Today I will be listing out 4 Dental KPIs that must be measured for dentists. Keep in mind that none of these Dental KPIs are available through your dental practice management software. Typically practice management software tells you “what happened” as opposed to “what’s happening”. My friend Weston Lunsford, the CEO of Dental Intel also offered key insights into these KPIs while joining the Thriving Dentist Podcast.
1. Hygiene Patient Reappointment Percentage
There’s a passive and an active metric here. The passive is what percentage of all your hygiene patients have a future appointment, the active metric is what percentage of your hygiene patients are re-appointing. That can be measured in whatever date range you want. Your goal should be to increase your hygiene patient reappointment percentage to 85% to 90%. The backbone of a general practice is the hygiene department; the stronger the hygiene department, the stronger the practice. These are patients who generally want cosmetic procedures too, since these are people that care about their smiles. You can track it by getting an excel sheet and identifying the number of hygiene patients that came in for that particular day and identifying how many of them have a future hygiene appointment. Do that for a week, and you might be surprised.
2. Dentist Production per Patient
Take your average appointments and multiply it by average production per visit — that will equal production. There are only two ways to increase your production: by seeing more patients or by increasing your fees (or you can expand your procedures). Making yourself busier might not add to your bottom line, and you can lose whatever work-life balance you have. To increase average production, don’t look at it daily; take your last 3 months’ production and take the total number of patients you saw and divide it by that. It can really open your eyes on what you need to improve.
3. Treatment Acceptance Percentage
Treatment acceptance percentage is when you calculate once you present a treatment to a patient, what percent of that treatment was scheduled or done that day. Same day treatment acceptance and overall treatment acceptance can both be measured, but if you can get those same day treatments scheduled and treated that day, it can make a huge difference. Once they walk out, getting that treatment scheduled after that is not easy.
4. Unscheduled Active Patients
This metric can measure the hidden potential of your practice. This is very difficult to obtain from your practice management software. A patient can be considered active if they have been in your practice and have completed some production treatment within 18 months. Out of those patients, how many of those don’t have a future appointment? This would be your unscheduled active patients. And this metric can be so shocking. To raise this metric, you really have to get these unscheduled active patients rescheduled.
Hopefully, these 4 dental KPIs can help you better understand and turn around your dental practice to an all-new level. As one of my favorite influential figures Bill Bowerman used to say, “Things that are measured improve.”
Listen to the full podcast episode that I did with Weston Lunsford.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
