A few weeks ago, I wrote about what to do when your team falls off the wagon, when your numbers seem to falter. Then last week, I shared with you the only real way to judge your success and what the main focus should be every day with every patients.
Now, more than ever, as we approach the end of the year, you have to have rock solid discipline to stay the course and finish strong on top.
This requires adherence to a very basic principle in your practice: knowing your numbers.
You spend all day diagnosing and taking care of patients. You do this with tangible proof, pictures, x-rays, technology and patient feedback to make informed, confident diagnosis to help your patients get healthy.
Yet, so many practices don’t pay attention to their own diagnosis that is blatantly obvious as to where things might be going wrong or where opportunities to improve exist.
Without knowing these key numbers, you can’t know what is actually going on in your practice.
Example:
How much treatment has been diagnosed, presented to and accepted plus scheduled and paid for (either in full or at very least a deposit) for every single new patient each day.
You should be sitting down reviewing every new patient with the entire team (or at least your new patient team), to understand what went well and what could have gone better. You have to know this in order to determine what is moving in the right direction or what is going downhill.
Tracking case acceptance isn’t enough, you need to know every step in the process.
I still know people who don’t know how many calls they are getting compared to how many appointments are schedule.
Plus, you also should know how much production was done today and how many dollars were collected based on that number.
You should know how much unscheduled treatment is in every column of the schedule and how much is converted by the end of the day into active treatment.
These are very basic and yet they tell you everything.
They tell you what team members are effective, what team members are failing, what area of the practice is humming along, which one is struggling, is your diagnosis consistent, are your treatment plans being closed and is money getting collected.
You can just celebrate or complain about what “is” or you can understand why it “is” and then do something about it. You can either continue it or make adjustments, but without information you have nothing.
I see a lot of practices take the credit when they do well and then blame their patients when they don’t. Step up, own the results and do the work necessary to win.
Going through the motions will always result in a downward spiral eventually. I could put money in this right now: at least one area, one person, one part of your practice is just going through the motions and pulling down the others, and maybe there is more than one.
Get back to basics through the holidays and beyond to put up bigger numbers than ever before. Now you can go into the new year poised for growth and building momentum.
