Three numbers, and the two gaps between them
Bookable hours are the hours a provider was scheduled to work and a room was free for them: Dana on the floor Tuesday through Saturday, minus lunch, minus the admin block. Booked hours are the hours the calendar had a patient's name on. Completed hours are the hours that ended at checkout with a service rung up. The first gap, bookable minus booked, is empty calendar: the practice had the capacity and nothing filled it. The second gap, booked minus completed, is no-shows, late cancellations and appointments that ran short. The second gap gets watched because it hurts; the first often goes unmeasured because it is quiet.
Six measures, and where each input lives
| Measure | Formula | Where the inputs live | What a bad month looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bookable hours per provider | Scheduled hours minus lunch, admin and training blocks | The team schedule and the room calendar | Full scheduled days and a thin bookable number, because the admin blocks ate them |
| Bookable hours per room | Hours the room is open minus cleaning and turnover | The room calendar, or the opening hours if there is none | Two providers waiting on one laser room while a treatment room sits empty |
| Booked share | Booked hours divided by bookable hours | The appointment calendar, exported with durations | Afternoons open all month while mornings turn patients away |
| Completed share | Completed hours divided by booked hours | Checkout in the record system against the calendar | A full calendar on Monday and a half-empty checkout report on Friday |
| Revenue per bookable hour, by provider | Completed revenue for the provider divided by their bookable hours | The revenue cut by provider and the schedule | Two providers with the same revenue and one of them working twice the hours |
| Revenue per bookable hour, by treatment | Completed revenue for the treatment divided by the hours it took | The revenue cut by treatment and the duration on each appointment | A treatment the practice promotes that earns the least per hour of the room it occupies |
A worked example, labeled illustrative
Say your schedule gives Dana 32 bookable hours a week, and say the calendar export shows 22 of them booked and checkout shows 19 completed. In this illustrative practice the booked share is about 69 percent and the completed share is about 86 percent. The quiet gap in this example is ten hours a week of empty chair; the loud gap is three. Say Dana completed $9,500 of treatment that week in this illustrative example; that is roughly $297 per bookable hour, and the ten empty hours were worth about $2,970 at the same rate. Replace every input with your own before you act on it.
Add a provider, add a room, or fill what you have first
- Fill what you have first when the booked share is low and the empty hours cluster. The open afternoons are capacity you already pay for, and a provider added now inherits the same empty blocks.
- Add a room when providers are waiting on rooms: the providers' combined bookable hours exceed the room hours, and the room's own booked share is high while the providers' is low.
- Add a provider when the booked share is high across every block and the waitlist has names on it. Revenue per bookable hour on the treatments they would do has to clear what the hire costs. Run that line with your accountant before the offer letter.
- Change the mix before you change the headcount when revenue per bookable hour differs widely by treatment. Moving one treatment out of the prime block and another into it changes the number with no hire at all.
How the number drives the calendar
- Which hours to open: the booked share by hour of day and day of week shows where patients wanted in and could not get in. Open those, and close the hours that stay empty for a quarter.
- Which treatments to push into empty blocks: the treatments that run on a fixed interval and the ones with the shortest turnover go into the quiet afternoons. The comeback message for a patient who is due offers those times first.
- What a party should fill: a party is a block of empty hours sold at once. Pick the day whose booked share is lowest, size the invite list to the empty hours, and let the quiet block set the chair count rather than the other way round.
- Who gets the new patients: the provider with the lowest booked share and a rebooking rate you trust, so Jess lands in empty time rather than displacing a returning patient.
How to run it on Monday
- Export the schedule, the calendar with durations and the checkout report for last month.
- Build the three hour totals per provider and per room, then the two shares.
- Mark the empty hours on a printed week.
- Pick one empty block and give it one job for the next four weeks: a treatment, a party, or the comeback texts offered into it.
What to do next
NorthCore's Know your numbers solution puts provider and room utilization on the dashboard beside revenue per bookable hour, read from your schedule and record system, so the empty block shows on Monday. Scoped in writing and covered by the promise on this site: results in 90 days, or we keep working until you have them.
