The 24.5 hours nobody schedules
In a 2022 survey that collected 2,347 completed questionnaires, German dental practices reported an average of 24.5 staff hours a week spent on bureaucracy. The report points to work done twice, on paper and on screen, and the hours include work a practice has to do.
An appointment book is one of the most exact records a dental practice keeps. Every treatment has a start time, a length and a name beside it.
The administrative work around those treatments keeps no such record. A form is completed on paper and then entered again on screen. A note made for the practice's own file is written a second time, in another format, for someone else. None of it appears in the book, yet all of it happens on the same day and is done by the same people.
A count from Germany
In autumn 2022, the KZBV, the national association of statutory health insurance dentists in Germany, set out to put a number on that work. Its online survey ran from 29 September to 14 October 2022 and collected 2,347 completed questionnaires. On average, practices reported 24.5 staff hours a week spent on bureaucracy: 10 hours for all the dentists together and 14.5 for the rest of the team.
That is a total for the practice as a whole, summed across everyone who works in it. It is not one person's week. And the larger part of it falls on the team rather than on the dentists.
Where the hours come from
Alongside the hours, the report describes two sources of friction: analogue and digital processes running in parallel, and requirements to document the same thing twice.
Both are forms of duplication. A paper step that must also exist on screen is one task done twice. A record kept once for the practice and again for an outside requirement is one piece of knowledge written down twice.
Duplication is hard to see from inside a practice, because each instance is small: a date entered again here, a note copied there. It becomes visible only when someone adds it up. The survey did that for bureaucracy as a whole; its headline figure does not say how much of the total the duplication accounts for, and it would be wrong to guess.
What the number does not say
A figure like this is easily misused, so its limits deserve as much attention as its size. It is self-reported: practices estimated their own hours rather than logging or observing them. Eastern Germany and single-dentist practices are over-represented among the respondents, so the average is not a portrait of every practice.
Most importantly, the hours include necessary work. Some documentation protects patients, and some administration is simply part of running a regulated practice. The survey measured the time that bureaucracy takes. It is not an estimate of hours that could be saved, and reading it as one turns a survey into a promise it never made. None of this makes the figure wrong. It makes it a survey result, to be read as one.
A better question for one practice
For a single practice, the useful question is not how many hours bureaucracy takes in an average German practice. It is where the same work is being done twice in this one: which details are written on paper and then typed, which records are kept in two places, which steps exist only because two systems do not exchange information. Those can be found without a survey, by following a single piece of information from the moment it arrives to the moment it is filed.
SoliumOS is built for that layer of the day. It runs in the practice's own cloud and prepares the administrative work around care, so that it is ready for someone to check. The team approves every step, and the final say stays with the people who know the patients.
Sources
- KZBV. Gemeinsam Bürokratie abbauen! Auswertung der Online-Umfrage zur Bürokratiebelastung in Zahnarztpraxen. Online survey, 29 September to 14 October 2022; the exact publication date is not stated in the report.