Resilience in Dentistry: Mastering 3 Key Metrics for Success During Challenges

Enhanced clarity on your dental practice’s past and present, including current trends, is essential to boosting the practice’s bottom line. If a business leader lacks this clarity, anxiety, and panic can set in anytime. In situations of tension, leaders tend to make decisions based on gut feelings.

This is both detrimental and dangerous, especially when trying hard to claw your way back from losses. It is essential to benchmark and monitors key performance metrics to pave, for yourself, a path forward.

Know the Numbers for Dental Practice Growth

Attrition vs. New Patient Growth

Average new patients are worth twice the value of existing ones. It is, hence, mandatory to try and welcome them into your dental practice—even in the worst of times.

The average dentist requires 25–50 new patients every month to ensure consistent growth.

The new patients are an indicator of how well the dental team has been performing.

Even though you may be having a steady flow of patients, do you correctly know if the attrition is outpacing your current growth? If you subtract the number of patients lost from the total number of new patients, you easily derive your net gain or loss numbers.

Dentists are generally surprised by the outcomes. But it is hard evidence that enhancements need to be made continuously to keep active patients attracted to your practice.

Look at New vs. Active Patients

During the first few months of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, there was an immense focus on communication, especially with existing patients and making sure that their demands were satisfied first. That is a good thing as they are the ones who have been faithful to your dental practice and were compelled to postpone care.

But as you’ve been open for a while now, it is time to let the new patients know that you are open for business and are following necessary precautions to keep them safe. Welcoming new patients on board is important, especially if you are spotting holes in the schedule owing to pent-up demands coming to a pause.

During the first year, an average new patient is twice as valuable as an existing one. To make sure that you are getting more new patients and are increasing production, you could:

•      Try to extend your office hours
•      Consider setting aside times or dates to allow patients to consult you
•      Use unique communication campaigns and innovative targeted marketing to connect with new patients

Being accessible to new patients and flexible could help provide a strong competitive edge in the prevalent market. Looking at the overall production from existing and new patients, it’ll indicate how the recovery has been progressing.

Review Your Case Acceptance Trend

For every 15 treatment plans that you present, how many of your patients accept it? Are members of your team aware of the conversion rate? Every patient who does not accept leaves your office without planning to come back, meaning that you lose out on revenue.

Now is the ideal time to put forward the idea of holistic care to your patients. Why? Patients have started expecting more treatment on a single visit. Time is precious to them and many prefer to limit interactions due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Discuss the notion of comprehensive care with them and emphasize the undeniable connection between an individual’s oral as well as overall health. They are going to appreciate it and feel that you and your team genuinely care for their well-being.

Understanding your precise case acceptance rate enables you to establish realistic goals, fostering teamwork and collective success.

Practice intelligence gets the guesswork out of making critical business decisions. With it, you can pivot during ever-evolving times and have clarity on how individual marketing and operational decisions impact the results.

Besides, your team can predict what is likely going to happen based on earlier trends. You can cut down on inefficiencies, take advantage of new patient opportunities, maximize ROI, and understand patients better. And when you are empowered to do these, you can give them the best experience in the dental chair they have had.