Ahh, another day to spend, another patient to help! When a potential patient enters your dental practice, several things would probably pop into your mind as a dentist. How can you help them today? Are they currently in pain? When was the last time they’ve visited a dentist? Is there a particular question they want to ask you about? As such you, the dentist, are responsible for evaluating the dental health of your patients. This means you would know which treatments they should take, procedures they should go through, or which products would work well for their individual needs. Surprisingly, this can also be applied to your dental marketing company and your dental practice.
Now, with how busy your day might go with helping all of your patients, you might not be able to fully analyze your dental practice’s success. But there’s no need to worry, the dental marketing company can assist you with this! You see, just like how you would with your patients, there are several metrics to figure out whether your dental practice is doing well.
So what are these metrics? If you want to learn more, read more below:
Production per visit (PPV)
With production per visit, you can learn on which types of treatment, as well as how much of them you’ve given to your patients. It also lets you know if the amount of patients you have in your practice has dwindled. It can also inform you if it’s due to patients receiving less treatment.
Annual patient value (APV)
For this metric, you need to figure out whether the value of your patients has increased or not. So how do you get the annual patient value? Well, all the marketing company needs to do is to calculate the collections per patient, for all of your active patients. Once they do and if they see that it’s increasing, this means the value of your patients has also increased and they are receiving more treatment that they need. This metric lets you know if you’re seeing enough patients and know what you’re collecting from every active patient that goes into your dental practice.
Pre-appointment percentage
So you figured, so long as you have patients entering your dental practice, you should be fine, right? Well, you’d actually also have to see if the people entering are new or if they’ve visited before. The pre-appointment percentage finds out whether your dental practice has recurring patients, as well as new patients. It also informs you who have made a scheduled appointment with you. See, this metric, in particular, is determined by checking your active patients to see how many patients have actually made future appointments. So if the percentage is low, this means your active patients aren’t coming back and, unfortunately, this decreases your visits.