Here’s what Dale had to share:
As a follow-up to the webinar the following blog is a summary of areas shared in “Uncovering Dormant Revenue” in a GP practice. We covered how to identify and take action to improve revenue and the Tracker reports to identify revenue opportunities.
Hygiene Department
The hygiene area in the general practice often has dormant practice opportunities. Below is a summary of areas to assess:
Unscheduled Past-Due Hygiene Patients
Use Tracker reports to see how many hygiene patients are past due for hygiene treatment and not scheduled.
Evaluating the reasons why patients may not be scheduled, may allow the practice to identify obstacles to increasing revenue. Some of the areas to assess are: hygiene capacity; systems and human resources to manage patients.
Scheduled Past-Due Hygiene Patients
This may not be an obvious area to assess; however completing this often reveals revenue opportunities. Review your hygiene schedule for patients who are already scheduled, and ascertain patients who are scheduled a month or more past their interval. The results of scheduling patients past due their interval is delayed hygiene revenue, as well as, disconnect around the importance of scheduling at the prescribed hygiene interval.
Patients who are identified can be contacted and offered an appointment sooner. This reinforces the significance of scheduling hygiene treatment on time and improves customer service.
Hygiene Management
In a perfect world, dental offices would have enough staff to manage the entire active hygiene patients superbly. In the real world however, we know this is not the case.
I suggest placing focus on managing patients with a 3 or 4 month hygiene interval.
These patients generate more appointments within a twelve month period and clinically require more hygiene treatment. In addition to the number of hygiene appointments, treatment may be diagnosed for the doctor.
Downtime
Downtime in the hygiene schedule is an area of revenue loss. Although it is not possible to have zero downtime, the practice should meet an industry benchmark of 10% or less revenue lost to downtime. I encourage practices to measure hygiene downtime monthly and establish performance targets.
If the practice is above 10%, develop an action plan and resources to reduce downtime.
The hygiene revenue loss is easy to calculate, however, the true loss needs to reflect diagnosed treatment.
New Patients
In a general practice, plan for adult new patient hygiene appointments in the schedule. In order to plan these appointments, the average number of hygiene appointments generated by adult new patients must be calculated. By planning for new patient hygiene, their hygiene care is not delayed, and diagnosed treatment with the dentist is not postponed.
In terms of customer service, it is beneficial for adult new patients to be able to access hygiene services in a timely manner.
Using software reports and schedule template features will aid in implementing this system.
Pre-Appointing Hygiene Appointments
This management system is used extensively in general practices and in many cases is a one-shoe-fits all system. By that I mean whether pre-appointing makes sense for the patient or not the next appointment is scheduled.
In many practices this system creates a false sense of full schedules when in fact typically more than 30% of hygiene appointments change.
I suggest adapting this system by refraining from pre-appointing a group of patients for whom pre-appointing does not work. Using the staff knowledge and software, these patients are easily identified. This patient group may be shift workers, construction workers, self-employed, patients who are anxious or patients who do not place high value on hygiene care.
Reduce the loss of hygiene revenue by managing a group of patients differently. Use the Waiting List report to manage these hygiene patients.
Treatment Compliance
Measuring patient compliance to treatment is a key performance indicator and is an area of practice management to measure monthly. The systems around managing comprehensive treatment require a significant amount of staff time and energy, so the return for these efforts should be measured.
Begin by measuring the practice case acceptance percentage and establish a target monthly. Meeting an industry benchmark of 70% or greater is reasonable and indicates whether the system is effective.
Doctor Downtime
An area of practice management of significant revenue loss is doctor downtime. Use the industry benchmark of 3-5% downtime for the doctor. Of course meeting this benchmark requires sufficient patients and case compliance, along with systems that improve management of the schedules.
Since doctor revenue per hour is much higher than hygiene, this revenue loss can be significant if greater than the target.
Billing Code Assessment
Use the software reports to evaluate the billing by provider for specific codes. For example, review hygienists billing for 2 unit scaling and 3 unit scaling to evaluate consistency. If billing profiles are not similar, there could be inconsistent approach to care or errors in billing relative to treatment provided.
For the doctor, look at the lab percentage as an indication of case compliance with procedures that generate lab codes.
Patient Management
As an owner or practice manager, per patient revenue is an important number to know and monitor. For example, if per patient revenue is decreasing year over year this trend needs to be reversed.
If patients are falling into dormant status rather than viewing this as hygiene lost revenue, consider it in terms of per patient revenue. Efforts to reactivate patients relative to the cost can be evaluated.
The take away from examining dormant patients is asking why they are falling into this status. Are the reasons related to the systems, capacity or lack of team hours on the system? In addition, team members require training to manage patients, which includes software training and coaching.
Growth
Simply put, if the practice is not growing it’s in decline. In every practice there is patient attrition due to people who move, change dentists, remain on unscheduled lists and so on. Since patient attrition is a given, the number of new patients to the practice must be greater than the number not participating.
Internal patient referrals remain a frequent source of new patients. Of course social media and other marketing initiatives are essential to increasing new patients.
Ask yourself, how well does the practice do at stimulating referrals? For example, if the practice treats 400 patients a month and 5 new patients are referred by patients, what might this signal?
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As usual, an amazing recap and valuable insights from Dale. If you’re wondering if you’re really taking advantage of all the reports and plethora of features Tracker has, then reach out to us here at Tracker and make sure. Whether it’s a simple explanation or a more in-depth training, you will surely benefit.
Also, if you feel like connecting with Dale Tucci, please do. She’d be glad to hear from you. She can be reached at [email protected] or 416-450-8769.