During a bike ride this weekend my cycle-computer decided to stop working. What that meant to me was that I could no longer track all of the vital statistics that are important to my performance. Without this cool little piece of technology I lost my ability to track speed, distance, altitude, time and all the misc averages that I so enjoy. Since I couldn’t pay attention my own numbers I found myself thinking about my dental practices out there and the importance of all of the Key Performance Indicators that can used to measure practice health.
Numbers can be many things to many people. For some, numbers can be highly motivating while others find them frustrating or even intimidating. To be honest I never thought I was smart enough to understand practice numbers and once I took the time to learn I can’t imagine trying to run a practice without being able to keep my fingers tightly on its financial pulse.
There are no secrets about what numbers are important to the health and profitability of a practice and I’d love to help every dentist and team member understand the fundamentals. Do you know your Net Production? Net Collections? Overhead? How much do you share with your team about how they can influence your bottom line? Does your hygienist know how to determine her own goals based on a simple formula? How can you look at team compensation with strategy rather than emotion?
If you are not currently tracking numbers on a regular basis, consider choosing just 3 Key Performance Indicators to pay attention to as a team for 90 days and see what happens. I’d wager a guess that you will see improvement!
I rode about 20 miles before I could get my computer to work again and I know that my performance was better when I was actively tracking. How might your performance increase if you got a better handle on YOUR numbers?
Blog Contributed By Sheri Kay
COO & Lead Practice Coach ACT Dental Practice Coaching
As a cyclist and a dentist, I enjoyed your article. I too like to keep up with the stats on both my bicycle computer and my dental practice. Along with the financial numbers, I find it’s also important to track new patient numbers and overdue recall percentages.
Ed it’s always fun to meet a fellow cyclist in dentistry! There are a bunch of us.
I agree that both NP numbers and overdue recall are also vital…and I actually have a much longer list of Key Performance Indicators that in a perfect world are being tracked regularly. I love knowing capacity utilization for all producers, avg productivity per patient and per hour, percentage of hygiene services that are perio, amount of dentistry being presented and accepted, and I could go on :-)
My thinking in the blog post was around what might the “bare bones most important numbers” be to track. What are your thoughts? Anybody else want to jump in on this?
Be safe out there!