Every GPS app starts the same way. Not with directions—with questions. Where are you going? Where are you starting from? Skip either one, and the directions are useless. You could be standing right next to your destination and the app would still send you in circles, because it doesn’t actually know where you are yet.
It’s easy to look at your number of active patients and think you’re doing well, but the reality may be different, because of one metric: Unscheduled Active Patients. It measures the number of active patients who do not have a future appointment scheduled, and its impact is powerful!
You can run a practice through sheer force of will. Plenty of owners do… for a while. What nobody warns you about is how it feels: like you’re white-knuckling it through the day, all day, every day. Dr. Anisha Patel and her husband Travis, who runs operations and technology at Twin Creeks Family Dentistry, know that feeling well. For months, then
Being a dentist requires a certain mindset and skills, but those skills don’t necessarily translate to a highly profitable, healthy, and sustainable practice. To achieve that practice, you need to make a strategic shift — or more accurately, three shifts — in how you think, lead, and operate!
You said it clearly. You know you did—because you knew exactly what you meant. So why did your team do something completely different? Why did that patient leave confused? Why does it feel like you’re constantly repeating yourself and nothing sticks? The problem probably isn’t your team. It’s the gap between what you said and what they heard.
We’ve covered several hygiene metrics in our Data Snapshots lately, and this week we have a simple one: Fluoride Percentage. It measures the percentage of patients who receive a fluoride treatment compared to the total number of patients seen for hygiene visits. It’s simple only in definition, however, because
If your practice feels chaotic, the instinct is usually to look at the people. Who’s dropping the ball? Who’s not pulling their weight? Who needs more training or a harder conversation? But sometimes the problem isn’t the people. It’s the seats they’re in.
If you see constant finger-pointing and blame shifting in your practice, then you know there’s a problem. However, finger-pointing in a dental practice is rarely the real problem. Usually, it’s a symptom of something deeper: lack of clarity around ownership and accountability. What happens is that when
Dental school taught you how to diagnose. How to treatment plan. How to deliver excellent clinical care. What it didn’t teach you is everything else that comes with the keys to your own practice.
As we discussed in the previous Data Snapshot, periodontal disease is on the rise, and in order to best serve our communities, we must pay attention to the breakdown of hygiene visits. Your Perio Visit Percentage is how you accomplish that, because it measures the percentage of total hygiene visits in a given period that are periodontal therapy or maintenance appointments compared to prophylaxis visits.
