Successfully Growing a Thriving Dental Practice

As a dental practice owner, you must do more than deliver exceptional patient care to successfully build and grow a healthy, thriving practice. You also have to track and manage your existing processes and lead your team well. But what exactly should you be monitoring to make sure you’re hitting your goals and working toward your ideal practice vision without sacrificing a healthy work-life balance for you and your team? I’m glad you asked.

Measure What Matters: Remaining Key Performance Indicators

In the previous “Measure What Matters” article, I introduced the first five critical factors of the business of dentistry: production, collection, accounts receivable, patient financing programs, and overhead. 

Now let’s dive into the remaining factors.

6. Scheduling

Great scheduling is arguably one of the most important—and most challenging—aspects of running a successful dental practice. Tons of practices seek our help because the side effects of poor scheduling are wreaking havoc on their daily operations. There is much we could say about schedules, but the main takeaway is this: Create a scheduling system! Then make sure your entire team is well trained and consistently honors that system. If various scheduling approaches are happening at the same time, chaos is sure to ensue. 

Set your schedule in a way that aligns with your production goals. For example, designate specific slots for each type of procedure (primary, secondary, and tertiary) so your day contains variety. Reserve slots for new patients. Reserve other slots for emergencies. Be the architect of your day! Eliminate the worry and hassle that result from the constant highs and lows of an inefficient schedule. Trust me: If you are intentional about your schedule, you will hit your goals more consistently and will enjoy significantly less stressful days.

7. Broken Appointments and No-Shows

According to the ADA, a top cause of dental practice distress in 2022 was that of broken appointments and no-shows. While you can’t fully eliminate them, you can absolutely establish systems and processes to help prevent them, and your team can communicate effectively to instill value and commitment in patients regarding their appointments. If you are not currently tracking broken appointments and no-shows, start now. Doing so will reveal if this is an area in your practice that needs immediate attention and improvement.

8. Case Acceptance

The fulcrum of your practice is comprehensive diagnosis that includes careful documentation, excellent case presentation, and thorough follow-up. Everything else, including your case acceptance rate, will springboard from those three interconnected systems. 

Make sure you are entering every comprehensive treatment plan into your practice management software as well as following up on presented treatment plans that patients either haven’t accepted or haven’t completed. Repetition is the key to learning, so a patient may need to hear the same message multiple times before becoming motivated or comfortable enough to proceed. It is up to you to present clearly, follow up, and follow through.

9. Hygiene 

Hygiene is an integral part of your practice’s health and well-being—as well as your patients’ health and well-being! If you run a general practice, roughly 30% of your overall production and between 40% and 60% of your restorative work should be coming from the hygiene department. To say that the partnerships between a dentist and their hygienists are extremely important is an understatement. 

Make room in your hygiene appointments for more than just prophys and evaluations. Factor in additional time to educate patients on their diagnoses and listen to their concerns. Intraoral photography, the doctor hygiene evaluation, and your hygienist’s verbal skills are all key elements in strengthening each patient’s relationship with you over time.

10. New Patients 

Make sure you’re tracking not only how many new patients you are getting every month but also where they are coming from and the outcome of each appointment. Did they reappoint? Did they accept treatment? We don’t want to simply be setting and achieving a goal for how many new patients you need to be growing healthily as a practice. We also want to make sure we are attracting the right type of new patients to your practice: those who want the care that you provide. The only way to determine this is to track this metric appropriately.

It is also imperative that you deliver an exceptional new patient experience. This is a process within your practice that requires excellence from each and every team member to help build what we at Jameson call the four pillars of a healthy patient-practice partnership: trust, need, urgency, and value. If your patients aren’t wowed in that first appointment, why would they ever stay?

11. Team 

One of the most important critical factors is your team. Hiring and developing a high-performing team will determine how far and how fast you can pursue your ideal practice vision. The key here is to create and lead a healthy practice culture that sets appropriate performance standards so everyone can thrive. Continuously developing skills and working together as a group of leaders to better serve your patients and work toward a common set of goals: That is the ideal vision.

Without a strong team, the road to a healthy, growing dental practice is grueling. Answer these questions: 

• Do you have enough team members in the right positions so that patient care doesn’t suffer, production is unhindered, and stress is controlled?
• Do you have well-defined position descriptions that focus on key responsibilities, expected results, and accountabilities?
• Do you have a current personnel policy manual that everyone has read and agreed to?
• Are your team meetings productive?
• Do you have equitable salaries, benefits, and incentive programs in place that are fair for both the practice and your team members?

12. Attitude

Last but certainly not least, your and your team members’ attitudes matter. Consider these:

• Is your team cohesive?
• Is your team goal oriented?
• Is your team supportive of practice development, or are they comfortable with the status quo?
• Does conflict among your team members cause stress for you or others?
• Is communication effective among team members?

Note two things: First, there is no such thing as status quo. You are either going up or going down, so feeling comfortable with a lack of development is a kiss of death. Second, as far as hiring goes, I encourage you to prioritize attitude over experience. Make sure you are protecting your practice culture by hiring carefully and holding people accountable to bringing positivity to their work every day.

Harnessing the Power of Dental Practice Excellence

These are Jameson’s critical factors of the business of dentistry. By regularly assessing and measuring what matters, you can achieve and sustain a healthy, growing practice over the course of your dental career. Still have questions? Reach out to me at [email protected]. I am here to help.