Episode 479: Is Your Practice Healthy? (KPIs)

Kiera is all about key performance indicators in this episode, and why they’re important. When framing KPIs as the vitals of your practice, it makes a lot more sense! Some of Kiera’s favorite KPIs are …

• Production (net, not gross)

• Collection (at least 98%)

• How many new patients you’re getting

• Average diagnosis

• Acceptance rate

• Overhead

There are a lot more indicators she talks about in this episode, so whether you’re a beginner with KPIs or elite status, there’s something you can learn.

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0:00:05.6 Kiera Dent: Hey everyone, welcome to the Dental A Team podcast. I'm your host, Kiera Dent, and I had this crazy idea that maybe I could combine a doctor and a team member's perspective, because let's face it, dentistry can be a challenging profession with those two perspectives. I've been a dental assistant, treatment coordinator, scheduler, filler, office manager, regional manager, practice owner, and I have a team of traveling consultants, where we have traveled over 165 different offices coaching teams. Yep, we don't just understand you, we are you. Our mission is to positively impact the world of dental, and I believe that this podcast is the greatest way I can help elevate teams, grow VIP experiences, reduce stress and create A teams. Welcome to the Dental A Team podcast.

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0:00:50.5 KD: Hello, Dental A Team listeners, this is Kiera. And you guys, how's your day today? You guys loving it? Are you crushing it? I hope you are, wherever you are. I am actually sitting in my bedroom. I rarely ever podcast here 'cause usually my husband's home, but tonight I have some friends over there in the front room and I definitely needed to get some podcast done. Sissy was asking me... I just love having team members that are great at what they do, and I hope you guys take time to acknowledge the team members that make you great, the team members that are just awesome at what they do. You guys, Sissy keeps me so on the ball and I love her for it. Shelby does, Tiffany does. Britney, Dana, Kylie. They're just an incredible bunch of people. And guys, if you ever get the opportunity to meet any of them, you are one lucky person. So I hope you're having a great day, I hope you're loving it. So podcasting today from the bedroom. I hope the audio is great. I hope you're loving it. Sun's just going down. And today I just wanted to dive into a topic that I think is really awesome, and it's KPIs. So what the heck is a KPI? A KPI is key performance indicator.

0:01:54.8 KD: I'll be completely honest. You guys, you know I'm authentic Kiera Dent. [chuckle] People, when they call me and they chat with us, interested in working with us, the number one thing I get told is, "Kiera, you sound just like you do on the podcast." And I'm like, this is really great, because it is me. I don't shake it up, I don't change it, the only thing I do differently is I talk in a microphone, so my voice sounds a little bit like smoother, if you will, on the podcast than in real life. But beyond that, same cadence, same tones. This is Kiera real life. So you guys know I am always... I try really hard to just be authentic Kiera. So if you ever come meet me in person, you peel back the Wizard of Oz curtain, I would be the exact same person as I am on the podcast as I am in real life. So when I first started as an office manager, I did not know what a KPI was. I did not know why they were important, I didn't know that I should be tracking these things. I literally had no idea. So guys, if you are in my boat, hey, welcome, welcome to the Kiera Dent no KPI boat. If you know it there, welcome, welcome to the elite boat. And if you are using them, welcome to the rockstar amazing boat, let's make you even better.

0:03:02.3 KD: So KPIs, I call them... The way I describe a KPI, is they are the vitals of your practice. So just like when you go to the doctor and they take your blood pressure, your temperature, they listen to your heart rate, all those things, those are the vitals. They take your weight. I just went to the doctor the other day, and it's super cool, you sit on the chair and they say they'll take your weight. And it was funny, the gal asked me, she said, "Do you wanna know your weight today?" I was like, "Wow, thank you. Thank you for not making me have a bad day if I don't want to, or thank you for giving me the opportunity." It just made me giggle. But bottomline is the vitals, we go to the doctor and they take those vitals first, because if any of those are out of alignment, that's the first sign that we have trouble. So that's what I think of with KPIs in a practice, as these are the core pieces that are going to show you, is your practice healthy, or is it not healthy? So yes, it's tracking, and there's lots of different KPIs you can track. That's why it's called a key performance indicator. I am a firm believer that you should be able to change these up.

0:04:06.5 KD: I think there are certain things that you should be tracking consistently. But I also think as human beings, we get stagnant and bored. So give yourself a decent amount of time to track, and then shake it up, that way you're growing constantly, and we don't get bored with KPIs. So for me, some of my favorite KPIs, and this is a question every consultant who comes to Dental A Team to work with us, we ask them, "What is your favorite KPI to measure?" One, I'm checking to see if they know what a KPI is. Guys, I probably would have flunked the consulting test if I were to come on. We're a morally company guys, I have to keep these consultants on their top-notch, they can't be lower than us now. So I ask what your favorite KPI is to track and why? Most of the time I get production and collection. Production is a great KPI to track. It's something... And again, be careful on production, make sure you're tracking it on net, not gross. A lot of people wanna tell me that they have these huge successful practices. But guess what, guys, if you can't collect it, don't even tell me that number, I don't care. It does not impress me because guess what? That high gross number feeds your ego, your net number feeds your family.

0:05:11.3 KD: So I don't care about it. So, report that number in net. Next up is your collection percentage. I wanna know how you're collecting. So if you're a one-million dollar practice and you're only collecting 700,000, that's stressful. That means you're in a 70% collection rate. I am aiming for a 98% collection rate. Now, there are lots of other KPIs, and I will say there are some great softwares out there, Practice By Numbers, Dental Intel, Divergent. Those are my top three favorites, I'd probably put them in the order of Dental Intel, Divergent, Practice By Numbers. I think all three of them are great, I love them all for different reasons. The reason I'm promoting for Dental Intel is 'cause they just merged with Modento, and guess what? They are kicking it. So I love that, I love what they do, and I love Modento as a company. So any company with Modento, that's gonna be my favorite company right now. But bottomline is, a lot of these track KPIs. What I found that gets tricky, and what a lot of offices do is we often track too many things, that we don't actually move the needle on anything. I'm guilty of this.

0:06:06.4 KD: So in our company, I was having Sissy track how many Instagram followers we were getting every single week. At first I thought it was a great marketing metric, I thought it was great to see how our marketing was doing. Guess what? It was actually just feeding my ego. So guys, if you wanna feed my ego, please just go follow us on Instagram, I would love it. Get your friends, get your family, get your siblings, get your kids, I don't care who, you can boost that number just to feed my ego. At the end of the day, do the Instagram followers actually matter? No, they don't. They don't move our company forward. What matters? Just like you guys, how many new patients we're getting. So I don't actually care about social media followers. Yes, it's a fun number to track. But what I care is, how many new patients are we getting? Then after that, I actually care about if I'm going to the elite boat, or to our rockstar boat. On how many new patients you're getting, do you know how much each patient's value is? Do you also know what our average diagnosis is on each patient? And do we know what our acceptance rate is on each patient?

0:07:01.7 KD: If you don't know that, and you're already tracking some of these numbers, that might be a fun zone for you to go to, to be 2.0 or 3.0 of KPI tracking. If you're just starting out, don't go there, let's just get you tracking new patients and where they're coming from. Bottomline is, these are the vitals. First ups first, I want you with your KPIs to make sure that you have the vitals of your practice. Production, collection, new patients, case acceptance, reappointment percentages. Those are your main shebangs that are really gonna tell you where you're going. If you wanna add in your overhead, I also love that because that's gonna pull in the business side of it, to make sure that we're actually profitable as a business, and we're not just running around trying to serve, but not even being profitable as a practice. We need our practice to be profitable, otherwise we can't serve more in our community. Those are my main things I love to focus on. If you're just starting out, start tracking those. I prefer you track them at a minimum every week, at best.

0:07:55.5 KD: I actually like these ones to be tracked on your morning huddle. It's great, everybody has it, have it on a whiteboard, everybody can see it. That is the vital heartbeat of your practice. I would love you to do it. Just like on my Apple watch, I'm watching the rings on my Apple watch. That's honestly the only thing on my watch face, guys, because it'd be really fun, but I decided I don't wanna get distracted by other things, I need to master these items before I move on. So that's why I love it to be front and center. Get these KPIs front and center. Get a whiteboard, guys, they're real cheap, put it up, track these items, production, we talked about it, net, not gross, collections, we wanna make sure we're collecting at least 98%, if not higher. And then I want you to know how many new patients you're getting out of goal, what your case acceptance is. A healthy practice, if we're talking dollar for dollar, I like you to be anywhere from 35% to 65%. Now, there's a wide range on that, because actually, if you don't diagnose a lot of ortho and you're not diagnosing a lot of implants in larger cases, your dollar for dollar should be way up higher.

0:08:56.5 KD: If you're diagnosing these huge treatment plans constantly, you actually should be hanging out lower because we're presenting so much treatment that I'm okay with a lower-case acceptance. If we're going one-for-one, meaning one thing accepted off of our treatment plan, no matter how large it is, I want you actually to be sitting at at least a 90% case acceptance. If you're not, we gotta talk. That's right, you and me, we're gonna have a date, we're gonna chat. We need to get that case acceptance up because what we're doing is we're dis-serving our patients, we're not helping them find a way to get this treatment done. You as a treatment coordinator, your job is to be a solution creator with the patient. So do your job, find the solution, get those patients accepted, that way we can help them have healthy mouths, and a better life, right? That's what it's all about.

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0:09:40.2 KD: Hey, Dental A Team listeners, how was your 2021? Have you reflected back? Where did you really win? Where did you really not win? If 2021 was a year of years, congratulations, I am celebrating with you, and I would love to invite you to take it to the next level. If 2021 wasn't quite your year, hey, it's alright, I'm there for you, and I would love to invite you to make 2022 the year for you. That's right, guys, if you're ready to take massive action, if you're ready to take your practice and your team to the next level, increase your profitability, yeah, guys, through an easy way. Get your entire team aligned and you're ready to just have your life be different. That's right, team development, top to bottom. System development, top to bottom. Changing and shifting your culture, improving your team morale. If that sounds like what you're interested in, guys, I'd love to invite you to join us in our Dental A Team Platinum group. It's the exclusive group where we physically fly to your practice, we give you insider tips, we share with you.

0:10:38.3 KD: We have a quarterly newsletter that shares all the updates we're coming up with, and we share it with our Platinum group. We'd love to have you, and I would like to invite you, because guys, remember, you're always one decision away from a completely different life. So reach out, guys, I'd love to chat with you. I'd love to see if you're a great Platinum client or what works best for you. Email me, [email protected]. And I can't wait to welcome you as our newest Platinum client. Take massive action, this is your year, let's make sure 2022 is your year, [email protected], can't wait to welcome you.

0:11:10.6 KD: So those are my main KPIs that I love to track. Once you get those dialed in and you're consistent on those and you know, then we're gonna start diving into even more data. I wanna know how well our hygiene department's doing, they should be producing at least three times their pay. If I'm a hygienist making $10 an hour, oh, wouldn't that be a dream, guys? Welcome to 2022, hygienists, $10 an hour. Yeah, right. You guys are like $100 billion an hour. It's crazy how much hygienists are at right now.

0:11:37.7 KD: But let's say for the sake of this podcast, it's $10 an hour. I should be producing at least $30 per hour as a healthy hygienist, that's on a PPO. If I'm fee-for-service, I like you producing at least four times your pay. If I'm on a fee-for-service practice, I'm producing $40 an hour. That would be another great KPI to track. You can also break it down per department. We might have our doctors. Great KPI to track on our doctors is, what are they producing per hour? Most doctors should be producing at least $500 per hour at a minimum. So if we're working an eight-hour day, that's a $4000 a day per doctor. Again, on net, not gross. That's a great metric to put in there, what are doctors producing per hour? What's our doctor case acceptance? What's our doctor diagnosis? Great KPIs for you to start tracking. If we move on to our hygiene department. You can track fluoride, you can track perio. Perio's a great set to track. We can track how many night guards are doing, we can track how many orthos are doing, great KPIs to track.

0:12:42.5 KD: Again, if you're in the elite rockstar status. Dental assistants, I like to track how many same-day conversions you get. Also, how many times you leave the room is a great KPI to track. Also, how many Google reviews do dental assistants get? Those are all really, really great ones that you can do. For front office, scheduling, how often are we scheduling our hygiene and doctors to goal? So I usually like between 80% and 90% that they're scheduled to goal. Schedulers can be how many openings they have in hygiene, can also be how many new patients you're scheduling. For our treatment coordinators, case acceptance, right? We wanna make sure that we're getting those cases up there. For office managers, what's our collection percentage? That can also go to our billers. Billers, I love you to be tracking your AR. Also, outstanding claims, how long it's taking us to get our claims paid. It's a fan-freaking-tastic KPI to be tracking, 'cause we wanna be paid quicker. Guess what? If I'm tracking that, I can see, are we not sending our claims clean and are we having errors? Could we fix that? Could we enter data better so we don't have these issues happening?

0:13:47.8 KD: We can also track how long our patients are waiting in the waiting room, if we're working on VIP new patient experience. As I just listed, there are a myriad of KPIs you can do. What happens is we often try to track too many things that we're actually focused on nothing. So I suggest you usually have at least one primary KPI per person in the practice. It's their primary. That's the one that no matter what, they're going to hit that, and we make sure it moves our needle forward. So, what's gonna move our doctors forward? What's gonna move our hygienist forward? What's gonna move our dental assistants, or scheduler, or biller, or office manager? What is the one thing, if we could only focus on one thing, what's gonna move each of those people forward the most and move our practice forward the most? Focus on that. Master that. Set a goal of what you should be hitting and report either weekly or daily on those. I'll be honest, if you report it daily, just like working out daily, you will probably see greater results than if you do it weekly or just monthly.

0:14:43.1 KD: So I also have with KPIs that you should really, really, really, really be ramping those up and making sure you're reporting consistently, and that people know the goals. If we miss it, let's find out why. What's going on? Let's diagnose the problem. Let's find out, what can we do to improve that? Again, I want you to think of these as vitals. KPIs are vitals of a practice. If you don't track these, if you don't check them, you will die. Okay? If you think about it that way, well, instantly and like, "Maybe I don't need to track that. Maybe I don't need to focus on that." If you're already tracking it and you're breathing in perfect, guess what? What happened to the doctor? They start checking other things. They run blood tests on us and they check a thousand different things in that. So there are lots of KPIs you can do, but I would say, keep it simple. Do the KISS method. Keep your KPIs simple, then add to it. Maybe each quarter we add something, maybe each month we add something. It's also fun if you have your team help create these KPIs with you.

0:15:38.7 KD: What do they think is gonna move the practice forward? What do they get excited about? Maybe they wanna make social media posts. Maybe they care about how many followers we actually have. Maybe you guys wanna do that. Maybe they do it on how many new patients they can get. I just had an office, super fun. The team decided that they were going to try and get more family members scheduled. So, on average, this practice was averaging about 35 new patients. Guess what? Guess what? Just by focusing on asking for referrals from patients and getting more family members scheduled, they use the phrase, "What other family members can we get scheduled for you today?" they have increased their new patients, with no marketing, to 50 new patients a month. Is that not rad? That's because they focused on a vital that the practice needed to do. They focused on where they were weak and they're able to move their practice forward. So guys, I would encourage each of you, look at these KPIs, get them set. If you don't have a regular KPI tracking, let's start there. If you do, I wanna bump it up. Are those KPIs being reported weekly by all team members? And does the doctor and office manager review this?

0:16:42.6 KD: I will tell you at our company, Shelbi, she's a rock star, our whole team reports on a Google Drive we call our leadership scorecard. Those are where our KPIs hang out. Every person has a number that they're tracking. We review these, we make sure that they're the vitals of our company and they're moving us forward. Every person reports on this every single Friday. We have a reminder that goes out, so everybody fills it in, Shelbi then makes sure it comes over to me. I then, with Shelbi, review this leadership scorecard. Then on our leadership team, we would look at this every single month, and make sure that those are vitals. And then we look to see, where are we weak? What do we need to move forward? This is how you start to track. Also, if you wanna stamp out and do more practices and you wanna have more growth, having a leadership scorecard where you track these KPIs consistently allows you to then be able to manage and oversee multiple locations, 'cause everybody's tracking. And at a second, you can glance at this and you'll be able to know where your practice is weak and where it's strong and where you need to dive in and give that massive help.

0:17:41.3 KD: So guys, I strongly encourage you, if you're not doing it, do it. If you're doing it already, where can you ramp it up? If you're already ramping it up, get your team members involved and ask them where they wanna take it to the next level. KPIs are magic, they're vitals. Also, if you're in that top top tier, maybe I'd challenge you and say, "Where could you simplify? Are you over-tracking?" Sometimes when I look at Dental Intel on my colleague walk, that's a lot of items you're tracking. How do they know where to focus? I think about the book Essentialism, if you haven't read it, I would strongly encourage you to do it. If we're focused on too many things we actually don't make a lot of progress anywhere, we make minimal progress. If we're focused on one thing, we kill it, we knock it out of the park, we dominate it. So I challenge each of you, look at those KPIs, could you simplify them if you're already doing them? What are the main drivers of the practice? Keep it to three per department is my recommendation. Make sure that what we're truly focused on is actually gonna move you guys forward.

0:18:38.7 KD: If you need help getting those KPIs set up, if that's something you wanna start doing, we make sure our practices are all tracking. Our offices have vitals, we look at them, we actually call it their vital scorecard. [chuckle] Truth, that's really what we call it. So if you guys want help with this, if you'd love somebody to help hold you accountable, email me, [email protected], I'd love to help you out. Nothing else, guys, go get these KPIs in place and know that you guys are in control of this. You can see your practice at a glance, you can know if you're healthy or not just at a glance, just like the doctor does when we go in for our medical doctors. So guys, try it out. I'd love to hear it. I'd love to hear your successes. Post your KPI scorecards and tag us, we'd love to see it. Share. If you guys want to, you can start to get on our Facebook group, Donuts with Dana. She's literally going around and she's pulling these ideas and she's sharing and she's answering questions, so join her, she's on Facebook Live every Friday, Donuts with Dana. So hop on over there if you have questions getting this set up, she's there, she'll help answer questions.

0:19:34.8 KD: And as always guys, just take action. Do it. Don't be afraid of KPIs, they're very easy. And if we can help you, email us, [email protected]. I'd love to share it with you guys. If you need a sample, email us, [email protected]. And as always, thanks for listening. I'll catch your next time on the Dental A Team podcast. And that wraps it up for another episode of the Dental A Team podcast. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.