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Running the practice
Admin scorecard for dental practices: how many front-desk hours a week could AI prepare for you to approve, job by job
Enter the hours a week your front desk spends on enquiries, recalls, follow-ups and reviews to see which jobs AI could prepare and what stays with staff.
The front desk of a dental practice does its written work in the gaps between patients. Recalls go out when there is a quiet afternoon, treatment plans are followed up when someone remembers, and website enquiries wait until the phone stops. The diary pays for it: a missed recall is an empty chair in six months. This scorecard asks how many hours a week each written front-desk job takes in your practice and shows which could be prepared by a tool for staff to approve, which stay with people, and what the time costs.
Free tool
Admin scorecard for a practice: the office hours a week that could be prepared by AI and checked by you, job by job
Works in your browser. Nothing you type leaves this device unless you ask us to email you the result.
The jobs it asks about
Six of the eight jobs are messages written from the diary and the practice's own policies. An enquiry reply gives the next step and the fee guide. Recalls follow the interval the dentist set, and the recall planner shows the reminder dates. A treatment plan follow-up restates the plan, the price and the date the estimate holds until, as in our follow-up template. Review replies must confirm nothing about the patient, which is the rule the review reply writer is built around. Short-notice offers go to the patients who asked for them, in order. Medical history forms are requested before the visit and referrals chased after it.
How the score is worked out
There is one assumption and you can change it. For every job a tool prepares, the scorecard keeps a share of the time for a person to read the draft and approve it. We set that at a quarter. So a job that takes four hours a week by hand is counted as three hours handed over and one hour kept. Jobs that stay with a person are counted in full on your side. The yearly figure is the handed-over hours multiplied by the hourly cost and the number of weeks you enter. It is a cost of time. It becomes money only if the hours go on paid work, or a role you were about to fill is not filled.
Where the line sits
Two jobs stay with people. The phone and the welcome at the desk are the first, and in most practices they are the larger part of the week, which is why the score here is lower than in an office-only business. The second is anything clinical. A tool that writes recalls must not answer 'is this normal after an extraction'; that message goes to a clinician. Patient data draws the other line. Health information is special category data, so a practice needs a data protection impact assessment before a new tool reads the diary, and a written agreement with the supplier, as our guide to AI and patient data explains. A review reply that confirms someone is a patient is a confidentiality breach even when the review named the practice first.
A worked example
With the example hours left as they are, the scorecard shows 31 hours of office work a week, 16 of them on the six jobs a tool can prepare. Keeping a quarter for checking leaves 12 hours a week handed over, 39% of the total. At £15 an hour over 46 weeks that is £8,280 a year. The three largest are online and email enquiries (3.8 of 5 hours), recalls and reminders (3 of 4) and treatment plan follow-ups (1.5 of 2). What stays with a person: answering the phone and greeting patients, 15 hours, and clinical decisions. The example hours are ours, chosen to be plausible for a small practice; they are not survey figures, and the point of the tool is that you replace them with your own.
The three readiness questions
The hours say what could be handed over. The last three questions say whether it would work in your practice this month. First, are the rules written down? A tool follows a page that says what a good reply looks like, what must never be said and when to stop and ask; it cannot follow habits that live in one person's head. Second, does the work arrive in writing? Jobs that come by email, web form or from a system with an export can be drafted from. Jobs that come by phone or on paper have to be typed in first. Third, is there one named person who approves drafts every working day? Without one, drafts queue, and a queue of unapproved drafts is slower than doing the job by hand.
What to do with the result
Start with the job at the top of the list and no other. Write its rules on one page, run it with a person approving every draft for a fortnight, and count how many drafts went out unchanged. If most did, lower the checking share for that job and move to the second. If few did, the rules page is wrong, not the idea.
Overlyft sets up AI assistants for dental practices and clinics built around drafted jobs like the six above; the work is priced after a fixed-price audit, and you pay the AI provider directly for any subscription. The scorecard works the same whichever tool you buy, or if you buy none and give the top job to a part-time administrator instead. Our comparison of the AI tools sold to dental practices and clinics sets out what else is on the market and what each costs.
Short answers from this page
Can AI run the front desk of a dental practice?
The administrative part: recall lists and reminders, the short-notice list, unscheduled treatment follow-ups, complaint acknowledgements and review reply drafts. Nothing clinical, no recall intervals and no charging decisions. Overlyft can set up an AI assistant that drafts and schedules; the practice manager reviews and a GDC registrant reads anything that touches treatment.
Every short answer for dental, physio and aesthetics clinics
Where this comes from: Arithmetic on the hours entered; the checking share is our stated assumption and can be changed. Rules behind what stays with staff: UK GDPR, articles 9 and 35; GDC Standards for the Dental Team, principle 4 (confidentiality)
AEO Lookup editorial team
We write practical guides for people who run small UK firms, and we check every fact against its source on the date shown. Read how we review, or tell us if something has changed.
