All dentists should be in a position to determine and track the health of their dental practice. This is done by considering your key performance indicators, or KPIs. KPIs are statistics or measurements that represent the most important factors in business success over a period of time. Every month, your practice’s key performance indicators should be measured and summarized in a single-page report. KPIs give your team targets to shoot for, milestones to gauge progress, and insights to make better decisions.
Metrics have been used in accounting, operations, and performance analysis in business for quite some time.
They are used to analyze corporate finance and operational strategies by executives, by analysts to form opinions and investment recommendations, by portfolio managers to guide their investing portfolios, and by project managers to lead and manage all kinds of strategic projects. There are a wide variety of metrics generated from a multitude of methods. Your dental practice will go by their individual cases or scenarios as a guide as to what type of metrics to use.
Just as you use expertise and resources as a dental professional to care for your patients, there are also important metrics, procedures, principles, and tools to assess the health of your dental office. A good profitability formula to use is production (visits x production per visit) multiplied by your collection percentage minus overhead expenses equals your profit. Following are five metrics every dental practice should be tracking.
Annual Patient Value
The way to determine if you are increasing the value of your patients is your APV. Annual patient value is found by calculating your collections per active patient. If your APV increases, this means you are increasing the value of your active patients, which means they are receiving more of the treatments they need. This figure can help you determine if your practice is healthy, what you are collecting per active patient, and if you are seeing your patients enough.
Pre-Appointment Percentage
To determine this metric, look at your active patient base to see how many patients have appointments in the future. This tells you whether you’re getting new patients and recurring patients and how many of them have a scheduled appointment. If this percentage happens to be low, it means your active patients are not coming back, which indicates you are not using patient visits as well as you could. Therefore, your ability to increase production and visits is gone.
Production Per Visit
Production per visit (PPV) helps you determine how much and what kind of services you are providing. This is a very important metric. Measuring the PPV helps you see if your volume of patients is decreasing or if your patients are accepting less treatment. This gives you an idea at what rate you are getting acceptance of treatment and how you are doing in overall treatment in relation to your patients.
Hygiene Re-Appointment Percentage
This metric impacts your annual value as well. It lets you know how your practice is doing from day to day in reappointing patients who come in for hygiene.
Periodontal Treatment Percentage
This metric helps drive production per visit. It helps you see on a preventive side how you are doing as a whole. If you are not locating any perio-related services, are you finding restorative production? How are the hygienists in your office doing in co-diagnosing these types of treatment?
Results
The first good metric to begin with is production per visit. Calculate your PPV for each month and begin building from there. Calculate for this year and last year. Then you must ask yourself if you are where you think you should be at this point. Where do you want to be? If not, do you know what to do to get there? Your metrics may then be correlated with personal and team behaviors.
After learning to use these five metrics, you can begin drilling down into your case metrics. Case metrics are items such as treatment dollar acceptance percentage, patient acceptance, and patient diagnostic percentage. These will provide you with the clearest look into the health of your practice. Once you are able to really use these metrics to analyze your dental practice, you can start delegating responsibility to different team members to take ownership of one of these metrics. You can begin to set goals that will impact your production per visit once you know where you stand.
Your bottom line will begin to grow when you learn how to determine your dental practices metrics. The first thing you must consider is your goals when setting KPI benchmarks for your practice. Creating a set of standardized measurements that you can compare from month to month will help reduce your financial stress. Once you have a set of numbers to measure the health of your practice, you will be able to relax and focus on the specific areas you need to focus on for improvement.
Strategic Practice Solutions, LLC provides consultants to help your team acquire the tools and knowledge to successfully communicate your program details to patients, and overcome their objections and obstacles to close the deal on their medical treatment. Call 888.421.1808 to request your complimentary Hygiene Department Assessment today!
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