The best advice I can give when zoning your diary is

1. Ensure you have enough exam zones to
   1. accommodate your recalls
   2. Grow your new patients 
2. Then, look at what your last six months of treatment looked like. Did you have the right number of zones for the value of the treatment? If not, you may find your FDT weren’t adhering to the zoning.
3. What are your most frequent treatments? There is no point in having an abundance of high-value zones to hit your daily target if your clinicians are doing mainly lower-value work

Hi David,

We implemented zones a few months ago so are still finessing this, but what I’ve found works for us as a small, 2 chair practice, is making sure for both recalls/new patients/ treatment zones, there is at least some availability on all days for all patient types (eg on Wednesdays our main practitioner does larger/complex treatments while our 2nd practitioner is open to seeing recalls/new patients).
And also keeping a mix of morning/afternoon times for those zones, as some people prefer mornings, and others can only come in the late afternoon after work/school.

We are still working on optimising it but I’ve found it works, being able to offer patients a couple of options whilst not compromising our zoning (Practitioner/practice as you mentioned in the 3 P’s)

Great question

We are just starting to use the Zones, so again, great to hear what is working in other practices, especially in groups where associates move between clinics. 

Currenlty we have rolled out Emergency zones and private and medical card zones, but will deff watch this thread to learn more. 

Also, THANK YOU to ​@David Rutherford  who has been a great help to use with rolling out schedules and zones as well as so so much more.  If you are not linking in with your Dentally Customer Success Manager, you should 100% setup a zoom call now with them, as their insight and advice tailored to your unique practice is invaluable. 

We do the same, we have New patient appointments, routine exams for existing patients, treatment space and one emergency space each day. 

We love using zoning and I love the set up of creating the recurring zoning slots, however it will let you delete a zoning slot from the diary but it wont let you add one back in that way. It would be so handy to be able to just change a zoning slot sometimes for one day from the diary. Could this be looked at ​@David Rutherford as would make life much easier.

Hi ​@Kirsty_the_receptionist great to see your using the zones feature. Thanks for your comments, I’ll pass these on to the development team as a feature request. I don’t know many sites that delete the zones by right clicking but this is something to consider as a future easier way to add zones in. 

The new schedules feature offers something similar to what you’ve listed above, which can be changed and added in from the diary itself. This feature is a great way to better control your open hours; it’s replaced the need for recurring appointments blocks. 

Are you using the new Appointment Search feature yet? You need to make sure your existing zones have a zone group assigned. Once done, this will enhance your patient journey and make the receptions' lives so much easier and enable a smoother patient booking process. 

Great, thank you so much ​@David Rutherford. We don't often delete the zone from the diary, its just on the odd occasion we need to accommodate a patient. For example they can only come at 2pm for treatment when its a exam zone so we would make the 3pm treatment zone an exam zone instead. I hope I have explained that clearly.

Yes we already use the new appointment search feature which is brilliant :-)

We keep 2-3 emergency 15 min red zones each day in the diary which nobody is allowed to book as its for same day emergency patients or from the evening before.  If the appointments dont get filled by 10am each day, we will use them for recalls or patient examinations if they call up.