How Healthy is Your Dental Practice? 3 Key Indicators

Are you the linchpin of your dental practice? Meaning, can your dental practice run without you for even a day? If you can’t confidently say ‘yes’ to this question, your practice might be tiptoeing the lines of healthy and unhealthy.

If you’re tied to the entire revenue your practice generates, when do you get a time off? When are you able to take a vacation? Will this pace be sustainable, as you get older?

In order to gauge how healthy your dental practice is, you need to have some key metrics. What are you doing right? What can improve? Are there any hidden potentials you can tap into?

Here are the 3 key indicators that help you answer these questions:

1. Efficiency of the Practice

Do your front office, back office, and the billing department all operate as efficiently as possible? Your hygiene department might be under performing, or barely breaking even.

How long do patients have to wait to get their appointments scheduled? What is your practice’s case acceptance rate?

When you can answer these and analyze the results, they’ll reveal a lot about how efficient your dental practice truly is. This can help you determine whether to hire more people or automate some parts of the practice (like setting up recall reminders).

2. Dental Practice Growth Rate

Inflation requires your practice to grow every year. Your dental practice can’t remain stagnant. This requires you to be plugged into how fast your practice is growing.

Do you have a goal for how much your practice should grow each year? For example, does it seem attainable to grow your practice by 7% every year, which will yield to doubling your patients in 10 years?

Growth rate is also tied to cash flow. To stay profitable, you should know what percentage your staff, lab costs, supplies, and facility expenses take away from your profit, and control these costs.

3. Performance of Your Team Members

No good dental practice can run on one person. Every member of your practice has to work in harmony and display competencies. Some parts of performance can be measured objectively, while other parts that require soft skills can be measured through anonymous evaluations.

Team members should also give feedback on what they think of their leadership. A good leadership provides motivation and education.

Sometimes it’s hard to see your practice as a small business that needs all the marketing and organization. When you remove yourself from the day-to-day operations and take a step back, you can better understand how your practice is running.

When you look at the above 3 key indicators, you’ll be able to spot improvements and set up your practice for further success.

Want to learn how to run your practice more systematically? Click below to request your free copy of our e-book Five Steps to Successful Dental Practice Management.