Twenty Four hour days for Dentists?

In 2017 many people do not have true down time since we are potentially always available to our work. Increasingly I too have been dealing with practice matters when my office is closed.

While I don't often have to open my office during off hours for emergency, I do often have to deal with office appointments and patient enquiries. We participate on Zocdoc and patients are able to book appointments, 24 hours per day. When they do  make an online appointment, a follow up email ( or two...) is generated and I am reminded that the appointment needs to be confirmed. Also, more and more of my patients feel it is ok to contact me via messaging either on my cell phone or Facebook. I actually do not mind and even give my cell phone number out on my answering machine message.

When Zocdoc emails me, if I am home I can use Logmein to remotely log onto my office server to enter their appointment in my office management software so that I can confirm their appointment.  This is an improvement for my patients since in the past, before Logmein was available, I was forced to wait until my office manager opened the office to confirm a patients appointment request.

Patients booking through Zocdoc are able to change appointments easily and often do during off hours and this can be especially annoying since I am OCD enough that I have the urge to follow up and change their appointment in my office software. I believe that those using Zocdoc think the changes they make in their appointment times are taken care of automatically, but they are not. Instead, changes  need to be  made manually by me or my secretary.


Sometimes patients do contact me at times when I can't really answer them. They may have a question concerning a particular treatment or a particular appointment time and I am not able to access my appointment calendar or their chart notes. Sometimes, I need to remind them of that as digitized as my practice is, since I haven't yet placed my patient's progress notes on my computer, I do not have access to their paper chart that lists all their procedures. Maybe next year I will make this change since it will be an overall improvement and complete my dental practice's digital conversion.