Dr. Amy Nett: I have a schedule to see patients Monday through Thursday and probably about 24 hours of appointment time. I find that probably 15 to 20 minutes for every hour of patient care I spend doing admin-type work, and then for case review appointments, which are the 75-minute appointments, I spend anywhere from maybe 30 to 60 minutes preparing for the case and probably closer to 60 minutes preparing for the case. So 24 hours of patient care in addition to the admin work, prep time, and then doing some additional work on the clinician training program here and that sort of thing ends up being more than enough.
I have Monday through Thursday scheduled, and then I’ve found what works best is to keep one or two appointments off of the calendar that patients can use for self-booking, and our practice manager helps me keep a couple of spots for urgent appointments. Inevitably each week I have someone who is not tolerating their supplements well or has some sort of emergency that comes up, so we kind of keep an appointment or two hidden each Thursday and then add people in as needed. Occasionally I do also add patients in on a Friday or Saturday. Again, it just depends on what comes up during the week. How many patients I actually see on a weekly basis depends a little bit. I do, right now, about six new patients per week, and those are 75-minute office appointments, so that takes up a pretty good chunk of time. And then I most often do 30-minute follow-up appointments. I also allow people to do 45- and 60-minute self-booking appointments, so it sort of just depends on the week and what patients book. If I just happen to have a week where people are booking 45- and 60-minute follow-up appointments, then I might be seeing slightly fewer patients, but again, most often I have about 15 to 18 hours of 30-minute follow-up appointment, and then I just also started allowing patients to write in for emergencies. I’ll let them book for 15 minutes. I don’t generally let people self-book a 15-minute appointment because it’s rarely enough time to cover things adequately. I have some people who like to check in maybe once a week or once every two weeks, and sometimes all they need is about a 15-minute appointment, and it’s just “I started this supplement. Here was my reaction. Is it OK? Do I need to stop?” Sort of little things that they just want to go over and review. So most often, the Friday and Saturday appointments I’ll add will be 15- or 30-minute appointments.