How Oakmont Dental stopped turning patients away
Oakmont Dental was losing days it had already paid for. Rooms sat dark, hygiene patients got pushed to next month, and nobody could say exactly what it added up to. By covering those openings with temps instead of rescheduling around them, Oakmont added more than $180,000 in production over the past year.
Challenge
Oakmont Dental runs several offices in the same metro, and for a long time each one solved its staffing problems alone. A hygienist calling out in one office had nothing to do with the office fifteen minutes away, even when that second office had somebody sitting on a light schedule. There was no shared view, so there was no shared solution.
What made it hard to fix was that the cost never showed up anywhere. A cancelled hygiene column doesn't produce an invoice. It produces a slightly emptier day, a few patients moved to next month, and a schedule that looks fine by the time anybody reviews it. Multiply that across offices and across a year and it's a real number, but it's a number nobody was adding up.
The group's regional manager described the pattern as death by a thousand small decisions. None of them felt like a crisis in the moment. Somebody would call, somebody wouldn't answer, and the front desk would start rescheduling because that was the fastest way to make the morning work. The decision to lose the day was made quietly, by whoever was closest to the phone.
Nobody ever walked into my office and said we lost a day. They just moved the patients and got on with it. That is why it took us so long to see it.
Solution
Oakmont put every office on WORKFORCE under one account. When somebody calls out, whoever is covering the front desk posts the opening rather than starting a phone tree. The request goes to vetted, license-verified professionals within real travel distance of that specific office, and it goes to all of them at once instead of one at a time.
The change that mattered most was not speed, though it was faster. It was that the decision moved. Posting an opening takes under a minute, which means the default answer to a callout stopped being to reschedule. Someone has to actively give up on a day now, rather than falling into it because calling around is exhausting.
A month of chairs
Every filled slot is a day that stayed at full production
Because all the offices sit under one account, the group also stopped duplicating work. A professional who has worked one Oakmont location is already known to the others. Alerts push last-minute openings to people who have worked with the group before, so a name that went well in one office is the first name the next office sees.
The compliance side is handled the same way in every office, which for a group is worth as much as the coverage itself. On a temp placement the professional is our employee, so classification, payroll, insurance and workers' compensation sit with us rather than with whichever office happened to book the shift. There is no version of this where one location is doing it correctly and another is improvising.
Results
Over the past year Oakmont captured more than $180,000 in production that would previously have been rescheduled or lost. That figure is not new revenue from new patients. It is work the group had already earned, on days it had already paid rent and salaries for, that used to fall out of the schedule because nobody could find a hygienist by nine in the morning.
Coverage typically lands the same day it is posted. More importantly, the group stopped treating a callout as an event. The front desk posts it and moves on to the next thing, and the schedule holds.
There is a patient-facing result too, and it is the one the clinical team cares about. Hygiene recall only works if patients actually come in when they are due. Every time a cleaning slides a month because the office had nobody to do it, that patient's whole schedule drifts. Holding the column holds the recall.
Why it works for a group
A single practice can survive on relationships. The office manager knows four hygienists, and on a good day one of them is free. That approach does not survive contact with a group, because it does not scale and it does not transfer. When the office manager who holds those relationships leaves, the coverage leaves with them.
What Oakmont has now is not a bigger contact list. It is the same process running in every office, producing the same result whoever is standing at the front desk that morning. New offices inherit it on day one rather than spending a year building their own network from nothing.
The win was not that we found people faster. It was that giving up on a day became something you have to decide to do, instead of something that just happened.
What is next
Oakmont is now using the same posting flow for permanent roles, moving temps who fit well toward full-time offers rather than starting a cold search. The group is also watching which offices post most often, on the theory that a location constantly covering gaps may be a location that needs another permanent hire rather than another temp.