Dr. Ellery produced $92,000 last month. Dr. Okafor produced $71,000. Dr. Okafor works three days a week. Who had the better month? Total production cannot say. Production per hour can.
What is the formula?
Production per hour = net production divided by scheduled hours, for one provider, over one period.
Two decisions:
- Net, not gross. Subtract contractual adjustments, or a provider with a PPO-heavy book looks better than they are. If your software cannot split adjustments by provider cleanly, use gross for everyone and say so.
- Scheduled hours, not hours worked. If the provider was scheduled 8:00 to 5:00 with an hour for lunch, that is 8 hours, whether or not the 3:00 patient showed up. Open chair time is the thing this KPI is meant to expose.
A worked example.
| Dr. Ellery | Dr. Okafor | |
|---|---|---|
| Gross production | $92,000 | $71,000 |
| Contractual adjustments | $16,500 | $8,200 |
| Net production | $75,500 | $62,800 |
| Scheduled days | 17 | 12 |
| Scheduled hours per day | 8 | 8 |
| Scheduled hours | 136 | 96 |
| Production per hour | $555 | $654 |
Dr. Okafor had the better month per hour. Whether that is scheduling, procedure mix or payer mix is the next question, and the KPI only tells you where to look.
What about hygiene?
Same formula, one provider at a time. Example: a hygienist scheduled 4 days a week, 7 hours a day, 16 days in the month: 112 hours. Hygiene production for the month, including exams and X-rays billed in the hygiene column, $23,500. Net of contractual adjustments, $19,800. Production per hour = $19,800 divided by 112 = $177.
Hygiene per hour moves with three things: periodontal therapy as a share of visits, X-ray and fluoride coding, and open time from no-shows. Of these, no-shows are the one the front desk controls; the no-show page measures it.
Where do the numbers live?
- Open Dental. Reports, Production and Income, by provider and date range. Scheduled hours come from the provider’s schedule under Setup, Schedules; the Appointments report can total scheduled time.
- Dentrix. Office Manager, Reports, Management, Practice Analysis for production by provider; Practice Advisor reports scheduled production and hours.
- Eaglesoft. Production by provider from the Reports menu; service rows are type S in
transactions_headerwithuser_idas the provider. Scheduled hours come from the provider’s hours in the schedule setup.
In all three, the hours are the harder half. Many offices keep a simple sheet of scheduled days per provider per month and multiply.
What moves it?
Scheduling. A doctor’s column with one crown prep, one filling and five hygiene exams scattered through the day produces less per hour than the same procedures blocked together, because the exams interrupt the prep. Block scheduling (big cases in the morning, shorter procedures after) usually lifts the number without any change in what is done.
Open time. Every unfilled hour is a zero in the average. A 9% no-show rate on an 8-hour day is roughly 45 minutes of zero a day.
Procedure mix. Per hour, a crown beats three fillings. This is not a reason to over-diagnose; it is a reason to make sure diagnosed crowns get scheduled rather than sitting in the unscheduled treatment list.
Payer mix. The same crown at a PPO fee produces less per hour than at the office fee. Net production per hour by payer tells you what each contract is really worth in chair time.
Assisting. A doctor with two assistants and two chairs produces more per hour than with one of each. The cost of the second assistant is in the overhead number, not in this one, so judge them together.
What should the target be?
We do not print a benchmark. Published figures mix gross and net, scheduled and worked hours, general and specialist practices. Set the target from your own best quarter, by provider, and look for the reason when a month falls more than 10% below it.
What Calibic adds
The KPI dashboards are LIVE, with provider and hygiene views. Calibic reads completed procedures, adjustments and the schedule from Open Dental, Dentrix and Eaglesoft (read-only, it never changes a record) and shows production per scheduled hour by provider and by day, with the hours and the production both opening to their rows. The dental KPIs page places this number beside the other eleven.
Next step: the production per hour calculator takes two providers and compares them.