Do you know who your top referrals are? Are your marketing dollars bringing a satisfactory ROI? When you are running a small business, it is important to track your key performance indicators and your marketing dollars should be one of those numbers. Patients are finding your practice in many ways. Therefore, it is important to link up the correct referral source to the patient so you can get analysis reports out of Dentrix.
You probably know how to link up a referral source to a new patient account, but do you know how to obtain the statistics you need to evaluate the ROI on those referral sources? There are two great reports that will give you this information.
- The Referred By Doctor/Other Report will show you the marketing referral sources, how the patients that have been referred to your office and the dollars brought into your practice from this referring source. This report can be found on the Office Manager > Reports > Management > Referred By Doctor/Other, then select your parameters. You can look at new patient numbers each month or quarterly to see what referral sources are bringing in quality patients who accept treatment.
- The Referred by Patient Report will also give you these numbers for your existing patient referrals. This is a great way to reward your patients of record for referring their friends and family to your practice. You must be careful about incentivizing your patients for referrals so make sure to check your state law about this. I have heard that you can give a “thank you” for the referral but cannot solicit referrals with a monetary item.
With both reporting documents, you need to have some kind of referral attached to the patient record. With this in mind, if the patient does not know how he or she was referred, you might want to consider creating a NONE category. I have attached a screen shot of what this report looks like so you can have an idea of how it will look.