Key Metrics to Track in a Dental Practice

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Key Metrics to Track in a Dental Practice
Data has a big role to play in the coming years
for the success of any dental practice.
Integrated analytics functionality, on your
practice management system, is necessary for best
management practices. But, what are the right
metrics to track to assess health and progress of
your practice?
This is an area that requires considerable
thought since a lot of metrics can be derived
from the vast amounts of data available. While
some are useful indicators, others have no real
meaning for your practice or may even show the
opposite trend.
We can generally look at metrics in 3 key areas
Quality metrics, Operating metrics and Financial
metrics. These 3 areas together cover the overall
health, sustainability and potential for growth
of a practice.
Quality metrics
Revisits Revisits are a very important real
metric to measure patient satisfaction.
Correcting this metric is also a great way to
boost assured revenue in hygiene.
Restorative Hygiene ratio The ratio of number
of cases between restorative and hygiene cases is
an important metric. Restorative cases are profit
earners, but hygiene ensures sustainability of
the practice and regular patients who will choose
you for restorative care as well.
Productivity This is an important metric and
can be measured individually at a provider level.
Productivity of a provider ensures he is able to
discuss and agree on treatment plans with your
patients. Tracking this metric allows you to
zero-in on the non productive providers and train
them in better patient management. Operating
metrics
Scheduling efficiency This metric is the total
number of scheduled slots divided by total
available slots in your calendar for all
providers. This will give you a rough idea where
to look at to increase revenue. If the efficiency
is 100, it means you have scope to expand your
practice. If this efficiency level is low, it
means, you should focus on increasing outreach to
get new patients and increase patient engagement
to enable better revisits.
Check-in to Check-out time If a provider sees
10 patients and his time to see each patient is
reduced with better processes by 10, that means
your practice immediately gains a slot for one
more patient and all the revenue that slot brings
adds directly to your profits, as your overheads
are still the same. Check-in to check-out time
should be drilled down to further stages and
tracked to improve efficiency.
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Staff productivity Various metrics allow you
to measure the amount of time each member of your
team spends on a task. You may be overstaffed or
understaffed for the task at hand. Over staffing
leads to low practice efficiency and
under-staffing leads to bad customer experience.
If you are overstaffed, you may even consider
expanding the services you offer and add new
verticals to your revenue stream. Financial
metrics
Profit Though this sounds simple enough, most
practice owners are not tracking true profits.
They miss out the overheads, they miss out
inefficiencies. It makes a lot of difference to
have a tangible accurate measurement tracked over
time. This is the single most important metric
for your practice and should be followed closely
and drilled down to constituent elements.
Free Cash Another very important metric that
affects the stability of your operations and
growth plans is free cash. Maintaining enough
free cash by rigorously negotiating credit
periods and collecting payments and getting
claims processed fast is crucial to ensure your
practice is growing at its optimal pace. Always
remember that money today is more valuable than
money tomorrow.
Gross Revenue This is another important metric
that helps you directly assess your marketing and
patient engagement efforts. This will also take
your attention to the fee schedules and whether
they are optimal. Gross revenue does not include
revenue that gets passed on to 3rd party vendors,
like labs. How can a practice management system
help you keep track of key metrics?
Some modern cloud base dental practice management
software systems have built in analytics modules
that consolidate all the data and present the key
metrics in an easily traceable, well presented
dash board. This makes the job of following key
metrics extremely simple. Newer intelligent
systems can even alert you when something is off,
thus maintaining a constant eye on the metrics
that truly affect the efficiency of your
practice. And now since everyone has moved or
migrated to the cloud it is for given then your
Dental Practice Management system has to be cloud
based and scalable to as many locations are your
existing group practice and possible expansion.