Taking the Pulse of Your Dental Practice

Dental practice software is powerful.  You can pull hundreds of pages of reports and gather an enormous amount of data.  But do you need all that to take the pulse of your practice?

When Albert Einstein taught at Princeton, he would sometimes write on the blackboard, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Not everything that you track in your software matters, while some very important barometers of success are not tracked at all.  If you want to quickly take the pulse of your dental practice, I recommend you focus on three areas: treatment acceptance, new patients who receive comprehensive exams, and accounts receivable older than ninety days.

There is no fancy report for treatment acceptance, but the front team can easily track it.  If patients have dental treatment, new or pending, track whether or not they schedule.  Then review your results at least monthly.  Anything less than eighty percent for a general dentist indicates you have many opportunities for improvement.

Your practice software will track new patients.  But what you need to review is how many of those new patients received comprehensive exams, something the front team can easily determine.  Having twenty new patients receive comprehensive exams is obviously much better than a bunch of emergencies who fail to return.

Finally, when you review your accounts receivable aging report, pay close attention to total accounts older than ninety days.  If that amount is growing or if that amount is much more than ten percent of your total outstanding balance, you and your team may need some fine-tuning.

What does the pulse of your practice tell you?  If you’re not sure, it’s time well spent to find the answer.

Learn more about how our dental consulting can help you improve your practice pulse.

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