The Practice Advisor Report in Dentrix has been out for a few years and I hope you have implemented this amazing reporting tool into your practice management routine. It is like having your own personal practice management consultant at your fingertips whenever you need him or her. This report tracks the key performance indicators that dental practices should be monitoring for managing the health of their practices. During one of our Train-the-Trainer meetings, I learned a few new things about the Practice Advisor Report that I would like to pass on to you.
The most valuable thing I learned was how it pulls information from your continuing care system. This information is located on the Continuing Care section of the report.
- Patients seen with CC visits within the last 12 months – This is considered your patient retention rate. Many dental consultants, including myself, consider this an extremely valuable number and the Practice Advisor report keeps track of this automatically for you. The industry standard is above 85%. Keeping an eye on your retention rate lets you know if you might be slipping in certain areas like confirming appointments or managing your Continuing Care lists.
- # of patients seen with Appt Scheduled – This is the number of patients that were seen for CC and have a next appointment scheduled, CC appointment not restorative. This lets you know how many patients scheduled their next CC before they left the office.
For more information on keeping your schedule full, check out our blog titled
“The top three reports for weekly schedule management”
Another important piece of information I learned about the Practice Advisor report is how it calculates unfilled hours. Before you look at the unfilled hours calculations, make sure that your Provider setup on the Appointment Book is accurate. This is something that you need to keep up-to-date at all times. If one of your providers takes a day off, make sure you change it on his or her schedule in the Provider Setup so it will reflect this change in hours on the Practice Advisor report.
- Dentists and Hygienists # of production days – This number comes from the provider setup, not the schedule.
- Dentists and Hygienists Daily and Hourly production – This calculation comes from the total production (total production not net production) and divides it by the number of production dates and hours in the provider setup. The system considers a full day at 5 hours or more and a half day under 5 hours. With this being said, if your hygienist works from 8 a.m. until 1 p.m. and you only want her to be calculated for a half day, put her in the provider setup for 4 hours and 50 minutes.
- Unfilled Hours – This is the one everyone gets stuck on and it was explained so well at the Train-the-Trainer meeting that I hope I can give it justice. It takes the total available time (number of minutes in the provider setup) minus the total scheduled time (number of minutes in the appointment book). In other words, if you looked across the schedule at all operatories horizontally and there was nothing scheduled, this is considered an unfilled time unit. In the provider setup, it knows which providers are scheduled for that day and it looks for empty spots. If you schedule an event, this is still considered unfilled time.
The last piece I want to talk about is Case Acceptance. This number can vary depending on the type of office and specialty. I hesitate to give industry standards because this number varies widely. However, it is good to know how the Practice Advisor will calculate the case acceptance and also know that this is a “moving” number. For example, if you treatment plan something in January and it is accepted in March, the report will recalculate the January case acceptance number to include this treatment. What this means is that the Y-T-D number will change.
- Amount of Treatment Diagnosed – Any treatment that is treatment planned that day, including the Reason box on the appointment. This includes all hygiene procedures.
- Amount of Treatment Accepted – Any treatment that has been diagnosed and completed in the same month, any treatment that has diagnosed and the case has been marked as accepted will be calculated as accepted. Remember this also includes all hygiene regardless of whether it was set complete on the appointment book or posted to the ledger.
This is an amazing report and I hope that you will use some of these tips to implement the Practice Advisor into your monthly routine. The Practice Advisor Report is a helpful tool for your team tracking the practice goals. Check out our YouTube video on setting up goals in your practice.
