The 10 Best Dental Practice Management Monitors

best dental practice management

In a moment, we’ll get to an exercise related to what you currently spend on dental marketing and how to improve your direct return (meaning production coming to you) from whatever you spend on external advertising right now.

Monthly monitors are a fundamental part of good dental practice management systems. They are basic tools that yield outsized results but are greatly underutilized. Peter Drucker remarked that ‘what gets measured improves.’ Name an industry and a study somewhere has already shown that measurement improves results including the use of monitors as part of dental dental practice management practices.

Here are the top 10 best dental practice management monitors and trackers for any practice serving any clinical niche:

  1. Monthly production and collection plus comparison to previous year
  2. Monthly A/R report which should include an annual analysis of write-offs per individual insurance carrier.
  3. Down time
  4. Monthly new patients by dental marketing source (this would include FREE patients coming to you via Google+ and Yelp reviews. Unfortunately, most readers of the free eLetter are doing very poor jobs with their reviews. Sad, but true.)
  5. Monthly production from new patients by marketing source (Specialists need to consider each referring practice a marketing source).
  6. Monthly patients inactivated and reason why
  7. Monthly Call Tracking – inbound and outbound marketing calls with call outcome.
  8. Phone Slip (it’s system AND a monitor) – documents each call, outcome, and reason why prospective patients are calling.
  9. Sales Process Overview Monitor – in the past month and YTD how many consults were booked, how many consults showed up, how many dental physicals were conducted, how many case presentations given, how many cases started, what was the case amount?
  10. Sales System Monitor – for management of patients in various stages of your sales process (AKA dental case presentation process). Anything costing $5,000 or more requires a multi-step sales (dental case acceptance) process to be successful. If you won’t commit to learning a sales (dental case acceptance) system, leave the $5,000 and higher cases to those who are qualified to do so.

You should ONLY use monitors if you are interested in the following:

-You want to be efficient

-You want to get the most return on your time in the office

-You want to identify dental practice management problems early

-You want to identify holes and opportunities in your dental marketing

-You want to identify problems in dental case presentation (sales process),

A lot of experts will tell you about 1-6, almost no one will discuss 7-10 nor be able to provide documents to help you with this. Graduates of The McAnally Selling System training (the best online dental case acceptance program that’s evidence based) have access to just such monitors. It’s also the only dental case acceptance program that provides dental practice management resources.

Now, if you already use monitors, I challenge you to an exercise.

Take a look at what spent in the last 12 months on advertising. Now look at the dentistry/production that resulted. Now, take the annual production total that resulted from your marketing and multiply it be .25 and then by .50.

How sizable of a number is that?

Could you put that additional production to work or use?

Would it be worth claiming that additional production without spending any more on dental marketing?

Just one example of how sound monitors can impact dental practice management and direct attention to problems with your dental marketing.

If yes, you’ll be interested in putting your team through The McAnally Selling System training. It’s been helping practices for nearly a decade to reclaim 25-50% more from their marketing expenditures, it can help you too. To get going in the program go here.   To discuss this or something else in privately go here.