
- High – $50,000
This information can be useful if you plan to build a new office or expand your facility. There is a natural tendency for your architects and suppliers to overbuild. However, I often think doctors are too slow to upgrade. It is very easy to cost-justify an additional room. But when planning new practice facilities, I sometimes see overbuilding.
Helpful rules of thumb; It costs about $250 per square foot to build a new facility. It costs about $130 to “build out” an office in an existing building. These are the cost for the facility—not the equipment, chairs, computers, etc. A rough estimate is $40,000 to $50,000 per room for that stuff.
Another helpful rule of thumb is to plan on about 450 square feet per treatment room when sizing the total square feet of the facility.
How to Improve Your Return Per Room!
The usefulness of these kinds of statistics is that they are a window you can look through to see possibilities for your own practice. Some thoughts for getting the biggest bang for the buck for your facility:
Expanded Hours – Keep the rooms working. More days and/or more hours per day. Almost all the $50,000 per room/month Dentists do this.
Horizontal Thinking – Make your schedule a daily plan to get the most out of all of the rooms, not just a list of patients to be seen. A good rule of procedure every day, more overlapping, more use of CRDAs doing kiddy prophies, etc.
Upgrade – Almost every practice has a treatment room that’s not quite up to snuff. It is very easy to cost-benefit getting a new x-ray unit, dental unit or chair. Make every room a good room! Just Call us and we’ll run the numbers for you.
More “Same Day” Dentistry.
“We may be able to save you a trip and get this done now.”
“Would you like to get this done today?”
Not only does this help case acceptance, it is a lot less work for you and your team (no need to reschedule, confirm, etc.)
Fully Delegating to Your CDRAs & RDAs – That next patient always seated and ready to go. Doctor leaving the room and the post treatment instructions to the assistant. Hygienists helping with anesthesia. The more you delegate, the more you are going to do per room!
If you can increase the number of patients treated per room by just one per day, you’ll add handsomely to your bottom line. There are about 15 work days in the average month for most practices. The average production per doctor visit is about $500 and the average production per hygiene visit is about $150. So even just one more doctor or hygiene visit per day can add $2,250 to $7,500 per month production, mostly bottom line!