Are You Checking the Vital Signs of Your Practice?

Imagine if instead of a dashboard readout your car issued a month-end report, telling you how fast you were traveling on average per day, what your total fuel consumption was, or that you were running low on oil – two weeks ago. I think we can all see how that wouldn't be very helpful.

Some of that data might be useful if you're a mechanic, or a statistical analyst, but if you're the driver you also need key information now while you're driving in order to make decisions and adjust your actions accordingly.

We all recognize how necessary it is to have dashboard feedback in our cars, but for some reason when it comes to the practice, many dentists wait for the month-end report to get crucial data and don't realize that they've been driving blindly the whole time.

It is one thing to measure retention by recording how many patients return for hygiene within a target period; it's another thing to influence those return visit numbers by using the information intelligently. One practice I know that was going through a merger knew that slippage in hygiene retention could be a problem with all the changes, so they made sure everyone tracked pre-appointments carefully and stayed on top of it. The close attention paid off. Within a year, a retention rate that had hovered in the mid-80s had increased to 93 percent. I have seen similar results when practices track case acceptance above a certain level on a daily basis. Just being aware of where you stand can make all the difference, because it draws your focus – and what you focus on works.

The common objection I hear to implementing an ongoing data tracking system is that it makes things more complicated. Dentists feel there is already a lot of record keeping going on in any dental practice and this just adds another layer of complexity. The fact is, for leadership purposes you only need to concern yourself with four key patient behaviors:

1. Are they accepting treatment?
2. Are they appointing ahead?
3. Are they paying promptly?
4. Are they inviting others?

These are the behaviors that drive practice success at all levels and if you and your team use these basic dashboard indicators to guide your actions, it actually makes things less complicated.

To use another metaphor, consider how complicated the human body is and how intricately the various organs have to work together. However, medical doctors evaluate a patient's condition and monitor progress by tracking a few key vital signs such as heart rate, respiration, blood pressure and temperature. What we're talking about here is tracking the vital signs of your practice in a similar way and for a similar reason. This way you can reduce what can be a bewildering array of data to a few essential indicators and use that information to guide deeper explorations where necessary. It's not about making things more complicated, it's about being comprehensive in your approach to it and emerging with a pure understanding that clarifies – and actually simplifies – your life.