Inside a Bohaus Sprint: A Small Dental Practice

The situation

A small dental practice with one or two dentists, a couple of hygienists, assistants and a front desk of two. The same pattern fits a chiropractic office. Scheduling, charts and billing live in the practice management system. The front desk runs the phones, insurance questions and checkout at the same time.

Two problems keep coming up at the morning huddle. Empty chairs: patients cancel late or simply do not show, and the hygiene schedule has gaps no one can fill on short notice. Lapsed patients: a long list of patients in the system have not been seen in well over a year, and recall happens in bursts, when someone has a quiet afternoon to call down a list.

The practice management system includes reminders, but they were set up long ago, send the same message to everyone and stop after one try.

What the sprint finds

In Discover we spend a day at the front desk and a morning in the hygiene schedule. We review the reminder settings, pull the list of patients overdue for hygiene, and look at a few months of cancellations and no-shows by day and time.

Before changing anything, we set a baseline with the office manager: no-show rate, late cancellations, unfilled hygiene hours and overdue patients reactivated per month, all measured from the practice's own system. Without that, nobody could say later whether the work paid off.

Diagnose ranks two linked problems first, because both come down to the same patient communication: confirmations and waitlist fill for the near term, recall for the long term. The one live system is a patient communication sequence inside the existing practice management system, built on the patient record and measured against the baseline.

What it builds

Build covers the patient from first call to the next recall.

New patients. Web and phone inquiries get a prompt reply with available times and a link to complete forms before the visit. New patients arrive with paperwork done.

Confirmations. Appointments get a confirmation request a few days out and a reminder the day before, by text or email based on the patient's preference. Patients confirm, cancel or ask to reschedule with a reply. Anyone who does not confirm gets a call task for the front desk.

Waitlist fill. When a slot opens, the system offers it automatically to patients on a short-notice list who want an earlier time, first reply wins. The front desk sees the change and approves it.

Recall. Patients overdue for hygiene get a sequence spaced over several weeks, written in the practice's voice and varied by how long it has been. AI drafts the wording variants; the office manager approves each one. Patients who book drop out of the sequence immediately.

Patient record. Contact preferences, recall dates, confirmation history and opt-outs all stay on the record in the practice management system.

Messages carry no clinical details. Patient data stays inside tools the practice already uses under its existing agreements. The practice and its own advisors decide what meets its privacy obligations; the sprint follows their rules.

Hand over

In Hand over, both front desk staff learn the confirmation queue, the waitlist and the recall sequence. The office manager learns the settings and the measurements. The playbook covers replies the system cannot handle, patients who ask to stop messages and who owns the system.

The dashboard compares current numbers with the baseline every week: no-shows, late cancellations, slots filled from the waitlist, overdue patients contacted and reactivated. The 30/60/90-day roadmap adds treatment plan follow-up and online reviews.

What changes

The morning huddle starts with fewer holes. Short-notice gaps get filled by patients who wanted to come in sooner. Lapsed patients return steadily instead of in bursts. The front desk spends less time dialing and more time with the people in front of them.

Most important, the practice can see each of these changes against its own starting point, so the decision to keep investing is based on evidence.

What this means for your business

Write down the numbers before you change anything. It is the only way to know what changed.

For a dental or chiropractic practice, those numbers are no-shows and reactivations. For a salon, rebooking at checkout. For a physical therapy clinic, completed plans of care.

That is a Bohaus Sprint: six weeks, fixed scope, four phases (Discover, Diagnose, Build, Hand over), and one live system inside the tools you already use, with a trained team, a playbook, a dashboard and a 30/60/90-day roadmap.