Productive Scheduling for the Profitable Dental Practice

November 26, 2019 Leave a comment

Working in the dental field is rewarding! There are endless opportunities to serve people and to change lives one smile at a time. But as a dental professional, you still have to be profitable.

Dentistry has one of the highest overheads in the health industry, and when you add the ever-growing contractual write-offs, profits can quickly dissipate. What if there were a way to increase production without drastically affecting overhead? This can easily be achieved by refocusing the way appointments are scheduled.

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10 Steps to Use Your Dental Practice Referral Systems Properly

May 24, 2018 Leave a comment

“Who may we thank for referring you to our practice?” I asked in a friendly voice. “I met your doctor at his ice cream social” was the reply. I was the marketing director and I knew we had never participated in an ice cream social. When I asked the doctor, he said he had no idea what the patient was talking about.

About an hour later, another call came in with the same answer. “I met your doctor at his ice cream social.” I asked the doctor again and he still didn’t have any idea what the patients were talking about. There was even a third person that called.

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Why is it Important to Track the Dentist’s Production?

April 27, 2018 Leave a comment

As with other key performance indicators (KPIs), tracking doctor production is crucial to maintaining your dental practice. Setting and achieving goals motivates you and your team by holding everyone accountable for work on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.

This KPI provides the big picture of how your practice is doing at any given time. A busy practice is not necessarily a productive one. If you have a schedule full of patients and your numbers are not justifying the busyness, taking a look at doctor production can help you identify any issues. Here are some factors that can help.

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The Importance of Keeping that New Patient!

March 28, 2018 Leave a comment

Ahhhh, we all love new. We love that new car smell. We love a new spring day with the right amount of sunshine. New clothes, new shoes, new house! New is exciting!

New patients in our practice means growth … and growth is exciting. When new patients receive impeccable customer service in our office, they leave excited. Creating an atmosphere in our practices that fosters great customer service, a friendly team, and communication where patients feel comfortable and welcomed is a tall order but absolutely necessary to set ourselves apart from the other offices around the corner.

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How Well Do You Know Your Active Dental Patient Base?

March 13, 2018 Leave a comment

For any business to be successful, it must know and grow its customer base. Understanding even basic demographics of its customer base helps a business develop effective marketing strategies, and asking the hard questions about why a client switches to a competitor can help a business determine how they can improve their client experience moving forward. When a dentist commits to running his or her practice like a business, these statistics will be among those that he or she needs to know on a consistent basis. Understanding the Active Patient Base in the practice will shed a bright light on the facets that measure the success of your business.

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5 Steps to Exiting your Dental Practice in Style

February 23, 2018 , , , Leave a comment

My story with exit planning started on a Saturday morning in October, about 14 years ago. I was in my early 30s, with a family, a mortgage and a young, growing CPA firm. That morning, I learned that one of my college friends suffered a heart attack and did not make it. The news was very sad, especially since we had attended her wedding reception less than a year earlier. A few days later, I started feeling chest pains and, since the loss of my friend was still fresh on my mind, I immediately made an appointment with my doctor. My doctor saw me the same day and did the necessary tests and referred me to a cardiologist.

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Back Again: Consultants Ponder Why Dental Patients Won’t Return for Six-Month Appointment

November 7, 2017 Leave a comment

We started by asking consultants from around the country three simple questions. What we got back from them was very interesting and informative.

As a follow-up to the article showing Sikka Software data on the rate of six-month checkups being reappointed, we threw out these three questions to the consulting world.

  • What’s the biggest reason you believe patients don’t come back into the practice for their six-month appointments?
  • What’s the biggest tip you could give practices to avoid that from happening?
  • What have you seen personally work in your practice or practices you have consulted with?

Sounds simple, right? Well, just like every person is different, every consultant has a different way of looking at things.

Jamie Marboe of Inspired Hygiene

Here is what Jamie says she has learned through working more than 30 years “in the trenches” as a hygienist and five years as an assistant.

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See You in Six Months: The Hygienist’s Role in Getting the Patient Back

October 24, 2017 Leave a comment

If there is one thing that is taught (or at least should be taught) to us as dental patients at a young age, it is that it is important to visit the dental practice every six months for your check-up.

To those of us in the dental industry, it seems like a common sense thing, right? Periodic exams are necessary to keep track of a patient’s oral health. However, we all also know that visiting the dentist is not always at the top of a patient’s mind.

How are dental practices doing with getting their patients in for their six-month recall appointments? We recently extracted data from Sikka Software’s collection of numbers that has been collected from more than 12,500 dental practices from around the United States over the last seven-plus years. Here are the numbers of periodic exams per month, per practice…

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Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Trends

August 19, 2017 Leave a comment

Are more general practitioners keeping more procedures in-house rather than referring them out? That’s what some numbers compiled from Sikka Software data suggest.

Looking at the quantity of oral and maxillofacial surgeries per practice per month, numbers have risen sharply since 2010. A common theory floated about shortly after the 2008 recession was in full effect was that dental practices would keep more procedures in-house in order to not lose the production. These numbers seem to buoy that theory.

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Here’s the Average Number of Single Crowns Dentists are Placing (and Where the Trend is Headed)

July 11, 2017 Leave a comment

It’s been called the single-most productive procedure performed in the dental practice, yet data compiled by Sikka Software is showing it’s not happening that often in practices around the United States.

In this article, we’re going to talk about the number of single crowns placed by a dental practice per month. We’re also going to look at the number of days worked in a dental practice per month to see exactly how many single crowns the average dental practice is placing per month.

To find this out, we took data from Sikka Software over the last seven years. The data we are using for this comparison has been collected by Sikka Software from more than 12,500 dental practices from around the United States.

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