Dental News - Take your practice into the matrix

Sierra Rendon, DTA

Mon. 28 April 2014

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Most orthodontic practices have a well-established and growing set of reports that look at their business from multiple angles. With every software update, orthodontists may get better at capturing and reporting on patient schedules, billing cycles, treatment length, new starts, pending care, capital expenditures, office leasing and patient communications.

But the dirty little secret, said Mark S. Sanchez, DDS, founder, CEO and chief developer of tops Software, is that there is no 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 overworked treatment coordinator — have logged countless hours compiling statistics on those reports,” Sanchez said. “Sadly, by the time you finish your analysis, the data is already stale and incomplete, and the insights have lost their potency.”

Sanchez said the profit potential of real-time insight is actually a game changer for orthodontic practices.
For example, test yourself to see how many of the following seven profitable insights you can put your fingers on — right now:

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.
Multi-specialty 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,” Sanchez said. “Our business systems need to properly handle this multidimensional matrix in real time to show us how to chart our way to profitability.”

To that end, the newly released topsOrtho 6.0 includes the first analytic engine available in orthodontics: D7 Matrix. It’s not mere “reporting” — it’s analytics. And it enables you to see — quickly and easily — the profit drivers (and crashers) in your practice, Sanchez said.

Most practice-management reporting systems provide nothing in the way of actionable insights, according to tops Software. Treatment coordinators could spend huge amounts of time gathering information from reports and attempting to synthesize the data into something coherent.

topsOrtho D7 Matrix fixes all that. It’s multi-dimensional, interactive and instantaneous with real-time data, Sanchez said.

Here’s what orthodontic practice consultant Char Eash, CEO of Profit Marketing Systems South, said after experiencing D7 Matrix: “Today’s orthodontist should be tracking every patient and every penny on a daily basis. The D7 Matrix is the only thing on the market that can do both well. It actually creates profit.”

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