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2.3 What Factors Affect Patient Care Revenue?
 The following factors all affect patient care revenue:
- Patient scheduling. Efficient
patient scheduling permits staff to work at maximum productivity. Managed
appointment scheduling works best when there are three chairs per full-time-equivalent
oral health professional. Two chairs are for scheduled appointments,
and the third is unscheduled for walk-ins and emergencies.
- Broken appointments. Broken
appointments (patient doesn’t show for appointment or call in
advance to cancel) tend to be more common in the patient population
targeted by safety net dental clinics than in private practice. Careful
consideration must be given to policies adopted to deal with broken
appointments. Those policies can be counter-productive if they are
not developed thoughtfully.
- Efficiency of the dental team. Dentists
are most efficient with the right mix of dental assistants and
dental chairs. A dentist should use a minimum of two chairs and 1.5
dental assistants to achieve productivity aims.
- Billing and collection system. A
system that captures revenue for all oral health services provided
maximizes patient care revenue and minimizes bad debt.
- Fees. Establishing
fees is a delicate balance between maximizing access and maximizing
clinic revenue.
- Payer mix. Since
different payers reimburse the clinic at different levels, patient
care revenue will be influenced by the relative proportion of patients
in each payer category. Use financial analysis to establish minimum
ratios (percentage of payer mix) needed to maintain operations.
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