Best practices for dental practice management – what is dental practice management and why it matters.
Running a dental practice can be incredibly challenging, especially as you are constantly searching for ways to improve your practice’s efficiency and bring in more patients. You may not know where to look for these insights or have enough time to search multiple places for them.
To make your role easier, we have gathered the best practices for dental practice management, including those that will help you achieve your goals. Among them, you will find innovative advice on improving the business’s efficiency to save time and gain more patients.
What is dental practice management?
Dental practice management refers to running the day-to-day operations of a dental practice. Essentially, dental practice managers are in charge of most aspects of the business, other than the actual dentist services.
Dental practice managers have numerous roles, including increasing revenue, collecting payments, building teams, communicating with patients, scheduling, marketing, and more.
Major trends influencing dental practice management, including KPI tracking.
The best way to track your dental practice management’s success is to use KPIs (key performance indicators). These provide an objective method of measuring how well your dental practice is doing and in which areas you should work to improve.
There are dozens of KPIs you could track as a dental practice manager, but the following are the most important:
- Practice Production: Track production at various time intervals, including by day, week, month, quarter, and year. Practice production is arguably the most important performance metric. As a bonus, it’s incredibly helpful in helping you confirm that any changes you make, including those suggested below, are effective.
- Average Production per Patient: This helps you see each patient’s average value to the practice. This tends to be a long-term metric.
- Profit: It should go without saying that you will track your practice’s profit, which is the collections minus the overhead costs. This is another metric crucial to measuring the success of various changes.
- Collections: Since the ultimate goal of the dental practice is to bring in money, you should also pay attention to the rate at which you collect payment from patients. After all, bringing in more patients is not helpful if they do not pay.
- Overhead: As a rule of thumb, you want the overhead to be about 59% in the case of general dentistry practices, with slightly different figures for specialised practices. You should ideally separate the overhead into categories and track each one.
- Percentage of Patients Currently Scheduled: You want to track the percentage of your patients that are currently scheduled for an appointment. To help ensure consistent revenue, most dental practices try to schedule the next appointment when the patient leaves their current one. The percentage of patients scheduled will vary significantly based on whether you follow this practice. Either way, pay attention to consistency and fluctuations.
- Number of New Patients: This KPI helps you measure your practice’s growth. It also helps you ensure you make up for any lost patients.
- Patient Attrition: Ideally, this figure will be lower than or the same as the number of new patients.
Innovative ideas to help reach your dental practice KPIs – the individual pieces of dental practice management.
As you track your KPIs, you should have a goal for each in mind. The following ideas will help you reach those goals.
Make the office appealing.
Unfortunately, about 60% of people.>, social media, and texts.
Offer flexible financing
Some patients put off going to the dentist because they cannot afford treatment, but that can cost you revenue. Avoid this by offering flexible financing options. Remember that offering more financing options will make it easier for patients to pay, resulting in more consistent revenue.
Consider a credit line.
It can make sense for your dental practice to have a line of credit available. You can then use this for the various short-term expenses or overhead costs of running your practice.
Watch daily banking
As you look at your financial KPIs, be sure to pay attention to your daily banking. Consider making daily bank deposits to help ensure your cash flow is recorded and that you collect all payments in a timely manner.
Evaluate supply costs
Take the time to look at what your dental practice spends on supplies and confirm that you are not over-spending. Look for areas to cut costs; just make sure you do not sacrifice quality to do so. Additionally, any time you plan on changing supplies that are directly part of the treatment, always consult the dentists in your practice before doing so.>
