KPIs for Office Management
Author: Felicia Sprague, Co-founder Dental Hive
As a dental office manager, it’s important to track your team and office’s success. Not sure how to effectively do this? By monitoring important KPIs (key performance indicators), you can help ensure your clinic is operating on the highest level. You can track as many KPIs as you would like (each clinic is different, we have 15+ that we monitor) but here are the top 5 we recommend.
Practice Production: Keeping track of production metrics is crucial for all dental offices. There are many variables involved: you don’t want to look at just your daily, monthly or yearly production as a whole. You need to track individual providers, net and gross production, as well as any specialty services you might offer (example: Invisalign production). Industry Benchmark for daily production in a general practice is $3,500 per dentist and $1,000 per hygienist.
New Patients: Unless you’ve reached your capacity for new patients, strive to welcome a minimum of 20-25 new patients per dentist each month. Each dentist should have an active patient count of 1,500. An active patient is considered to be one that has been to your office in the last 18 months. It’s important to be continuously auditing your patient base to ensure accuracy.
Staff Salaries: This KPI will give you some great insight when hiring or looking at salary bumps for your current staff. On average, your employee wages should amount to 20-25% of your collections. Retaining staff can be difficult so track this indicator in order to pay your employees a fair and competitive wage. This will create long-term employee/employer relationships, saving you on hiring and training costs.
Clinical Supplies: In order to maintain a healthy overhead, keeping dental supply costs low is key. If your office is anything like our office, someone always wants or needs something but it’s important to stay within the Industry Benchmark of 6-8% of collections. If your office is consistently higher than that, do a deep dive into what you can change. Review your purchasing, look at current inventory, and eliminate inefficiencies. Even reducing spending by 1% can increase net income by thousands.
Patient Retention: Keeping track of patient retention in your hygiene department is one KPI you do not want to sleep on. It costs less to care for an existing patient than it does to acquire a new one. If your hygienists or administration staff are booking back 90-95% of patients for their next hygiene appointment, your future schedules are going to look really healthy with wiggle room for appointment changes and new patients.
Tracking KPIs allows you to set targets and goals for yourself and your team to strive for. You can then gauge your clinic’s progress and gain insights that will aid in the overall success of your office.
Resources: https://www.dentaleconomics.com/practice/article/16386298/key-performance-indicators-for-dental-practices-management-by-statistics
About the Author: Felicia Sprague
Felicia Sprague is a dental office manager and co-founder of Dental Hive. Felicia is experienced team training, HR, dental systems development and implementation, and has a track record of increasing productivity in dental offices.
