Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs)! By establishing KPIs in your practice, you find ways to remove the emotion that doesn’t need to be there. Tiff and Kristy explain how KPIs drive a practice — and how to implement them if you haven’t started yet.
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Transcript:
The Dental A Team (00:00)
Hello, Dental A Team listeners. We are back again today and I say we again because I've got Miss Kristy here with me. You guys know how much I love her and podcasting with her is just, I told her today, like I just, you bring a sense of calm and it's great and letting it be on a, like Thursday afternoon, this is kind of cool for me ? and ending my week. I've got, you know, we've got things to do tomorrow, ending calls with this is really, really cool. So Kristy, thank you so much for being here today. How are you?
The Dental A Team (00:29)
Good and you?
The Dental A Team (00:31)
I'm good,
thank you. ? I'm... I was gonna say that, like what the heck? I'm so glad you're here though because, you know, this time last year you were here in snow and ice and I'm so glad you're here but it is cold and I heard you guys, record these, this is January right now, it'll be released in February but it's like so cold. It's like 43 degrees in the morning here and us Arizona women are just not used to that so.
The Dental A Team (00:34)
It's cold for Arizona.
The Dental A Team (01:01)
I agree and there's supposed to be ice and snow coming, not for us, we get rain, thank goodness, but I'm like, that's why we live here, so we don't have to deal with ice and snow. yeah, puts a little damper on travel, so we'll see. We'll see how that goes, but I am glad that you're here. This is the time of year that everybody comes and visits. February is a massive, massive time to be in Arizona. In March, we've got spring training games going, we've got...
Waste Management Open, we've got, oh my gosh, every weekend there's a taco festival or something going on. So this is the prime time to be in Arizona. If you wanna come visit, tell us that you're coming and we'll be happy to give you some suggestions. Kristy, we talk about these a lot and I'm excited because I know you actually thrive in this world a ton. You make decisions based on these. are phenomenal at projections.
four practices and the world of KPIs, which you guys, for those of you who don't know, key performance indicators, those are the indicators within your practice that tell you how you're performing. I had years and years and years ago now, like way too long to even count, I had a manager one time and she said, Tiff, I want you to start joining the KPI meetings on Thursdays with the CPA doc and I. And I said, okay. And then I ran over to my computer and I was like, Google, what is KPI? What does KPI mean? I was like, I'll be there.
That sounds great. This is like growth for me. You're putting me in. I was like, yep, I'll be there. And then I was like, what does this mean? So if you don't know what it means, you're not using them, you are not alone. I had to Google that once upon a time. And that was before Chat GPT. I feel like I would have been so much better off if I had that to break it down for me. But alas, here we are. And Kristy, I love KPIs. I love black and white decision making. I love any opportunity we have that we can remove some emotion.
from a decision, especially in the dental industry. We have a lot of emotions in the dental industry and being able to remove those and say that yes or no something is or isn't working. And my favorite piece of that is when we do that, Kristy, I think it gives us the opportunity to tackle the system and not make it personal about the person. Like it might not be that you suck.
it's that the system's not working or we're not using it correctly. And if that's the case, I'm fine. We start using it correctly or we alter it. But I think, Kristy, it makes me feel a lot better about accountability and about KPIs and just about leading teams when it's less about a feeling and a person and more about the system. So I'm excited. Kristy, tell me, why do you love KPIs?
The Dental A Team (03:41)
Yeah, for the same reason, Tip, because so many times we see people focused on the wrong thing. And when you really dial into the metrics, they start to tell a story, right? And sometimes even metrics can look a little bit deceiving, but that's why I like to say the numbers start to tell a story. And then we get to dig into it and figure out the story. So, you know, just in saying that, I think if I wasn't doing what I was doing, I would be some kind of detective. And I mean,
The Dental A Team (04:09)
I think
you would too.
The Dental A Team (04:10)
Maybe that's why it's so exciting for me, but like, and it's truth, right? The numbers don't lie. And so a lot of times we have misperceptions on things and that's the human aspect. So to give grace on us, and I also feel like what we measure expands, it grows, right? And so if we're focused on the wrong thing, what do we get more of? And so,
The Dental A Team (04:33)
Mm, true.
The Dental A Team (04:40)
I just think it's the fastest way to make improvements. And it's kind of funny Tiff, because in other things we do, if we want to lift weights or we want to lose weight, what do we do? Get on the scale or we're like, we lift 50 pounds. my gosh, I added another weight. We measure it really well, but in dentistry it's like taboo. ? we can't do it. Like it's so bizarre, right? But I just, again, it's the true measure. We talked about this.
The Dental A Team (05:02)
I agree.
The Dental A Team (05:07)
on a different podcast of winning. It truly lets us know if we're winning or losing, and maybe we'll focus on the wrong thing, right? I know you've heard it a zillion times. Doctors come on, need more new patients. I need more new patients. I need more new patients. And we look at their outstanding treatment list and it's like $3 million. And I'm like, do you really know what you mean? Right? So again, sometimes it lets us win faster because we can breathe direct and focus on
The Dental A Team (05:26)
You
for sure.
The Dental A Team (05:37)
what's really gonna get us there.
The Dental A Team (05:40)
Yeah, I love that you said that. I love the idea of focusing on the wrong thing because I think we do that a lot. focus on the negative, right? We're like, what was our attrition rate instead of what's our new patient and our active patient count? Are those growing? Because if our new patient count and our active patient count are growing, attrition's fine. But if we're looking at attrition rate, we're like, how many are we losing? We're grasping. It's a different kind of energy and that will grow. So if you're looking at it,
you want your attrition to grow, then keep watching it. If you want your active patient count to grow, keep watching it. And if it's not growing, then you tackle the systems and assume attrition is happening. So I love that you said that because it broke it down, I hope for everyone, a little bit differently there. And our podcast today is How KPIs Drive a Practice. And I think in that simple statement and those two minutes you were just talking, you just broke it down, like verbatim on how it drives a practice because
what you focus on will grow no matter what. you're right, it's so everything in our life, we count everything. Like it's just human nature to count and track everything we do. We track our money, we track our expenses, we track our weights, we track our weight, we track everything that we do, we track our gas mileage. know, my sister's always like, ah, I got 16 gallons or whatever. I need to go get the best gas price. And I'm like, girl, I don't.
I don't know what she's like, what is your car get? I'm like, I have no idea. But there's, know, she's tracking that. But like, then we go into a dental office, it's like, don't talk numbers. Don't talk numbers. Don't track it. Because that's going to make somebody feel bad. It's like, no, we're going to track it. We're going to see that we're winning. And we're going to feel really, really good. Like my sister, sometimes she comes home and she's like, ah, I guess mileage was down. Sometimes she comes home and she's like, guess what? Simple. But that's how simple it can be.
doesn't have to be astronomical, but those small wins add up to something astronomical. And I have had so many clients that, I've had clients that have purchased practices, they're like, all right, when are we starting marketing? I'm like, well, what do you mean? You've got, like, what's your patient count? What's your active patient count? And then what's the total patient count of that practice? Because you have, every patient right now is a new patient. Starting marketing,
is a wild use of your money. Let's internal market, let's get your exams better. There's so many different avenues that we think are just the norm, so we jump on board with them. But then when we pull and extract those actual KPIs, we can find the root of what we need and the root of any problems that there might be, any systems that need to be revamped. So I love that, because that's how you're driving success, by watching the KPIs.
Kristy, and you've got, I hope everyone knows, I don't say it every time, but Kristy's done so much in her dental career and held so many titles and she's consulted for far longer than she's even been a presence here at the Dental A Team. We're so grateful for her. Kristy, in all of your experience, what do you feel are the easiest KPIs to start tracking if we're not tracking any? And then what are the most valuable KPIs maybe that people don't think of?
The Dental A Team (08:53)
Ooh, that's deep. Obviously, I think we have to look at it as like two different forks in the road, right? Because so many times we hear the practice of a million dollars and then we hear the practice of six million. And I think doctors, you guys get all ramped up and think if I'm the million dollar guy, why am I the six million dollar guy? And I'm thinking, wait, wait, you don't necessarily want to be that guy. You're actually more profitable than, you know.
The Dental A Team (08:55)
I I like that one.
Correct.
The Dental A Team (09:22)
So it's not just what's happening in the practice, but also how profitable you are, right? And truly us here at the Dental A Team, we're looking to make sure you're hitting that profitability because that's where the true freedom is. But with that being said, the biggest KPIs out of the gate is what do I need to hit every month to be profitable? And then I measure my production, net production.
and collections. And ? I am going to throw new patients in there, but in a different way, because doctors do want new patients and a lot of times they're getting them. But don't just look at how many I'm getting. Look at how many are reappointing. ? you know, it's one thing that you're getting them and you might be doing limited, limited and letting them go out the back door. So again, look at those, but also
put more weight on how many are getting reappointed. And then ? I also like doctors to look at diagnostics, dollars and diagnostic or sorry, acceptance dollars and percentage. ? They go hand in hand. It can't just be percentage of acceptance because maybe I'm not accepting enough to even get to that goal. Yeah.
The Dental A Team (10:31)
case acceptance.
Yes,
yes, I love those. Yeah.
The Dental A Team (10:46)
And lastly,
probably in that tip would be your reappointment rate. How many are we reappointing? Because keep those patients of yours. Don't have to spend so many external dollars to gain more because if we just keep what we have and too often we look at how many people are sitting in our inactive pile or we don't look at it and you have a whole nother practice sitting there that you could tap into.
The Dental A Team (11:13)
Yeah, I love that. I love what you said about the case acceptance dollars, the diagnostics and the case acceptance dollars. I too have doctors, I love having them ? track their diagnosis and then their dollars. Number one, I hated being a treatment coordinator that had no control over how much was being diagnosed and only initially when I was treatment coordinator, were really only looking at case acceptance, which is very popular.
So case acceptance, case acceptance, and then they're like on your neck and that call these three people, why didn't these, like call the people and like I have called all the people. I can't, and we have so many clients, right, that the TC's are like I've called all the people, Tiff, can't, Kristy, I can't call anymore. Cool, it might not be in the case acceptance. Sometimes it's in the diagnosis and then to loop back to your new patient statement, all of those go so hand in hand and this is why, ? heaven help me, this is why.
things like our scorecards, clients of Dental A Team that talk about the scorecard. This is why the scorecard is so important because you can look at a dental analytics screen and it's choppy, all over the place. The scorecard brings it together so that you can see what's affecting something else because to your point of the new patients, I had a practice near and dear to my heart. He hit his massive goal this year and I'm so proud of him. We worked really hard on, it was, you know,
Timelined out for five years and he hit it literally two weeks before his deadline, his date. One of the things that was holding his practice back was the new patients. He needed more new patients, needed more new patients, so his marketing company is like, all right, we're gonna ramp up new patients. And then all of a sudden we've gotten new patients, but it's like, we're not growing. There's nothing on the schedule, what's happening? And so I said, okay, what kind of new patients? And we had so many emergency, limited, transient, going through town, looking for an emergency.
He was doing a lot of same day dentistry, but not getting things booked on the schedule and not really adding to his patient count, because there wasn't reappointments happening. When we dialed that in, we found that and I was like, here's the key, switched his marketing, his new patients went up,
Then we focused in on his case acceptance. And then like you said, with the dollars, we're seeing, are they accepting fillings?
Are they accepting crowns? Are we getting the near cases? Like what is the case acceptance percentage is cool, but what are we actually, what's the procedure that's being the dollar amount and is there a ceiling maybe in our treatment planning, either back office, front office, wherever it is, is there a ceiling that our system needs to be able to help us overcome in diagnosing a certain dollar amount or treatment planning a certain dollar amount?
The Dental A Team (14:03)
Yeah, I love that you say that, And as the TC, that's the one that gets me because so many doctors go back up there or come to us and say, they're just not closing it. And I always tell my practices, case acceptance is a team sport. And literally, it starts from before they even call the office. Like everything you're doing is contributing to their trust. And so ? truly, docs,
I know you don't want to hear this, but it's your job to get them to yes with treatment and ? financial coordinators get them to yes financially. So some of them can work heroics and they do, but it is totally a team sport. So going back to the diagnostics too, you asked a tool that I use ? that maybe isn't so looked at. And I would say print your procedure count report yearly and just take a look, you know?
Are you doing four surface fillings? And I'm not saying that you shouldn't, but is it aligning with your philosophy? And are you giving patients the choice for long-term care? Because sometime that probably four surface filling is going to turn into something, you know? And let your patients decide. Let them decide.
The Dental A Team (15:18)
Yeah.
Yes, I love that I have worked with many practices that they do give the options, but they assume that their patient base wants something specifically or can only afford something specifically. So they may give the options, but they kind of talk them into starting with something and started just leaving it on the table and saying what, if this were your mouth and roles were reversed, that we often say,
this were your mom, if this were your sister, if this were your brother. But I like to think, what if we were in different seats and the patient or the dentist, you were sitting in that chair, what would you want someone to tell you? Because you might even still err on the side of like, mom, when it happens, we'll fix it, but like, let's just do this patch for now, right? Because I don't, we don't want to get you numb. Like you might still err on that side for a family member, the, know, quote unquote conservative, but if you were sitting in that chair,
what would you want the dentist to say to you? And I think that makes a massive difference. And that is like your detectiveness, right? That's your detectiveness, but it works and it's what practices need sometimes. And I think, Kristy, part of those pieces, and you showed me your AR thing yesterday and how you diagnose that. And sometimes we do have to go to those spaces.
The Dental A Team (16:17)
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Dental A Team (16:40)
because you can't see it in the other areas. like, gosh, something is here, but that's why you look at those KPIs that are gonna drive success. And then when one of them isn't working, when one of them isn't hitting the metric that you want it to, you dive deeper. You're not just going to say, okay, every month let's pull the procedure code report. You're gonna say, if case acceptance, if we're not hitting production, case acceptance isn't working or diagnosis isn't working, now we're gonna dig a little bit deeper.
I think what tends to happen is we either go surface and we're like, everything's fine and we ignore issues or we go so deep that we're in the weeds and nobody has time to see the patients. We're just pulling reports all the time.
The Dental A Team (17:20)
Yeah, it's so funny. So much psychology goes into it, right? Like our doctors get so upset in dentistry. I remember like doctors thinking, well, we're the only ones that do free consults. Medical doctors don't do free consults. Why do we do it in dentistry? You know what I mean? But yet we also complain, my schooling costs so much and they don't want to pay me what I'm worth, you know? And it's like,
Almost everything, it's funny when we get into it and I work with clients, I'm like, we kind of caused it. We taught them. How many times do we answer the phone and we go, do you have insurance before we even know their name? You know? So it's funny. It's like an oxymoron in a way, but I love that you brought that up because many times we do it to ourselves.
The Dental A Team (18:10)
Yeah, yeah, we just spin our wheels on something, to find it and trying to get it right in an industry where nobody's taught how to do this stuff. guys, doctors learned how to be dentists and that's it. It's a rare occasion that you come across anybody who is taught how to run a dental practice. And dental is different than medical. So even healthcare professionals, right? People who have a degree in healthcare management, it's different.
This is why we're here. This is what we do. This is this is years and years. mean, across the whole Dental A Team team, like we should count that up. That'd be a lot of years. I don't even know anymore. We've grown to so many consultants. I don't even want to try to count that right now. We'll do that later. We'll ask Josh to do that for us. But regardless, there's so much wealth of knowledge here in.
The Dental A Team (18:57)
Yeah.
The Dental A Team (19:04)
ensuring that and we've done such a great job at finding the solutions and the systems to at least get templates and things started to customize for practices. I think that's just an immense value that consultants like the Dental A Team bring is that space of uniformity. these are things that we've seen work. Let's start here and then let's layer on top for you and let's adjust it for your practice and your team.
and those KPIs that drive success, pretty universal. And you said, you know, the common ones, production collections, new patients, diagnosis, case acceptance, and I loved your reappointment rate for new patients and just in general, those tell you the stories. And then from there, we dig and dive deeper. So I love it, Kristy. Thank you so much. think if I were to give an action item, it would be to revamp.
your KPIs if you're digging too deep and grab some new ones if you're not going deep enough, if that makes sense. So, Kristy, anything else you'd like to add?
The Dental A Team (20:09)
No, I love it. The only thing I would say, Tip, I know you have the saying down better, but use, love the numbers, right? Don't use them as sticks, is that?
The Dental A Team (20:17)
Yeah.
Yes,
yes, numbers are here to guide us. They're stars to guide us. They're not sticks to beat ourselves up with. Yeah, years and years of presenting with Kiera. Awesome, well you guys, go check your KPIs, go check your scorecards. If you're a Dental A Team client, you should have a scorecard. If you don't, get after your consultant. Everyone has scorecards this year, so we're good to go. But if you don't know how to use it or if you're confused by it,
The Dental A Team (20:26)
There you go. Love it. Yeah. Love it. ?
The Dental A Team (20:48)
or if you're not a Dental A Team client yet and you want information on it, please by all means reach out. We're here to help you. We wanna make sure that everyone is successful, whether you are a one-on-one client with us, a group client, or just here as a listener, we wanna make sure that you are all successful. So reach out, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com, and you guys, we'll catch you next time. Thanks so much, thanks, Kristy.
The Dental A Team (21:08)
Thank you.