Creating KPIs for a Dental Practice – Easy How To Guide

What’s a KPI you ask?

You’re not alone, many people use this term and have no idea what it truly means.

We’re here to help!

KPI = Key Performance Indicator.

These are metrics within your business that will show you success or failure within your practice and the specific departments or positions. They are common metrics like:

• Production and collections
• New Patients
• Overhead
• Case Acceptance

But they can and do extend to any position and job duty in your practice! You can measure anything!

Creating KPIs for a dental practice

Google reviews for instance can be a great way to measure patient satisfaction; creating KPIs for your dental practice around this could look like: 150 five-star Google reviews by December 31st. Beautiful, now that we know what we want, we can look at how we will get there!

Building your KPI by position is just as easy! We love taking an overarching goal like the Google Reviews example and breaking it down by position. This allows everyone to see what they can do to contribute to the big goal in small ways every day. That could look like this: Dental Assistants are to ask 5 patients per day how their visit was and prompt them to leave a Google Review online.

Anyone can and should participate! You’re looking specifically for items that push the needle in big ways and break it down so that they’re easily tracked and achieved.

From there you set measurable achievements (see above for 5 reviews per day requested) with dates attached. Sticking with that example, how many reviews should they have asked for per week that they can track? Typically, a KPI is set for a quarter at a time, or occasionally we will see them for 1 month – just be sure the allow time for you to see that the metric is actually forcing change within your company.

Meaning, if you’re asking for 5 Google reviews per day or 20 per week, you should surely see an increase in online reviews received! Given enough time to track, you allow yourself to see that it’s happening! If you change too frequently it can cause some chaos for the team (frequent change can lead to confusion) and a lack of true measurement. 

Building these out takes practice, use your team, and see what small things you may already be doing that move the needle – can you increase what you’re doing or is there maybe even something that you want to be doing that you’re not? Implementing KPIs around things like that allows for easy implementation and success!

Get to building! And reach out so that we can help you when you need it, we want to see you succeed in the biggest ways possible! 

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