I am a numbers girl. The very first dental practice I worked in back in the early 90s helped shaped my love of numbers. We had annual planning sessions, monthly numbers meetings, and talked about the goals during our morning huddle. This helped me understand the business side of running a dental practice. Now, when I am working with teams all over the country you will hear me say . . .
“Not only are you in healthcare, but you are also running a small business.”
After your annual planning session, you now have the practice production goals that you can plug into your Dentrix software. You might get these goals handed to you as an annual goal or a monthly goal, so you might need to do some math as you start to enter them into your software. You also might need to calculate what portion of the production goal is hygiene and what part is doctor. If you need help with this, I would love to schedule a call with Dayna to talk through it.
When I was in my own practice, I would receive a monthly goal and the production goal per hour for each hygienist. I would then take the monthly goal, subtract the hygiene part, and this would give me what the doctor(s) need to produce for the month. Now I was ready to add the goals into my Dentrix software so the rest of my team could use it as a guide for scheduling.
From the Office Manager go to Analysis > Practice > Setup > Goals to add the monthly production goals for each producer. Then, in your appointment book, click on View on the top toolbar to select the providers you want added to your calendar view for monitoring production goals. You can create multiple views for tracking the entire office, doctors only or hygiene only.
I really like having the goals separated by each hygienist and doctor because you can set up customized appointment book views for your hygiene team so they can monitor their own goals. This really helps during the morning huddle. When you look at the calendar in the upper left of your appointment book, you can see the scheduled production and the goal for the month. You can quickly see if you are on track or need to step it up a little.
** One thing to note, however, is that the system will calculate the total amount of the appointment based on the scheduled provider. If your doctor receives the credit for hygiene exams, you will need to mentally subtract this amount from the scheduled production.
Once you have your production goals added into your Dentrix software, you can view and monitor them in a couple of different places. For the scheduling team, I think the calendar in the upper left corner is the best spot because you can quickly see if you are above goal or short of goal. You can also track and monitor your goals from the Daily Huddle Report. This is a great report for your team to review together to get a summary of the important metrics for the office.
The bottom line is that your team needs a roadmap to get the office to where it needs to be in order to be financially healthy. From mapping out the days/hours/vacations to setting up your ideal day to monitoring goals, all of these tools help everyone keep eyeballs on the outcomes.
