What one hour of clinic downtime actually costs

Ask a practice manager what a lost day costs and you will get a reasonable answer. An hour is harder, because the loss does not stop the moment the system comes back up. The honest figure takes three layers and about ten minutes with a calculator.

Every figure below comes from your own practice. The worked example at the end uses round illustrative numbers to show the method, and those numbers are not benchmarks.

Start with the chair hours you cannot rebook

Take the number of operatories running at the time, multiply by average production per chair per hour, and that is the direct loss. The word doing the work is rebook. An appointment that shifts to next Tuesday is deferred revenue, not lost revenue, but an hour where four chairs sat idle and the day still finished at five is gone.

Add the staff who are paid either way

Payroll does not pause when the server stops answering. Count the hygienists, assistants, and front desk staff who were on the clock, multiply by fully loaded hourly cost, and add it to the first figure. This layer is also why an outage feels longer than it is: everyone is present, willing, and unable to work.

Then add the recovery tail

This is the layer that gets left out. It is the rescheduling calls made that afternoon, the following two or three days running over as displaced patients are fitted in, and any charting done on paper during the outage being entered a second time. Estimate it in staff hours, price it the same way you priced the second layer, and add any chair time that genuinely never came back.

A worked example, with illustrative figures

Four operatories, average production of $400 per chair per hour, six clinical and admin staff at a fully loaded $45 per hour, one hour of downtime at 10am on a Tuesday. These figures are made up for the arithmetic. Substitute your own.

• Chair hours: 4 x $400 = $1,600
• Staff on the clock: 6 x $45 = $270
• Recovery tail: 8 staff hours of calls, catch-up, and duplicate charting at $45 = $360
• Chair time never rebooked in the following days: 2 hours x $400 = $800

That is roughly $3,000 against an obvious figure of $1,600.

If you only do one thing

Work your own number out once, on paper, and keep it where budget decisions get made. An hour of downtime priced honestly is the only figure that makes a prevention spend easy to argue.