1.       A standard scheduling practice in a Dental office was to schedule all Dental Hygienist appointments one hour apart because the worst cases took that long to complete.  The hygienists knew from past experience which patients took longer than others but had no way of communicating that to the front desk scheduling assistant.  As a result of a lean assessment event, the Hygienists came up with a notation on the chart which told the person scheduling the next visit whether the patient needs a “long” appointment or “short” appointment for their next visit.  This simple change improved Hygienist throughput by 25%.

2.       In Dr. Bahri’s practice, the office discovered that 90% of the treatments they provided utilized the same set of instruments.  So, instead of organizing instruments by type of treatment, which meant the Dental Assistant would have to get a new tray of instruments each time a new treatment need was discovered during a patient’s visit, they decided to pre-package all the instruments needed for those 90% of treatments.  This saved the waiting time of the Dentist, the patient and the “get” time of the Dental Assistant.

There are examples of the magnitude of savings at the page:  What is Lean?

Robert Angeli contributed this page.