Two Ships Passing in the Night: You and Your Treatment Coordinator Are Never Free at the Same Time. Your Case Pricing Shouldn't Care.

Here's the rhythm of a real practice day. When I'm chairside with a patient, my treatment coordinator is free. When my treatment coordinator is checking a patient in or out, I'm free. We're both busy all day long — we're just almost never free at the same moment.

Two ships passing in the night.

That rhythm is great for running a schedule. It's terrible for sitting down together to price a complex case. And pricing a big case well takes both of us: your treatment coordinator has the sharpest read on how long the case will really run, and you have the clinical judgment on difficulty, risk, and skill. The accurate fee lives where those two meet — but the two of you are almost never in the same place at the same time to combine them.

So what happens? The case gets priced by whoever has a spare second, or it defaults to whatever number the practice management software spits out. There's no shared quiet moment to do it properly, so it doesn't get done properly. All that knowledge, stranded on two ships that never dock together.

This is a tool problem, not a scheduling problem

You can't fix this by finding a free hour together — there isn't one, and there never will be. The fix isn't more time. It's a tool that doesn't need you both at once.

Give your treatment coordinator a quick, efficient way to build the case fee — one they can drive in their free windows, between check-ins, while you're chairside. They price the comprehensive case from what it will really take: the difficulty you flagged, the appointments, the adjustments, the reline and its lab fee, the consult, an honest allowance for the parts that run long. All the operational knowledge they carry finally has somewhere to go.

The part that makes it work: it's live

Here's what turns two ships into one crew — the tool is cloud-based, so you both see the same case in real time.

Your TC builds it on their screen; it's right there on yours, updating live — no file to email, no version to reconcile, no "come find me when you have a second." Then, in your free windows — between patients, at the end of a column — you glance over what they built and make small edits as you see fit. Bump the surgical case up. Sharpen the easy phase down. Adjust the chair time on the part you know is trickier than it looks. Make sure the lab fees are in there correctly.

You're not building the fee from scratch. You're refining a strong draft your TC already put together — live, on the same screen, from two different rooms.

Priced right, and nobody's day stops

That's the whole point. The pricing gets done without either of you finding a free hour you don't have — because it moves between you in real time, in the gaps you each already have. Your TC does the heavy lifting. You apply the clinical judgment. The case gets priced right, and nobody's day stops.

The two ships never actually have to dock. The tool carries the case between them.

CaseFee Pro is built for exactly this hand-off: it's cloud-based, so your treatment coordinator prices each case while you watch it come together in real time and approve it — no meeting required. Try the free Hourly Goal Calculator to find your number in under a minute.