Being a dental practice owner encompasses two equally important aspects:  performing dental treatment while caring for your dental patients and running a business, ensuring that the resources necessary to provide dental care are adequate. In your role of business owner, you must assess the health of your dental practice and determine what areas you can work on to ensure and improve practice success.

From a business stand-point, performance and trends are very important indicators that need to be considered when determining your dental practice’s health. Looking at “the numbers” usually means analyzing several reports and screens and seeing what they tell you about your dental practice. However, with the ADSTRA Dental Software Solution’s advanced features, analyzing practice results has been simplified and streamlined in order to help you, as we understand it can be a time consuming and stressful process.

ADSTRA Management, the dental practice management module of the all-inclusive ADSTRA Dental Software solution, provides you the means to run the business and administrative aspects of your dental practice. ADSTRA Management’s advanced features provide more than 130 reports and charts via the Reports & Charts module and it also contains 3 screens which we will look into, that offer a summary of some of the most critical information needed for determining how successful your dental practice is. In addition, several on-demand data selections are provided in the Patient Analytics screen that also allows adding any number of customizable filters to satisfy your particular needs.

Practice Summary

This tab provides an overview of your practice, displaying the total number of patients by role, number of new patients, number of appointments, number of treated patients, number of invoiced treatments, number of payments received and future appointments, sorted by number of days.

This information is useful in analyzing dental practice health because it allows you to see at a glance whether these vital practice factors are moving in an upward or downward trend, as well as the rate in which this is happening. As previously stated, trends are an essential component in looking at practice success. With that, an upward trend in all of these aspects would indicate your dental practice is doing well.

Treatment by Type of Service

In this tab, for the number of days selected, the procedure code, category of service and procedure description ordered by total invoiced or numbers are displayed.

This is critical information for determining how healthy your dental practice is because it reflects practice performance. In looking at this tab you are able to determine within the number of days selected which treatments have been performed, the total amount invoiced for that treatment which could help you determine potential revenue, and how many times that treatment has been performed. For a successful dental practice, services performed should be a good balance between basic treatments (ie; patient exams/cleanings and recalls) as they are consistent and occur more frequently, and more complex treatments (ie: cavities, and root canals) as they bring in more revenue per appointment.

Future Appointments – Estimated Fees

This tab displays for all future appointments, the total fees by provider and day, as well as the total fees by day. This information is necessary for analyzing dental practice health as it helps calculate expected revenue – a good indicator of how well your practice is doing.

In addition to these tabs, there are a couple of Patient Analytics lists accessible via ADSTRA Management, that are helpful in analyzing practice performance.

Summary of Unique Patients – All Providers

This list tells you for the selected time period, how many patients were active and what the total fee is for that number of patients. This is helpful in determining how well your dental practice is doing because it tells you the number of patients that were actually at your dental practice throughout the time period, getting some sort of treatment or service done – reflecting practice performance. A successful dental practice within a one-month period should have a high number of active patients.

Patient Retention Rate

This chart displays the number or percentage of patients with appointments, for the specified period of time, by days, months or years.

Essentially, this chart signifies whether you are managing to keep your existing dental patients or not. This can be used to help assess the health of your dental practice because a dental practice that is able to consistently retain a high number its current patients (ie: high patient retention rate) correlates with patients being content with you as their dentist, the overall service at your dental practice, as well as referrals which are characteristics of a strong and healthy dental practice.

Appointments Summary

With this chart you see the total appointments scheduled, done, missed, made, and cancelled for the selected location, for the specified period of time by provider or location.

Referring to this chart when analyzing your dental practice’s performance is helpful as it can indicate why your revenue is where you expected it, or higher or lower than expected. If you have a high number of cancelled and missed appointments, when compared to appointments that were completed, this could result in lower-than-expected revenue and could mean your dental practice may not be doing so well. In this situation it would be necessary to determine why your patients are canceling or missing so many of their appointments and what you could do to improve appointment attendance. On the other hand, a high number of done appointments in comparison to scheduled, cancelled and missed appointments, results in increased revenue, and shows that your dental practice is healthy.

Opening your own dental office takes a lot of time, effort, planning, and financial investment. Therefore, analyzing your dental practice’s success is essential in order to determine whether it is a viable endeavor; one you should continue. Understanding the importance of the process, ADSTRA Dental Software in just a matter of a few clicks provides you with all the tools you need to help you determine how healthy your dental practice is.

Implement ADSTRA in your dental practice today.

Take advantage of the advanced features of the ADSTRA Dental Software solution and see your practice soar!