The Clear Vision Annual Dental Business KPI Report 2012
Measure to improve the results of your dental business
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are not figures you find in your annual accounts. Neither are they included in your monthly or quarterly management accounts.
And yet, as accountants to dentists and dental business consultants, we continue to urge dentists to measure and focus on these vital numbers. In fact we unashamedly bang on about them! Why?
Because it’s these numbers which influence your financial results. These are the underlying numbers which drive financials and make them better. Improve your KPI results and your financial results improve. So you can see it makes sense to focus on them, doesn’t it?
Clear Vision meets with dentists every week. So we have access to the KPIs measured by dentists across the UK. For the second year, we have crunched these figures to work out the average results for the key dental business KPIs across the UK. The results are most interesting…
Recommendations from existing patients
Looking at the new private patient figures achieved, I can reveal the UK average number of new patients recommended by existing patients to be 3 per month.
What is more revealing, however, is around 20% of dental businesses making this measurement report a noticeably higher monthly figure than the average. Some double it on a regular basis. Others exceed it even further.
So around 4,000 of the 22,000 UK dental practices (using BDA figures) are really getting ahead here.
By now you know that we’re eager to share what works for dental businesses , so you can read details of what these exceptional practices do to increase their figures in our full KPI report.
New patients from websites
The average number of new patients UK dental practices generate via their websites is 4 per month. Once again, it’s important to stress this is the average figure and there are dentists we see generating 9 new patients from websites per month. How?
Firstly by recognising online marketing is a specialist area, recruiting a specialist to help them and then sticking to what they do best.
They have set up productive and effective agreements with their specialists to deliver more traffic to their websites and more enquiries for their dental businesses. If you’d like to read more details on how this is done, you can check out the full report.
Recalling patients
Our statistics indicate the average exam recall rate across the UK rose from 50.77% in 2011 to 61.8% in 2012. Plus there are dentists we see giving this fundamental system keen focus and achieving rates as high as 90%.
The average hygiene recall rate was 71.93% last year.
The dentists generating the best recall results are finding new ways to illustrate the value of their exams and regular hygiene sessions. Again, you are welcome to read more in our report.
