Dental software can help your clinic in various ways, from managing staff schedules and employee appointments to storing health records and evaluating oral images. When it comes to finances, though, there’s no capability better than dental dashboards.

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What This Article Covers:

• What Are Dental Dashboards?
• How Dental Dashboards Work?
• Adaptability
• Creating Accountability
• Top KPIs
• Next Steps

What Are Dental Dashboards?

Dental dashboards are graphical charts and other visual, interactive representations of your dental clinic’s business KPIs. They generally come as modules in broader dental products and sync up with your existing systems to provide a statistical understanding of how your business is performing.

Standalone systems or integrated modules that dental dashboards pull data from include:

• Practice management software
• Dental EMR applications
• Dental imaging tools
• Dental medical billing platforms
• Dental scheduling systems

How Dental Dashboards Work?

Dental dashboards work by compiling data and turning it into actionable insights for your company. Here’s a broad overview of how they work:

• You work with the software vendor or your in-house IT to set up what data you want the dashboard to compile and where it will pull that information from.
• The dashboard automatically collects the data and consolidates key KPIs to provide actionable business intelligence insights.
• It creates graphical charts and interactive data streams to help you understand each individual metric.
• You use the dashboard to stay up to date with productivity and revenue stats so you can make the necessary adjustments to meet monthly/weekly targets.
• Based on the analysis, you implement changes to workflows, processes and staff allocation to suit your needs.

Adaptability

Another thing you should keep in mind while reading about dental dashboards is adaptability. Today, most organizations have cloud-based systems instead of traditional, hardware-reliant software. Therefore, adaptability is key.

The new solution must have integration capability with the cloud and online systems. Dental clinics rely heavily on automation for executing administrative and mundane tasks. Your dental dashboard shouldn’t pose a challenge to any pre-existing automated workflows.

Look for these features to check adaptability. The system should be able to help you:

• Extract data in real time from different systems.
• Facilitate daily/monthly staff evaluations, performance optimization and checkup on revenue streams.
• Reduce man-made errors from data sets to increase accuracy and efficiency in decision making.

Dental dashboards not only ensure better organization of important data but also play an active part in the overall decision making process.

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Creating Accountability

Dental dashboards play an important role in building a seamless and optimized dental practice. They help create an environment where everyone is accountable — from management to medical staff workers. But how do they do that? Let’s have a look.

Team Performance

There are various metrics you can track throughout your organization. However, with the burden of care delivery-related tasks, the business side often gets the short end of the stick.

Dental dashboards track your company’s performance KPIs. While there’s an upside to this, if you choose too many variables it might end up being overwhelming. Therefore, organizing the most important metrics is crucial. You can ask your team to chip in their suggestions as well.

One common use of a dental dashboard is to track a team’s performance. You can set the benchmark and enable the system to start tracking daily staff performance. You can get periodic reports to know how close they are to achieving targets and make adjustments accordingly.

You can also use color-coded labels to tag tasks according to priority and type. Apart from that, this will give you an overview on how your clinic is functioning and the overall productivity.

Individual Performance

Post team performance, it’s time to award the best employees at your clinic. Similar to team performance tracking, you can also set up dental dashboards to track individual employee metrics.

You can allocate tasks to your staff and track how they perform them, how much time they take and other important metrics. This detailed view of performance will enable you to appreciate the staff who’re working hard and contributing to the clinic’s growth.

Employee Rewards

We know the feeling of receiving a hefty bonus or extra day off after putting in hard work — it feels great! Rewards work as incentives for employees to keep up the hard work while making them feel appreciated and valued. Therefore, put the individual KPIs to good use.

Employee recognition goes a long way to benefiting your clinic. It provides employees with a sense of appreciation and boosts morale all around.

Take time to know what each of your employees love and reward them after they reach a certain goal in time or exceed expectations. Introduce gamification programs like learning exercises to help the staff work toward a mutual goal.

Your employees will appreciate the thoughtfulness on your part and will continue to work hard in the hope of procuring periodic incentives.

Team Recognition

Time to party! What better way to celebrate success than a social event where there’s no work and all play. In spite of having employee rewards, we suggest you plan for occasional retreats and parties for the entire staff.

It goes beyond just monetary compensation and helps the team bond better over light-hearted conversations and food. Dental dashboards can help you predict task completion, which you can use to encourage the team to work better and reward them with a get-together or an additional day off to foster comradery.

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Top KPIs To Track

Tracking the right KPIs can make or break your dental business. By feeding the important KPIs to your dental dashboards, you can stay up to date with all the major aspects of the business. A well-constructed dental dashboard will help you make decisions that’ll benefit your clinic in every way.

For that, you need to first pinpoint crucial metrics. Here’s a list of some of the top dental KPIs to track.

Productivity

Production or productivity comes on top of the KPI list as this provides you an idea of the services executed daily. Overall production of a clinic shows the staff and dentist’s overall production of dental services during a specific time period. You can put the actionable insights to use by introducing new processes and changes to boost revenue.

Revenue

Aside from promoting and facilitating oral health, generating revenue is likely your primary concern. Revenue leads to profit, afterall.

Revenue tracking KPIs are vital to overseeing the financial side of your clinic. Identify areas of improvement and allocate funds or staff as required to boost pre-existing revenue streams.

Profit

Generating revenue is a primary concern, but turning a profit is the ultimate goal. If you aren’t profiting, eventually it will become difficult to sustain your operations.

Tracking profit KPIs and, perhaps more importantly, projecting profitability can help plan for the future, including anticipating cutbacks or expansion, developing new marketing strategies, and reevaluating supplier relationships.

Overhead

Loosely related to revenue and profit, your next important KPI that goes in dental dashboards is overhead costs. In simple terms, overhead costs are the costs it takes to operate your clinic every month.

This metric will provide you a detailed insight into monthly costs, including labor, supplies, maintenance, utilities, rent and more. Depending on overhead you can make important financial decisions at periodic budget meetings to better offset your overhead with your revenue — increasing your profits.

Active Patients

Patients are the life source of a medical clinic. Keeping a thorough overview of the number of active patients who’re scheduled for appointments is necessary for planning future expansion and revenue influx.

Active patient metrics help you to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing and referral initiatives.

New Patients

Acquiring new patients must be at the top of your list if you have a dental practice. Having dental dashboards track this KPI will give you periodic updates on new patient enrollments per week, month and year.

This metric will also help you understand if referral and marketing programs are working properly. Plan better patient engagement strategies and acquire new patient populations to improve revenue.

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Patient Retention Rate

Dental clinics long for a high patient retention rate. High retention rates contribute to revenue and mean your patients are keeping up with their oral health.

However, keeping the percentage high is the catch. You can use dental dashboards to track how many patients your clinic retains in a month or year.
If the rate is low, you can step up marketing and revamp services to attract patients to book follow-up appointments.

Average Production per Patient

Having an estimate of how much time each patient spends in the practice helps create meaningful production goals for your team. This KPI will help you understand overall productivity and plan daily tasks according to the results.

You can offset time-consuming practices like bridges and brace implants with easier procedures such as scaling or regular consultations.

Case Acceptance Rate

Understanding patient behaviors is a good way to maintain a high retention rate and patient satisfaction. Monitoring acceptance KPIs over time can help you see the percentage of treatment cases your patients accept.

This will provide you with the option of making subtle changes to your offerings and help you eliminate challenges during treatment planning. You can also look at other avenues such as connecting with patients and coordinating better communication to improve case acceptance rates.

Kept Appointment Percentage

Dental dashboards can also help you track kept appointment percentage. This is a metric that takes into account how many successful appointments there are in a month. Tracking this KPI will help you understand patient preferences and what time slots they prefer most.

You can use the metric to improve appointment scheduling and patient portal capabilities.

Hygiene Visit Percentage

For a dental practice, having a successful hygiene department is crucial. Developing a program around the top hygiene benchmarks can help increase profitability as it tends to churn out more revenue with time.

Dental dashboards can track the number of hygiene visits in your clinic. Improve preventive care services and patient satisfaction by making necessary tweaks in your service offerings.

Collections

The amount of money your clinic collects from patients is an essential metric to track. Income from patients and insurance companies is the major source of revenue streams you have. This KPI will keep you up to date with the practice’s incoming revenue and on-time payments for every service.

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Next Steps

Running a dental practice can be burdensome. However, dental dashboards provide you with the necessary insights to make better decisions and help your business grow and thrive.

They help you spend less time worrying about time-consuming manual processes and dedicate to ensuring patient satisfaction.

Looking for robust dental dashboards for your clinic? Read our comparison report to get an in-depth idea of the most popular dental solutions out there.

If you’ve used dental dashboards in the past, what were the top KPIs you tracked? Leave a comment.