Whether you’re selling a dental practice, acquiring one, or simply evaluating your current performance, analytics can provide your team with key data.
Why use analytics to gain more insight into your business? These metrics provide your business with objective data directly related to its operations. This enables you as a business owner to make decisions based on empirical evidence.
If you are wondering how you can leverage analytics at your own dental practice, you’ve arrived at the right place. We’re going to cover some essential metrics you should be tracking to help you make better and more informed decisions for your practice.
Essential Dental Practice Analytics
Financial and operational analysis helps you gain a more complete understanding of how well your business is operating. You can identify potential pitfalls, growth opportunities, and areas that need improvement.
Dental consulting teams like Duckett Ladd use a variety of platforms, software suites, and analysis techniques to evaluate a practice’s performance. In this guide, we’ll review the essential analytic categories that your team should be tracking.
Appointment Data
Analytics turn your raw appointment data into useful, illustrative information.
The following data points, among others, can all be tracked over time:
- New appointments
- Repeat appointments
- Canceled appointments
Appointment analytics may reveal how well your team is performing and point to likely upward or downward trends that are already in motion.
How appointments were scheduled is another important analysis category.
Are patients finding your practice through paid ads, social media, organic search engine results, or direct website visits? This data helps your team to redirect outreach funds into the methods that are providing the best return on investment.
Time Spent Per Task
What are the average turnaround times for your staff for completing specific tasks?
Time spent per task can be determined using time-tracking software. Employees use the software to start and stop a clock that tracks the time spent on certain tasks, such as updating patient charts.
To determine a target time per task, take the fastest employee’s average completion time and the slowest employee’s average completion time and use the midpoint between the two. This provides a stable baseline for setting internal standards. Faster employees can slow down and focus on quality while slower employees can work to improve turnaround times.
If a task takes one hour to complete, it costs your business one hour’s worth of pay to the employee that completes it. Understanding the cost of certain tasks helps your team to prioritize, reassign, or rethink some tasks accordingly.
Revenue
Are you bringing in more money than you’re spending on a monthly basis?
Are there aspects of the business that require more funds than you expected?
Take time to review your revenue streams, average cash flow, and expenditures. Analytics performed on these metrics can help your team expand or tighten your budget to improve the business’s net revenue.
Average Patient Review Scores
Websites and apps that compile reviews and ratings allow patients to share their thoughts and criticisms. Scores and reviews aren’t always fun to read, but they’re useful.
What are your practice’s average ratings? Are the same complaints voiced over and over again in numerous reviews? Potential patients might be swayed by this public commentary.
If your practice is trending under four stars across most review platforms, take a good look at the feedback. Learn how you can improve the patient experience. In turn, your business will prosper as ratings improve and patients choose to seek out and return to your practice.
Capacity and Bandwidth
If your practice is reaching its maximum capacity or internal bandwidth, that’s a sign that you might be expanding more quickly than you can properly manage.
Once you’ve reached 85+% capacity at a stable rate for several months in a row, it’s time to consider some growth-oriented changes. These may include hiring more staff, relocating to a larger office, or opening a second location.
Get More Analytics Insights from Dental Business Experts
At Duckett Ladd, we help dentists grow their practices. We’re a team of CPAs and advisors and CPAs dedicated 100% to the dental industry.
We put the following three steps into motion when working with a dental practice owner:
- Diagnose the practice – identify your unique challenges and pain points.
- Develop a treatment plan for growth – sustainable, healthy growth that ensures long-term success.
- Enjoy the success you deserve – while our team provides continued support on specialized financial planning and business aspects of your practice.
If you’re interested in using analytics to gain insights into the state of your business, contact our team.
