Are you sure your cases are being completed on time?  Do you have a program in place to resolve your run-on cases?  This pearl may help.

Run-on cases are costly; every wasted 10-minute appointment costs the practice at least $50.  If you average one run-on patient/day wasting a 30 min appt., it costs you about $150.  If you treat patients 160 days/year, it costs you about $24,000 per year in wasted production.  Imagine how much you are losing in lost production if you averaged more than one run-on per day.  Another way of looking at it is.  If you have an average of 50 run-on cases/year, seen every 6-7 weeks, that’s 10 visits/year times $150/visit = $1,500/patient times 50 patients = $75,000/year in lost production and patient upset—and it all comes out of your possible net.

The usual reasons for run-ons are patient cooperation (missed appointments and appliance wear) and the doctor’s level of satisfaction with the present result.  If the doctor is too "fussy" about his/her finished cases, he/she will create run-ons without realizing it—enough is enough!

A proven step-wise program to deal with run-on cases, that is mutually satisfying to the patient and practice, is detailed in the attachment.  This program can clean up your back-log of run-on cases and can also be used monthly to identify and deal with run-on cases before they get way out of hand.

The TC is usually in charge of this program, but needs other team members to make it successful.