Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable, outcome-based statements that you use to measure your ability to meet your business goals or objectives. When closely monitored, KPIs provide insight on how well a business is performing, help to make operational changes, and keep staff focused. You want to make sure that your goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Here is an example: increase doctor production by 20% and hygiene production by 30% in the next six months.

Before setting a KPI, however, you must first identify the problems your practice is experiencing. Next, identify the desired results or outcomes you want. Then plan and implement the training needed to achieve the outcomes identified. After that, you can begin stating and working on the KPIs you want to monitor and track in your practice.

Dentrix Ascend has the tools to help. The Insights dashboard provides you with a collection of reports that are important for monitoring the financial health of your practice. The reports are grouped by various aspects of running a practice, so you can easily identify which reports to generate based on the type of data that is desired. To view the Insights dashboard, expand the Home menu, and then click Insights (under Reports). The Insights dashboard displays your active patients in recare, production trends, and a treatment tracker.

Production and Schedule Optimization
Schedule Optimization encompasses new patients, appointment, activation, case acceptance, referrals, and broken appointments.

• Are your new patients or current patients returning for follow-up care or scheduling treatment-planned procedures?
• Do you know where your practice stands with these numbers?
• Where are your patients being referred from?

If you do not monitor this information, you cannot see your progress in these areas. Monitoring your patient reappointment percentage allows you to follow up on important data and gives you the ability to increase production per appointment.

The Production by Provider Type Report provides a visual representation of the production amounts and percentages for each provider type. The pie chart helps you immediately identify the practices areas that must be improved. We want to look at a healthy mix of hygiene and doctor production. An average production mix of 65-75 percent for doctors and 25-35 percent for hygiene is ideal. If your production numbers are down, you will want to try focusing on improving case acceptance by helping patients overcome financial worries, fear of procedures, and/or any other barriers they may have for not scheduling. Then, you can measure whether your efforts were successful.

Recare
The Active Patients in Recare Report measures the number of patients who visited the office in the past 18 months. This affects the current and future cash flow of your practice. If your active patients are declining month over month, it is time to act and set up measures to ensure patients return for future hygiene visits. If your return appointments fall below 85 percent of active patients in hygiene, it is time to act and make sure team members are appointing patients for their recare visits. This information is available with a click of your mouse on the Dentrix Ascend Insights dashboard.

Accounts Receivable
The Insights dashboard includes billing and collection reports to help you evaluate your aged receivables and applied collections, along with an adjustment summary.  Profitable practices set a goal to collect at least 98 percent of their total adjusted production (gross production minus adjustments). Your management of accounts receivable determines your profitability. Many practices fail to compare their outstanding A/R totals at least once a month. These numbers are key indicators of whether you have effective collection processes in place.

Analyzing your practice metrics help you correlate your data with personal and team member behaviors. Once you know where you are, you can begin setting goals to impact your production per visit. This will drive your annual patient value. You are on your way to exciting growth.

Additional Information

• To learn more about the reports on the Insights dashboard, read the Insights reports in the Resource Center.
• To learn more about production reports on the Insights dashboard, read Production by Provider Type – Pie Chart Report in the Resource Center.
• If you need help identifying your office problems or need expert advice tailored to your practice and your team, learn how Dentrix Ascend can help with Profitability Coaching.

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