Best Practices for Measuring the Success of Your Dental Practice

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There are so many factors that go into the success of a multilocation dental practice, like attracting new patients, building a connected team, and having access to meaningful reporting. Thats why visibility into how your practice has succeeded in the past is critical. The key to unlocking the success of your dental practice in the future will often be found in studying your business, operations, and clinical metrics. Vin Cardillo, president and CEO of Maeva Dental Advisors, visited The Dental Deep Dive podcast recently to discuss how dental practices can measure appropriate metrics and leverage those results into greater success in the future.

Metrics you should be tracking

When youre tracking metrics for your dental practice, its not beneficial for your employees or your practice to track every available metric. Narrow your focus on the core values of your business to get the best results. If your mission is to provide patients with the best care experience, ensure that youre reading reviews and following up with customer experience surveys. If you dont know where to start, Cardillo recommends looking at three distinct categories:

• Business
  For business metrics, the area of focus should be on daily business transactions like profit and loss numbers, supply expenses, lab expenses, the cost of dental assistants and hygienists.
• Operations
  Operations metrics refers to the operational aspects of your office. Here you should focus on hours of production, visits, number of new patients, the treatment acceptance rate, and A/R percentages.
• Clinical
  For clinical metrics, focus should be on care of your patients and how it relates to the profitability of your office. For instance, you should be looking at what percentage of revenue is generated by doctors or hygiene, what percentage of hygiene is periodontal focused, and even tracking your X-ray policies.

Driving success with culture

Starting a dental practice requires a lot of time, money, and patience. Studying and measuring metrics is a great way to better position your practice from the start, but most healthy practices also focus on their internal staff. You have to want to grow yourself as a leader and as a clinician. Its your job to let your team understand what is mediocre, what is acceptable, and what is great. Train them and show them how to get to great. Reward them for great. More importantly, just acknowledge them for great, said Cardillo. Offices with high turnover usually arent organized. If were not growing our people, were not growing ourselves. A good dental practice thrives on the people who work there every day. By investing in your team, you are investing in the future of your business.

How Dentrix Enterprise can help

Built specifically for the enterprise market, Dentrix Enterprise from Henry Schein One helps your multisite dental business or community health center (CHC) have the tools it needs for success. Dentrix Enterprise centralizes all your practice data, with reporting tools to help streamline the complexity of large organizations, and robust features, functionality and data-interface capabilities required by the enterprise market. For more information or to request a demo, visit DentrixEnterprise.com.