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How well do you know your practice’s business fundamentals?

Mark S. Sanchez, DDS, is the founder, CEO and chief developer of tops Software. (Photo: topsOrtho)
Mark S. Sanchez, USA

Mark S. Sanchez, USA

Tue. 22 April 2014

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Pop quiz: Do you know — right now — the biggest pulse points affecting your business in 2014? If your answer is “Sure, I can figure that out,” or “Yes, my treatment coordinator works on that every month,” you may want to think again. For every patient who leaves your office today with an incorrectly projected completion date or improperly set fee, so too leaves a revenue opportunity.

Can you really afford that miscalculation dozens of times each day?

Most practices have a well-established — and growing — set of reports that look at their business from multiple angles. We’re all getting better at capturing and reporting on information about patient schedules, billing cycles, treatment length, new starts, pending care, capital expenditures, office leasing and patient communications. Maybe some even capture a collection of patient “selfies” that show how well we’ve trained our iPhone-wielding tweens to position their new elastics.

But the dirty little secret is that none of us has a fast, easy way to connect the dots between those reports to draw out the good stuff: the insights. I’d guess that you — or your already-overworked treatment coordinator — have logged countless hours compiling statistics on those reports. Sadly, by the time you finish your analysis, the data is already stale and incomplete, and the insights have lost their potency.

You know what to report on, but how do you look for what you don’t know?

I’m a bit of a movie buff. So when I think of insight, I think of Laurence Fishburne’s character, Morpheus, in “The Matrix.” As Morpheus says to Neo, “No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”

So here is just one way I see the profit potential of real-time insight: It’s a game changer for orthodontic practices. For example, wouldn’t it be cool to look at three cuts of data around total treatment time — by office, treatment type, treatment coordinator and fee?

  • Individual level: Thomas Anderson required 20 visits at our Oak Street office to complete his Invisalign treatment at a set fee of $5,000.
  • Compare with a subgroup level: Treatment coordinator Anna Smith, who managed 25 Invisalign patients in our Main Street satellite office, recorded an average completion time of 15 visits.
  • Further compare against the total population: We had 100 patients complete Invisalign treatment across all four offices in our practice, at an average of 17 visits.

So here are some pulse points for the practice insight and learning/reinvention: What was up with Mr. Anderson’s treatment? Mr. Anderson’s team? And what can we all learn from Anna?

Take the insight test: What have you been missing?

If you need to have a more competitive practice, test yourself to see how many of the following seven profitable insights you can put your fingers on — right now. (No credit if you need a weekend, a treatment coordinator or an accountant to get to the answers!)

  • Profitability: Profitability, by patient or procedure.
  • Treatment time: Actual length of treatment versus the estimated range by doctor.
  • Understanding the unplanned: Impact of emergency visits on the overall cost of treatment.
  • Demographics: Correlation between patient age and average office-visit length
  • Setting fees: Whether you are undercompensated for any of the types of treatment you offer.
  • Multispecialty tracking: Ability to monitor patients efficiently through
  • multispecialty treatment.
  • “What if” drill downs: Answer questions — on the fly — about the impacts of the mix of patient load, treatment type, age and local team on each of your satellite offices.

In truth, gaining real insight into how your practice works requires a matrix of patient data in many dimensions. We need analytics and not just reports. Our business systems need to properly handle this multidimensional matrix in real time to show us how to chart our way to profitability. Until now, we’ve all been driving blindly.

Note: This article was published in Ortho Tribune U.S. Edition, Vol. 9 No. 2, AAO Edition 2014.

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