Calculate Chair Utilization Without Fooling Yourself
Calculate usable chair capacity by accounting for no-shows, doctor-check constraints, and turnover buffers.
Six chairs run from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. with a one-hour lunch, creating 2,880 possible chair minutes. The calendar shows 2,360 booked minutes, but the team reports repeated bottlenecks during doctor-check windows. DMAIC measurement: define the capacity question, measure actual flow losses, analyze the bottleneck, improve the schedule policy, and control the metric. The common trap is using booked minutes as capacity. That ignores no-shows, turnover, and chair minutes spent waiting for the doctor, so the practice can look underused and overloaded at the same time. Define Capacity question: How many chair minutes are usable for completed clinical work…
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