What are Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and what do they mean for your practice?

Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are measurable outcomes that contribute towards your business’s overall aims and objectives. In a Dental Practice this could be areas such as:

• UDA targets 
• Revenue earned
• Average employee production
• Operating expenses

KPI’s need to be monitored at different times of the year by your senior staff. The KPI’s will reveal key details about performance, profitability, operations, and other important areas. Whilst it doesn’t matter if you can’t hit every KPI, it is important to focus on the ones that will help grow your practice and improve your business strategies. Without identifying each KPI that you want to measure for your practice, essential opportunities could be missed to help drive team morale and implement successful goals.

Over half of practices don’t know where to find the information they need and over ¾ of dentists surveyed either do not measure success or only do so occasionally!

This is where having a software package in your practice to monitor this, is a particularly useful tool to implement into your practice. It is a way for practice staff and associates to track, trace and forecast their individual performance, on the go. Both practice and individual data is accessible at your fingertips in a convenient web portal, enabling your team to benchmark and take ownership over their own success through KPI monitoring.

Below are a few areas that your staff and yourself can keep track on:

1. Practice Production

Practice production is what every dentist needs to monitor and keep track on. It is easy to recognise when your office has had busy and slow periods which could trigger off alarm bells. If you have noticed an increase in production per patient for the month, but your profits are going down, then you should question where the money went?

So by keeping on track of your income will help you measure how your practice is doing both day-to-day and throughout the year.

2) Average Production Per Patient

Average Production Per Patient or Annual Patient Value (APV), helps you to measure how much revenue each of your patients brings to your dental practice. When it becomes low, then this needs addressing and you and your team need to be doing more to encourage add on or additional services and possibly bring your costs down to attract new patients.

You might also notice that whilst you are treating a significant number of patients but their spend is too low, you may wish to allow longer appointment times so the staff can connect better with their patients, creating more opportunities for additional care such as hygienists, tooth whitening, dental implants etc.

3) Practice Profit

Your profits are very important, but there it is different from other KPI’s and definitely worth tracking. After subtracting your staff costs and materials, you can calculate what percentage a procedure costs. That means if 76% of your revenue from dental implants goes to cover your overheads, you will be aware of the monetary loss if you accept a lower-paying insurance cover.

4) Cancellations & No Shows

This KPI is a common occurrence for dental practices and unfortunately it is out of your control. Your Dental Practice staff should track this to account for your daily bookings and production time. You might just need to improve your reminder and scheduling process using a more automated approach such as text or email reminders. For those repeat offenders, you may consider enforcing fees as a consequence.

Summary

Being able to monitor individual performance and the overall success of your practice is important. By empowering your staff to keep your software package up to date, it will help you to determine how well your business is doing and can help boost motivation towards targets. So where possible, enable access to business-related insights on every level as it will not only take away pressure from your management team, but can also help your clinical team to better understand what income they are bringing into the practice.

So get your team to monitor their successes and trigger tangible, positive actions to stay on track all the time.