Using Metrics to Put Your Practice on the Map
Keeping your finger on the pulse of the business side of your practice requires creating a map for future growth and then following the data to ensure you stay on track
Every dental practice—whether it’s a single office with one dentist or a multilocation organization— should be as concerned with its business health as it is with patient health. Of course, practice health can’t wait for a 6-month recheck. Instead, practice metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) should be used to continually review production and assess future growth.
“Basically, you can get the data you need in the way that makes most sense for your practice and where you’re trying to grow.”
- Erin Smith, Patterson Dental
What KPIs Are
KPIs can help you track your practice’s current performance status, including average production, collections, case acceptance, and new patient and recall numbers. Each item influences the practice’s bottom line in different ways and on different timelines, so monitoring them individually and collectively can give you insight into what can be improved in the short term and what might cause future issues.
KPIs should be part of any business’s overall strategy and goals. Like a map, they can help provide directions, but only if you already know where you want to go. “The first thing I ask every doctor is, ‘What are your goals for the next 5 years?’” says Kathy Brodal, Patterson Dental practice analyst. “Because that’s what’s really going to change what happens with their analysis. For example, if the biggest issue a practice sees is case acceptance, you might also need to improve retention to get that in place.”
What KPIs Are Not
Perhaps it’s simpler to say what isn’t a KPI. Any individual value—even one being monitored as a KPI—is not a KPI in itself. For example, a fully booked schedule on a given day is not an indicator of a booming practice—it may be the only full day in the week, or the production per patient may be low. Think of these numbers as “you are here” dots on the map.
What the Metrics Can Tell You
KPIs can be divided into “leading” and “lagging” indicators. Lagging indicators show progress in the past—for example, the practice’s average collections over the previous 3 months. They can help identify areas for improvement or show improvement over a period of time, but they can’t be used to anticipate future performance.
Use leading KPIs to make educated predictions about your practice. For example, a recent increase in the number of new patients may point to an upcoming increase in business. Staying with the map analogy, lagging indicators can help show how a practice got to its current point, and leading ones may be useful signposts.
Know Where You Want to Go
Practice metrics can’t give you step-by-step directions, but they can help guide you if you know where you want to go. An increase in new patients won’t translate into more appointments in the future without investing in effective retention and case acceptance strategies. Having access to helpful resources, such as those available from Patterson Dental, can help you chart your course.
Using KPIs Effectively
Like a map, KPIs are best monitored on an ongoing basis to ensure the practice is still on the right track. When assessing the effect of business changes, they provide the most accurate information when considered as trends over time. Unless you keep up with where you are, you won’t know whether you’re going to reach your goal on schedule until that day arrives.
The KPI map is complicated by the fact that there are many KPIs, and they depend on each other for success. Focusing on a single KPI may lead to a downturn in other areas. Balancing KPIs to assess finances, patient satisfaction, and process effectiveness is crucial to overall business health.
This is where Patterson Dental's Fuse Cloud-Based Dental Practice Software and its Practice at a Glance Dashboard come in.
“Fuse is one database for all your locations,” says Erin Smith, software product marketing manager for Patterson Dental. “So you can run comprehensive reports, or you can filter by location, or even by provider. Basically, you can get the data you need in the way that makes the most sense for your practice and where you’re trying to grow.”
The Fuse Solution
What’s your practice’s patient retention rate? Case acceptance rate? Average production per patient? More importantly, are these numbers rising or falling in your practice?
If the answer to these questions is, “I don’t know,” Fuse and its Practice At A Glance dashboard can help you find the answers.
Many KPIs are daily measures, but their real application isn’t as individual numbers, but as pieces of a larger puzzle.
“A lot of doctors are learning as they go and going by their gut,” says Erin. “They tend to judge based on a short-term view: I’m busy today, I’m busy tomorrow, business is good." But Smith believes that the longterm view is more important, and that doctors should have access to a whole list of different metrics and tie them all together.
Kathy concurs. “You can think you’re busy today and tomorrow, but then if something like COVID-19 happens, suddenly you don’t know what your numbers are. If you haven’t been planning ahead and now your schedule is empty, how do you know what you can do next?”
The Practice At A Glance dashboard displays key data points to track business metrics. “That’s a standard setup where everyone can start,” Erin explains. “Then, as they learn more about what they really need to keep an eye on, they can hide certain data points or arrange widgets in a different order to customize the dashboard.”
Onboard with Ease
Such intuitive visibility, combined with Fuse’s WalkMe step-by-step, interactive training, helps keep all team members on the same page and up to date, whether within a single office or across multiple locations. It also prevents loss of valuable knowledge through turnover.
“Frequently, if the person in charge of keeping an eye on the numbers leaves, the person who takes over only learns what they knew," explains Kathy. "That’s why software training is so important. All team members need to know how to understand reports and what they should be tracking.”
Find Your Opportunities
With so much data at your fingertips, where should you start to build your business strategy?
“Start by finding out your biggest opportunity for growth,” Kathy recommends. “Most of the time, I would say, that’s retention. And Fuse does a great job of tracking that.” One way to monitor retention in Fuse is on the Hygiene Retention widget on the dashboard. If you see
that 20% of your patients are consistently leaving without their next appointment, you can review your walkout process to increase the number of patients who leave with a future appointment. It also could be an early indicator of patient satisfaction and could prompt you to re-evaluate the patient experience.
In addition, Fuse can quickly take you beyond the surface to the details—and the resources needed to understand them. “The way Fuse is designed, you can click through a lot of the widgets and data points on the dashboard to get a SmartScreen with the details of why your numbers are the way they are. Then you can put steps in place to correct them,” says Erin.
“For example, there’s an Accounts Receivable widget that will tell you the age of all your open accounts receivables—what’s 30 days, 60 days, 90 days old or older, all color-coded. So you can look at that quick view and say, ‘Yeah, these accounts are definitely in the red, and I need to try to get those old balances paid quickly.’”
When you click on the widget, you open the Receivables SmartScreen, where you can view the details of the outstanding balances and quickly create statements and more. “It’s all in Fuse,” Erin adds.
“Almost all dental offi ces that don’t have something like Fuse have an offi ce manager who’s pulling all the reports on their software and putting the data in a spreadsheet.”
- Kathy Brodal, Patterson Dental
Use Your Time Efficiently
If all that sounds efficient, it’s because it is. “As a dentist, practice owner, business owner, you have a lot of responsibilities,” says Erin. “You should be spending your time acting on the data, not gathering it."
That’s where Fuse can help. Everything is available to act on, including real-time data, so users don’t have to run multiple reports. Instead, everything is highly integrated.
“Almost all dental offices that don’t have something like Fuse have an office manager who’s pulling all the reports on their software and putting the data in a spreadsheet," Kathy adds. "It takes hours and hours and hours a month to gather data when they could be managing the team or implementing strategies. Fuse can do that for them and save all of that time and effort.”
Follow the Data
Your data can help guide you to your ultimate goals. Don’t ignore it. When you pay attention to the metrics of your practice—from hygiene production to case acceptance and more—and implement an intuitive cloud-based software that gives you easy access to the big picture as well as the finer details, you have a road map that will lead you to success.
