194 interruptions
Researchers observed one dental clinic near Berlin for 100 hours and counted 194 interruptions. What the interruptions were about says more than how many there were.
A dentist reaches the stage of a treatment that needs full attention. The door opens. Someone has a detail about the next patient. Someone needs an answer about the afternoon's bookings. Someone needs a document approved before it can go out. Each request takes a moment, and each one is reasonable. Then the work resumes, and the concentration has to be found again.
Anyone who has worked in a clinic knows this rhythm. It is easy to feel and hard to count. A pilot study published in PLOS ONE in 2024 set out to count it, in a single practice.
What was counted
The study, by Ziegler and Parikh, followed three dentists and three dental hygienists in one clinic near Berlin. The researchers observed 100 hours of work between March and August 2022 as a baseline. In those hours, they counted 194 interruptions.
The authors call it a pilot, and it should be read as one: a first, small measurement, not a general rule.
Information, questions, approvals
The researchers also sorted the interruptions by purpose. In the 2022 baseline hours at the clinic near Berlin, 58 were to hand over information, 30 were to obtain information, and 30 were to have a document approved.
Together, those three categories account for 118 of the 194 interruptions, about 60.8%. That total is ours, added up from the categories the study reports for this one clinic.
None of these requests is unreasonable. Information has to reach the dentist, questions need answers, and documents need approval. The difficulty is where the requests land: on clinicians who may, at that moment, be in the middle of treating a patient.
A light at the critical moment
The intervention itself was simple: a light that signalled, at critical stages of treatment, that no one should come in. No artificial intelligence was involved. In another 100 hours observed at the same clinic between November 2022 and January 2023, with the light in use, the researchers counted 53 interruptions.
What it shows, and what it does not
The move from 194 to 53 needs careful reading. This was one clinic, and the study had no control group: no comparable practice was observed over the same months without a light, to show what would have changed anyway. Some of the difference may come from the light. Some may come from anything else that changed between the baseline and the later period.
Nor can a single clinic near Berlin show how common the pattern is in other practices or in other countries.
An interruption is also not the same as lost time. The count shows how often the work was broken, not how much time was lost, and it should not be converted into hours or into a promise of savings.
Within those limits, the study points to a pattern. In this clinic, much of what interrupted the clinical team was the everyday movement of information and approvals, and in the period when a plain signal marked the critical moments, far fewer interruptions were counted.
It also leaves a practical question that any practice can ask of itself: who needs something from the clinical team, and at what moment do they ask for it?
This is the territory SoliumOS works in. It prepares the administrative work around care, inside the clinic's own cloud, and the clinic's team keeps the final say on every step. The study tested a light, and it says nothing about what our product, or any other, would change.
Sources
- Ziegler C, Parikh PJ (2024). Interruptions in a dental setting and evaluating the efficacy of an intervention: A pilot study. PLOS ONE 19(4): e0296677.