CATEGORY 90 AUSTRALASIAN DENTIST In this increasingly complex world there are people who have come up with ideas in how to run an efficient dental practise in 2026 and indeed beyond. Once upon a time everything was based on a demand driven appointment book, capacity systems and basically the purpose, of course, was to maximise and share utilisation without burning out the clinician. Today the team and the clinician understand we are in the era of real time sharing of productivity tracking. The clinician procedure is followed by a system and analyses of the number of service codes done per day, per session, per year will allow the system to determine what, if anything, needs to change in the day-today running of the dental practise. This will include making big changes to scheduling and protecting high value blocks of treatment which then can move to an automatic weightless system. These concepts are barely understood by the old fashioned norms of running dentistry and asking for patients to make appointments and trying to fit them in around barely perceivable ways of running the business. This was based on old fashioned ideas of filling up appointment books with just about anything, including procedures that don’t pay very much, such as scaling and cleaning examination. However this can now be managed as a waitlist system with AI assistance. It can also be possible to have peer production ideas used to compare with capacity dashboards in the diary. If you don’t have a system, these old fashioned ideas will still work but will be clunky and clumsy and not provide any positive feedback into a proactive recall system and reactivation engine. Predictable revenue and patient flow is the next most important. In 2026 the stand out will be a multichannel recall system that will include such things as SMS email, patient apps, voice behaviour and other important AI electronically driven systems. This will trigger a change in the next behaviour patterns of recalls. This pattern will need to be owned by both humans and machines and this will form the economic backbone of most dental practises now in the next digital new era. New patient conversions will become the purpose of this system to turn interest into booked appointments. It will automatically include things like online booking that includes intelligent triage, instant lead response, usually under three minutes with a scripted human follow up for high value cases so that conversion can occur by tracking source and staff member. Marketing conversion is incredibly important. Standardised clinical protocols The purpose of this is to provide consistency, efficiency and clinical confidence, as it must cover examination flow, diagnostic thresholds treatment sequencing and when to refer, versus when to retain. For example if the front office staff don’t know what allocations to make per procedure and who to refer to or which doctor in the practise can manage this best, it will clog up the appointment book, slow down production and reduce practise efficiency. Too often everything relies on doctor X who knows how to do the great things in the practice. In actual fact it should rely on who is the ideal dentist to do the particular procedure. Reception would not be a sales experience. Reception is not admin, it’s leverage. Clinical performance and analysis should also be subject to proposed mentoring. Systems that are not working and are not reaching targets can be weeded out and assigned to juniors, or in fact given to seniors to recruit juniors with training. Production per hour can be tracked and case exception rates of treatments need to be carefully examined to make sure that they are not heavily weighted towards procedures that have very little dollar value. It is important to understand the effects of mentoring, it beats micromanagement and both need data and cost control and supply management systems which are critical to understanding how they work. This data needs to be fed into the system at both the beginning and the end of monthly checks so we have some back benching and benchmarking systems available. Cost control and training It’s important to try and gain an immediate leverage in terms of cost control and supplies management. These systems that need monthly checks. Daily huddles are used to discuss all the preceding and are critical to allow rhythm to be developed and prevent chaos. These strategies will reset culture. The best dental practice is not the busiest, but the one with the most systems that require fewer individuals to scale without stress and deliver consistent patient experiences and remain profitable. u Mobile: 0412 322 253 Email: harry@dentalgrowthadvisors.com.au COLUMNISTS New ideas for 2026 and beyond Dr Harry Marget By Dr Harry Marget
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