One More COVID Casualty: Patient-Centered Care

In 2020, COVID hit dentistry like a freight train.

We had fallow time, schedules slowed down, ops sat empty between patients, and for almost 3 years, dentistry adapted amazingly well.

For dental hygienists it meant they suddenly had breathing room, eliminating the need to sprint from room to room which resulted in much less stress all day long.

Front desk teams liked it too because they no longer had to fit 10 patients into an 8 hour day. Fewer patients. Fewer scheduling battles. Fewer angry conversations with management about white space in the schedule.

But COVID is long gone but its effects linger on.

Doctors and managers must stop judging schedules by how “full” they look because a full schedule means absolutely nothing if the services that a patient needs during those appointments don’t match the allocated time. You cannot fit 80 minutes of clinical care into a 60-minute slot and expect hygienists not to feel overwhelmed.

But the reverse is equally destructive when we accept 30 minutes of actual service within a 60-minute appointment.That isn’t efficiency, that’s hidden white space disguised as productivity.

The industry became obsessed with blocks of time instead of blocks of patient care. When schedules are built around appearance instead of clinical reality:

• Patient care becomes inconsistent

Hygienists burn out

• Front desk teams are forced into impossible daily adjustments

• Clinics lose profitability

The goal was never supposed to be “fill the schedule.”The goal was supposed to be: Match the patient’s care to the right amount of time. That’s the way that  a doctor is scheduled so  why do we have to pigeonhole a dental hygienist?

This is exactly why RNA 180 exists.

The future of hygiene scheduling is not:
• “Adults = 60 minutes”
• “Kids = 50 minutes”
• “Just make it fit”

The future is patient-centered scheduling.

Scheduling based on:
• Patient’s condition
• Clinical requirements
• Due services
• Risk factors
• Time actually required to deliver proper care

Dentistry was never meant to be static and when you force an inherently fluid system into rigid blocks, eventually the people inside that system start snapping too.

The scariest part?

One tiny scheduling trick to accommodate a pandemic may have unintentionally changed the culture of an entire profession.