Follow these four methods to make your practice grow.
1) Benchmark Yourself
Many practices use internal KPIs to measure practice performance. While this is of value, this approach only allows you to effectively measure your performance against yourself.
It doesn’t really help you assess how you’re travelling against best-practice. Benchmarking is the process of looking at your own performance relative to that of your colleagues/competition/peers. Practice managers find this is a great catalyst for identifying new opportunities and increasing revenue.
2) Assess Productive Capacity
Understanding your practice capacity is one of the key steps in assessing your ability to increase financial performance. This process will indicate how effectively you are using your resources. Start by determining total capacity (available surgeries and operating hours) and comparing that to the actual surgery usage by your dentists, to give you your surgery’s utilisation rate. This can help you identify your maximum earnings capacity for the practice and the strategies you can implement to drive financial improvements.
3) Understand Full Time Equivalent (FTE) Efficiencies
When assessing your practice performance, it is helpful to understand FTE ratios and what you can learn from them. You can quickly tell if your practice has additional revenue generating capacity by comparing the number of surgeries available per dentist.
Other key statistics include the comparison of FTE dental nurses/hygenists and administration staff to the number of FTE dentists. Using FTE as the basis for analysis helps provide a better assessment of your practice efficiencies.
4) Expand Your Service Platform
Expanding your practice’s service platform can dramatically increase the number of return patient visits.
The most successful practices are open to complimentary services, often combining spare capacity with the provision of these additional services.
Practices with low surgery utilisation rates have the ability to engage with various professionals, eg. hygenists, to provide complimentary services, because they have the space to do so.
Contact us to discuss your practice productivity and profitability.
