.png)
A healthy, strong dental practice will have a healthy, strong production per hour (pph) and strong profitability. When determining the health of your dental practice, dentists need to consider their key performance indicators (KPIs).
KPIs are accurate statistics, that represent important factors in your dental practice's success. KPIs measure and give you a monthly summary. KPIs are based on your practice's data, providing an accurate review of your dental practice's performance in key areas.
In order to build and grow your dental practice, you need to know what areas of your practice to strengthen. Looking at your profit and loss statement won't give you the roadmap you need, to build upon your practices foundation.
Let's take a look at the following Key Performance Indicators:
Production Per Hour (PPH): One of the most important KPIs that you need to know. What is the dental practices PPH? What is each dentist's PPH? What is each hygienist's PPH? The health of your dental practice relies on what your practice is billing or what the team's production per hour is. Your practice cannot grow unless you are growing your team's PPH daily, monthly and yearly.
Active Patients: Do you know what percentage of active patients are scheduled in Hygiene? Do you know what percentage of active patients are scheduled in with a dentist? Do you know the number of patients being re-activated? If you are unaware of how many active patients are in your practice, you are unaware if your practice is staying the course, increasing or declining. A practice increasing its scheduled active patient base, indicates a healthy and growing practice.
Case Acceptance: I know that you know the importance of case acceptance in your practice. What is the percentage of case acceptance? Is it 30% - 50% - 90% acceptance? A healthy, strong dental practice should have between 80% - 85% acceptance rate, on proposed treatment plans. If you are not achieving a minimum of 80% case acceptance, you need to ask... Why? Building a roadmap to increase case acceptance, is key to achieving your dental practice's goals.
New Patients vs. Attrition: A strong dental practice needs to acquire 30 - 45 new patients per month in order to achieve healthy growth. The average production of a new patient is at minimum, double the production of an active patient. The important question we have to ask is... Do you know how attrition is affecting your dental practice? How many patients are you inactivating a month? Generally dentists don't take attrition into account - in order to get an accurate number of new patients you need to subtract the number of lost patients each month.
Growing Production: New patients are not the only avenue in growing production and profitability in your dental practice. Adding new dental services increases the practice's PPH. What dental services would you like to offer your patients but have yet to implement into your practice? What would you need in order to implement these services?
These five KPI's are only a starting point. A dental practice has many key performance indicators. These indicators result in your understanding of the health and strength of your dental practice. Knowledge of where you are, gives you the ability to go where you would like to grow.