What are KPI's and why do you need them for your dental practice?

KPI's Key performance indicators are monitors that are collected to enable you to measure performance and results. Essentially business’ use KPI’s to measure things within their business that they can monitor.  Commonly we see businesses that tend to only measure finance. However, we know that when delivering healthcare, working within a team and running a dental practice you need to measure much more than finances alone.

Just so you know, KPI’s don’t give you the answers, they allow you to raise questions and navigate your business. They allow you to gain a complete overview of your business, make quicker decisions and improve decision making based on the data. They allow for effective management and effective use of energy, early problem spotting and smart change strategies.

The beauty of being a business owner is that you can decide to measure whatever you want in your practice. However, you need to make sure it’s worth your energy and will allow you to reach your desired goals.

It’s crucial to collectively interpret the data as a team to ensure you are all pulling in the same direction.  If we purely measure our success by money alone one could misinterpret this as some sort of unethical sales technique and create mutiny on the ship. Whereas using money as a measure along with tracking and measuring the number of patients diagnosed, treatment planned, and case acceptance based on the whole teams understanding of dental disease will allow you to utilise the value of measuring money.

Below are our recommendations for categories of monitors that you should gather and that is centred around financials, patient care, professional fulfilment and practice growth. 

Financials

Assuming that you have a monthly target, this would be your simplest financial monitor as you are simply calculating what the practice has produced in revenue each month.  Because it is collected retrospectively, the biggest challenge that exists is that sometimes it’s a wing and prayer that carries you through to the end of the month.  Sound familiar?

Break that monthly target down into daily and weekly goals so that you can monitor it as you move through the month and plan ahead.

The next thing to consider is all the facets in the business that control the finances, and there are many. The two vital areas are your diagnosing, treatment planning and case presentation and your scheduling system.  When you see that the financial projections are falling, it allows you to look into what treatments plans are produced and what is the schedule looking like to be able to accommodate ideal treatment plans.

In summary, utilise the following:

• Practice monthly and daily goals
• Dentist/hygienist/ therapist monthly and daily goals
• Cancellations and no shows by each provider and open spaces

Its key for the whole team to fully understand the running costs of your dental practice. Overheads are generally high and lack of understanding can lead to both small and catastrophic losses.  It’s much easier to keep a full productive schedule if you understand the value to the patients’ health and the practice.

Patient care

By clearly stating what your goals are for your patients and within that, the type of treatments, care and service that you aim to deliver it becomes easier to create your ideal.  The goal should be for every patient to move towards health and your team can support them doing that by screening for disease, conducting risk assessments, developing treatment and/or preventive plans. 

Here we are tracking hygiene services as an example

Consider tracking the following:

• Routine hygiene appointments for a patient with no bone loss
• Periodontal maintenance
• Periodontal treatments
• Periodontal/hygiene assessment for a new patient
• Direct access hygiene
• Fluoride treatments and so on

We are assuming you are charging your hygiene per service and not charging for time, thus avoiding undercharging or failure to charge for more complex treatments. Monitoring these stats will demonstrate that your patients are being attended to according to their periodontal needs and allow you to track the growth of your hygiene department as well.

Collating the numbers monthly by appointment type gives you a clear picture of the care your patients were offered. 

Warning signs would be most patients fitting into a routine category, or 15 new patients to the practice and 1 of whom attended a new patient periodontal hygiene assessment.

Your hygiene department is of course way more than just periodontal therapy, the list of services is endless; caries prevention, management of erosion and sensitivity, professional fluoride is a service item that should be an added value and monitored and that’s not to mention adjunctive therapies, disease screenings and so on!

• Air Polishing (if you charge separately, although we don’t recommend that way)
• Genetic/Bacterial testing
• Oral/Systemic Wellness Testing
• Tooth Whitening
• Botox
• Dermal Filler
• Skin Health Treatments
• Any other service you offer in your hygiene department

These extra service items are what you have invested in as a practice and monitoring the number of procedures carried out each month will help you see your development and growth.

This type of monitoring is translated across the whole of dentistry and doing this is a great way of seeing collectively how you are progressing with new technologies and services that you are introducing to your practice.

Professional Fulfilment

Monitoring treatment items as described above is a great way to quickly view your progression into achieving your desired way of working.  Attending courses and investing in technology is the beginning of transforming the way you work but too often the structure of appointments and the way the practice runs can get in the way of being able to implement new skills and technology quickly.  Sadly, it is commonplace that you end up not utilising the skills at all. 

Let’s use the example that you want to offer more minimally invasive smile designs and you have invested in training in aligners and composite bonding.  It doesn’t just happen, you need to:

1. Begin by setting a goal of what you want to achieve each month e.g., 2 cases for the first month etc.
2. Set the fees and discuss with your team to ensure everyone is on board.
3. Block zones in the schedule so that the schedule can always accommodate these appointments
4. Have a protocol for your data gathering, planning and treatment presentation.
5. Have a marketing plan

At the end of each month, you gather the data related to how many cases you did and if you have achieved it you set higher goals and consider ways to reach that and if you didn’t, then you look at the 4 points and discuss what you didn’t do so well and identify areas to change.

Professional goals that stay in your head, lessen the likeliness of achieving them.  that chance of failure.  Shared goals allow the whole practice to support you in achieving your ambitions.

Practice Growth

A continuous flow of new patients and even more relevant is that high-quality new patients are required.  From establishing your goals for your patients, you move away from the ‘check-up’ and ‘clean’ to an oral health evaluation and knowing this helps you to position your marketing message and convey why patients should choose you instead of your competitors. 

Larger treatment plans are typically from new patients and so without them, you are continuously doing the ‘bread and butter’ dentistry which alone doesn’t fuel growth.  Delivering dentistry that significantly changes a person’s life will further feed into your marketing and both become synergistic.

The second part of practice growth is to always evaluate your existing patients as if they were a new patient.  Decide on your evaluation protocol and ensure that each patient receives the care they require based on their risk and needs.

What to measure:

1. Number of enquiries
2. The conversion rate of enquiries into appointments
3. Number of new patients
4. Marketing source (a goal is to always seek more patient referrals)
5. Value of treatment plans from NP
6. The treatment presented vs. treatment accepted

Evaluating conversions of enquiries should make you consider two things:

1. Are the calls being handled effectively?
2. Is marketing aligned with your service?

Evaluating the marketing source is also vitally important. Ensure you drill down to the exact source. To say the website is just not enough! Search to discover more detail. 

The value of treatment plans also tells you about data gathering and planning in alignment with the care you deliver and although they can vary between patients the average shouldn’t vary so much and if it does it means something is being done differently in the clinical area. 

Finally, the treatment presented vs. treatment accepted comes down to your presentation and selling skills.  Knowing and identifying this allows you to invest in training and development in this area if required.

Too often practices think they need marketing which of course always needs to be part of the strategy, but the vital statistic is the bigger picture of the connection between marketing to completion of treatment.

What do you measure in your practice?

Do you know how to use the data from your monitors?