Dental CEO - Building the Operations Dashboard

Show Notes

In this episode of the Shared Practices Podcast, Richard Low and Scott Leune dive into the essential task of building operations for dental practices. As a Dental CEO, mastering operations is key to running a smooth and profitable practice. Learn the strategies and systems that make a big difference in daily practice management. Key Highlights: 

1. Creating Efficient Systems: Richard and Scott discuss how building effective systems within your practice can streamline daily tasks, improve productivity, and free up your time for leadership responsibilities.
2. Managing Operations for Growth: Learn the importance of scaling your operations to handle growth without losing control. Scott shares key insights into designing systems that grow with your practice.
3. Delegating and Accountability: They break down how to delegate tasks effectively, creating a culture of accountability within your team to ensure that operations run smoothly even when you're not involved in every detail.

 

 

Ready to build a successful operations system for your practice? Tune in now to learn from the experts and take the next step toward confidently leading your practice!

 

 

Have a question or topic you want us to cover? Reach out to us on social media or our website at www.sharedpractices.com. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review if you enjoyed this episode!

What is Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership?

A bootcamp in small business ownership and practice management for dentists, giving the new graduate a roadmap to successful practice ownership. We interview the best dentists, experts, consultants and more on our weekly show. Here's the topics we will be covering in our 8 Seasons:
1. First Years as a Dentist
2. Think Like a Business Owner
3. Money and Numbers
4. Startups, Acquisitions, and Partnerships
5. Internal Systems
6. Marketing & Growth
7. Leadership, Vision and Culture
8. Beyond Dentistry
Go to SharedPractices.com to download the 8 Season Roadmap.

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Welcome to Shared Practices 2.0. I'm joined by my co-host, Dr.

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Scott Luna. Scott, how's it going today?

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It's going great today. I'm looking forward. I've actually got a men's retreat

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for four days starting tomorrow.

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So this is a great kind of cap to my work week right before I do something really cool.

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I love it. That's amazing. I've had a few of these men's retreat experiences

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before, and it's just like something to look forward to that's unlike anything

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else. So, you know, I might bug you offline afterwards to hear how that was for you.

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But I'm excited to return to the series that we started this last episode about the dental CEO.

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And we teased and talked about these three pillars of areas within this role

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of being a dental CEO that dentists need to think about.

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And this first pillar around managing operations, I think, is what a lot of

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people are more inclined to lean into as an entrepreneur.

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It's like, okay, let's figure out all the systems and manage the numbers,

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manage the people, or manage the production.

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So talk to us, why is this kind of part one of thinking about how to be a dental CEO?

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Yeah. And maybe just to review real quick, the three pillars we had talked about

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in our initial episode last time, where a CEO has to manage the operations of a practice.

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Those are are the things we see every day. When we're watching people do things,

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they are answering phones, scheduling patients, getting case acceptance,

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submitting claims, collecting money. Those are the operations.

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Operations are creating the collections.

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So that's the first pillar that we're going to talk about today.

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The second pillar is we have to manage our expenses.

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Those are the things that take away the money we collected, right?

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That's a whole nother category. And then the third pillar is managing the people.

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And there's specific strategies we need to understand when it comes to leading

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and managing a team and having accountability.

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And our habits as a CEO kind of become the glue that holds these three things

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together in a healthy way.

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So this episode is about the first thing. the operations, the things that we see every day.

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And this is what I think a lot of us think of when we think of being a CEO.

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When we think of like, I want time to focus on the business side.

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What I think a lot of us are saying is, I want time to make sure that the operations are healthy.

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And yes, of course, that's important. That's just one of the pillars.

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But it is the first big foundational pillar of bringing in money.

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So can we optimize things that bring in money?

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And to kind of lead us off on this thought, what I see is I see a lot of us

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dental CEOs confusing the important operational activities that give results with the loud,

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noisy things thrown onto our laps.

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So being a CEO starts off maybe by being able to identify what are the things

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that are incredibly important for me to almost habitualize in my life as a CEO versus the kind of loud,

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distracting things that typically might fall on my lap and might pull me away

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from what's important. Does that make sense?

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Absolutely. You know, the fires to put out.

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The one thing that's nice about a crisis is that you know you have to focus

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on that one thing. So I think there's people who,

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get comfortable living from crisis to crisis to crisis, because it's clear I

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need to focus on this one thing.

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I don't have to make CEO decisions of where is my time best spent to improve operations overall.

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But if you can't get out of that mode and actually look at this from a higher

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level, create systems, create structure and accountability, we're stuck in that cycle of fires.

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So I'm excited to get into the specifics. And hopefully by the end of the episode,

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I'm going to see if we can find, you mentioned last time, even checklists,

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items that we can hold ourselves accountable on for this to keep people organized.

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Well, when you hop from crisis to crisis, what you're doing is undisciplined management.

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You don't have to think of what to do. You don't have to be disciplined and

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proactive and organized and focused.

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You get to just sit back there in a lazy kind of way and just become a victim

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of a situation and react. So the situations are telling you what to do.

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And so often these situations don't tell you the smart thing to do.

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They tell you the loud thing to do that your dental assistant is upset about

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or a patient's upset about, or you're worried about some collection crisis or who knows what.

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See, to be disciplined as a CEO is to force in your CEO life these activities,

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these actions that have nothing to do with the crisis.

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They are the actions that result in preventing a crisis, but those actions don't make any noise.

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So we don't get to sit back and let the universe tell us what to do.

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No, we actually have to control our own destiny proactively by having the discipline

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and the focus to do something that's not asking us to get done.

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It's not making any noise.

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An example of that is let's just start with a simple example.

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Is auditing a couple of phone calls every week.

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All right. If you have a bad phone call, there's no alarm bell that goes off

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that tells you, Oh, alarm.

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You just had a really bad phone call or, Oh, you just hired someone that is

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saying the wrong thing over the phone or, Oh, your scheduler just said you don't

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take MetLife when you do like there's no alarm bell for that.

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So we don't, if we don't proactively like habitualize auditing a call on a regular

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basis, crisis, we will eventually become the victims of poor operations.

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And we may never even know it. It may be a silent cancer that happens for years.

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And we're scratching our heads thinking, man, I hate my marketing company because

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nothing's working when the phones are imploding.

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So kind of start this out. What are those actions, those activities that are

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going to actually bring results that need to be habitualized.

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That's how we start. What does it mean to be a CEO?

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It means to number one, identify the big knobs we got to turn the right way

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and then identify the habitual activities to make sure that those knobs are

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actually being turned the right way and they don't go backwards.

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It makes me think of the grid of important and urgent,

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Oh, crap. I can't even think of the other two sides of the grid.

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Do you remember? Do you know what I'm talking about?

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Yeah, yeah. So you've got kind of the y-axis and the x-axis and it forms kind of these four squares.

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And on one corner, it says this is very important and very urgent.

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And on the opposite, the catty corner, it says this is not urgent and not important.

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And then you've got, of course, the urgent, not important stuff and the not

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urgent, important stuff.

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Yeah. And yeah, it kind of makes you think along those lines.

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I tell you that, why don't we start by identifying the major wheels of a practice?

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Us okay the thing but because what's not a major wheel is

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the fact that the monitor and opt to isn't working that's not a major wheel

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that doesn't like hurt our our new patient flow or collections for the day but

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it becomes loud like you know we've got a leaky toilet is a loud thing but but

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it's it's not a major wheel so so we're of course going to have to handle the

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distractions distractions,

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but let's not skip and prioritize.

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So now let's not skip the important things and prioritize the distractions,

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right? So what are the priorities?

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I kind of like to look at the creation of collections in a linear fashion.

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There are specific, incredibly important benchmark moments in the creation of

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collections or in operations.

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So the first one is it starts with patient flow, patients coming in.

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And that's one big knob. And before we dive into that knob deeper,

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I'll just review kind of all the knobs I see. So you got patient flow to start with.

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And then those patients must be diagnosed.

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So how much do we diagnose typically as a practice or typically as a doctor?

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That's a major knob. And then once they're diagnosed, got the third knob that

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says, okay, do they say yes?

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Do we get deep case acceptance or do we get light case acceptance like what

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is that case acceptance knob where's it turned and then once we get case acceptance

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we obviously have to have room in the schedule to produce it so we got we need capacity.

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And after we produce it, we need to collect it. So we've got collections.

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So those might be like just in a simple way of thinking, five of the knobs to

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focus on, patient flow, diagnosis, case acceptance, capacity, and collections.

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And obviously, if we're strong at those five knobs, everyone listening knows

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that we will be collecting a ton.

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So how do we get strong at those five knobs?

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Knobs well we have to understand the components of that part of our machine

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that patient flow knob when we turn it what are the components that's actually

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controlling where how far that knob goes now does that make sense so far.

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Absolutely and i love these kind of large categories and that we're going to

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talk about you know not just the the what what is included here but what is

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actually important and non-urgent in these aspects that you can be auditing and improving as a CEO?

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So those five knobs, you may also look at them as like, okay,

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those are five things I need to do and improve to grow my collections.

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But as a CEO, those are all five very important moments I need to audit,

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I need to measure, I need to keep an eye on.

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Kind of like, you know, we're looking at the blood pressure and the pulse rate,

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you know, and our oxygen levels, right?

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Very important things that we need to make sure we monitor on a regular basis.

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So that first area, the patient flow, you know, what's that made up of?

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That's made up, of course, of new patients, but it's actually primarily made

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up of existing patients, patients that have come back.

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And so as a CEO, I need to know, all right, What are the activities to make those numbers go up?

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So what's the best practice? And how do I know if I'm winning or losing?

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Like, what should I be hitting?

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So like on recall, on reappointed patients, what is a healthy number?

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You know, how often should patients be reappointed for a future year hygiene visit?

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What would you say would be kind of a healthy number for that?

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I mean, we want it in the 90 to 95% range.

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Yeah. And we might actually take that reappointment of a patient and break it

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up into two different categories because there's two different types of activities.

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You've got the regular hygiene patient that's coming in regularly,

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and we want to reappoint them regularly.

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And that might be a 95% and up reappointment that we want to achieve.

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Then we've got the new patient. New patient, never met us before.

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They might need scaling, or maybe they're only in for a limited exam.

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And that is going to have a different action to get them reappointed.

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We have to have case acceptance maybe to get them reappointed,

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or we have to diagnose a prophy that they didn't come in for to get them reappointed.

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So it's good to kind of look at those two things separately because they involve

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two separate sets of actions.

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And maybe on that new patient, we might achieve an an 85% reappointment rate

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because, for example, there's plenty of emergency new patients that come in

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that have no intention of ever coming back.

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Or there's plenty of new patients that come in that need scaling and replanning.

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They've got periodontal disease.

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But your practice might have policies that say, we're not going to give them

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a future appointment unless they say yes to scaling.

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And so you're going to have kind of a lower expected rate.

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Now, we're not talking right about like, well, what should you do?

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What should the action be? Right now we're talking about being a CEO.

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You need to, in a way, take the concept of these five areas and build out a way to measure it.

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A very simple dashboard. So in the first area of patient flow, what is that made up of?

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Well, so far we've said we'd want 95% or higher reappointment rate on recall patients.

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We'd want an 85% or higher reappointment rate on new patients.

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And so let's have those two little numbers we look at at least once a month.

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Let's check the health once a month. Let's not allow more than a month go by

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where someone in our practice is now doing the wrong thing and that numbers drop down.

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It might make sense so far.

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Oh, absolutely. And this is where we start. I also think it's the,

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you ask someone if they're a better than average driver.

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And of course, who doesn't think they're a better than average driver?

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Why else would you be driving?

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Most dental practices think they are doing pretty well at this and are not looking at the data.

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And what you just said, every month looking at these two numbers should be a bare minimum. them.

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And you should believe the numbers if they say something other than what you

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expect or what we're saying here.

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Yeah. And if you look at data, but don't understand, if you don't step back

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and understand the entire picture, then the data itself is just a pixel that

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doesn't mean anything to you.

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You have to understand how all these pixels come together to build the image.

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And so just looking at a reappointment rate in hygiene doesn't mean a lot to

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you until you understand, Oh, that's part of the new patient flow driver.

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Oh, that means I need to be looking at it in this way. And if it's down,

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oh, that means that we are not doing the right action, the right activity.

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That other patient flow side is the new patient flow side.

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And while we may not have a number that tells you, are you good or bad,

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healthy or not, what we do have is we have your own trend.

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So if you start seeing your new patient numbers go down, that should be an alert to you.

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If they start going up, that should, of course, make you feel like some other

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things are working. But I'll ask you, where do new patients come from?

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What actions of our business ultimately result in a new patient showing up in our practice?

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I'd say insurance participation, reputation, referrals, and marketing,

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direct marketing to patients, sometimes organic search.

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Those are some of the avenues. news.

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Correct. So I love what you said. So how about we organize those in different topics?

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So on one topic, what brings in new patients are marketing efforts,

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whether those are paid marketing or organic marketing efforts.

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I put them all in the kind of marketing efforts bucket. Because today,

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so many things kind of blend in with each other, right?

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We've got all this organic social media kind of content and connections we're

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trying to get so that our paid marketing has a bigger audience that's going

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to click on it and get retargeted. So it's all kind of a marketing bucket.

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Marketing, I'd say, brings in the leads, the potential new patients.

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But then once we get the lead, all right, what turns that lead into an actual patient?

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And nine times out of 10 or more, it happens through a phone call.

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So what does happen through a phone call? Well, we have to answer the phone.

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And if we talk to a new patient, we have to schedule them.

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You mentioned insurance participation.

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What I've found from our studies is that that doesn't generate more calls.

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What it does is it causes more people after they called to actually schedule.

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So I would say that's converting people to an appointment.

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Insurance participation is one policy that helps us convert a caller.

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Just like being open on Saturdays or in the evening, just like accepting children

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in a practice or having a really low fee for a limited exam.

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Exam, all of those are examples of policies that lower the barriers to scheduling.

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Of course, policies aren't the only thing that impact whether someone schedules.

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What might you say, besides policies, if we've got a phone call,

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we answered it, we can cause them to schedule or we can screw it up and not

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cause them to schedule. What might that be?

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That is the skills of the the person answering the phone in their ability to

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demonstrate warmth, handle objections, be clear, and actually get someone to convert.

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Yeah, that's great. So how we handle the phone.

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Now, I don't like to call it skills because there's a connotation there that

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says someone is sounding skilled.

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And if I were to ask you or anyone else, what does a good phone call sound like?

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I asked that in my seminars, by the way, when I give seminars,

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our price management course, which is my biggest one, I'll ask that question,

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what does a good phone call sound like?

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And the answers I get are things like, they sound positive, they sound like

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they're answering with a smile on their face, they're very thorough,

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they answer all the questions a patient has, they're calm.

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None of that to me, means it's a good phone call.

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So a good phone call, ultimately the result of a good phone call is someone's scheduled.

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What gets people to schedule? Smiling doesn't.

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Now the opposite of that can hurt you. So being rude obviously hurts you,

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but being happy doesn't get people to schedule.

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Being super thorough in answering all of their questions actually hurts your

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ability to schedule them because what we need to do is we need to actually convert

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this call from them asking all the questions to us asking the questions.

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When they are asking the questions, less people schedule compared to when we

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are asking the questions.

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So we don't want to be super thorough and just wait for the next question,

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the next question, and the next question, because our conversion rates go down.

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It's proven it goes down.

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So we're really in the weeds right now, but when we talk about,

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okay, what's a good call?

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A good call is where we have taken charge in a way that flows and is appropriate. It makes sense.

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And it results in a person scheduling.

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If you were to ask me, what does it mean to be skilled?

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To me, it means that the person that answered the phone is following that exact framework.

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They're saying very specific words and sentences. They have a very specific strategy.

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That strategy isn't be happy and be thorough in answering questions.

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That strategy is a very unique way to take control of the call,

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to lead them to scheduling an appointment and getting it done in a relatively short amount of time.

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And that is what I would say is a skilled call.

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So like if we kind of back up a layer or two, we're talking about patient flow,

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new patients specifically, and marketing gives us the leads and the leads hit our phone.

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And assuming we answer the phone, we need to convert that to an appointment.

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That conversion is going to happen with policies and with our verbiage on the phone.

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Now that's again, assuming we've answered the call.

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I'm curious, I don't know if you happen to know, but do you happen to know about

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what percent of calls do not get answered in a dental practice?

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I've seen offices where it's 50% or more, unfortunately.

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Yeah. So the national average is depending on the size of the practice,

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there's two sizes they measure.

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One is 32% missed call rate and one's 38% missed call rate.

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And then when you look at startup practices, they're over 50% of their calls

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are missed primarily because they've got a small team and they're not open every day.

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So another way of saying that is, you know, a decent performer in the United

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States is going to miss one third of their new patient calls.

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That's like throwing Throwing away one third of your practice,

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it's throwing away one third of your leads, your marketing dollars.

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It's just, and it's not, it's actually, I would say it's even more than throwing

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away a third because that third of the patients you could have had would have

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come back and refer to other people who would have come back and refer to other people.

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And when you go down the timeline, you've really thrown away a lot more than

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a third of what you could have been.

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So what does that mean to a CEO? EO. Well, you tell me, what are some numbers that we need to add?

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We started on the patient flow side with regular hygiene patients.

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Are they going to reappoint 95% of the time or not?

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New patients, are they going to reappoint in hygiene 85% of the time or not?

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So there's two little numbers we're just going to look at once a month.

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But what about the new patient flow side? What might be some numbers we would want to look at?

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So, I mean, the final result, the new patients scheduled,

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and I would say not even scheduled, the ones who actually show up and become

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new patients in the practice, but then our calls, total call volume,

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missed calls, and conversion to appointments.

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Great. So if we simplify it down to the very basics, we'd say,

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okay, how many new patients did we get this month?

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So we know if we're trending up or down. The number by itself means very little,

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but are we trending up or down?

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And then what percent of the calls did we answer versus miss?

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That tells us, are we healthy or not? We should be answering in the 90s.

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If we're not answering in the 90s, we are definitely not in kind of that top

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performer mode we could be in.

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And then what percent of the calls convert to an appointment?

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So the national average is around 40%. It's 42, actually. The exact number is 42.

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We should be in the 70s and up. My practices have almost always been in the

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high 80s, but in the 70s and up would be considered a good performer.

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So if we just stand back and I am your dashboard,

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you're the CEO, and you log in once a month and I say hygiene reappointment

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rate 96%, new patient reappointment rate 88%, new patient flow 62 new patients just like last month,

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missed call rate 49%, and conversion rate 48%.

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What does that mean to you?

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That means we're focusing on missed call rate and call conversion rate because

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the other three metrics were trending well.

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They're doing well. And therefore, now I can actually appropriately allocate

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time and attention and we need to work on those.

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Good. So like you're going to look at the hygiene numbers for five seconds and

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forget about them for a month because they're healthy.

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So you don't have the burden of that on your mind. You're going to look at your

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new patient numbers and say, yeah, they're normal.

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You're going to forget about that for a month. But then what you said is our

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phone numbers could be a lot better.

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And if they are better, our new patient numbers could really go up.

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So how do we make them better would be the next thing the CEO needs to know and learn.

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And gosh, that could be a whole episode right there. But we first have to be

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able to diagnose this dental practice before we know how to surgically enhance it, right?

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So the CEO's job is to do an examination on its dental office every month to

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diagnose any potential cancers that might be building up and growing here.

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And in this little example we did, you diagnosed, oh, we've got kind of a tumor forming with phones.

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And so let's just make that next month's implementation project.

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What an effective CEO you would be if that's what you did.

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Because all these other CEOs are just cutting another tooth instead of looking

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at that number, or even if they are looking at it, they're just not doing anything about it.

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So that's the first knob.

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Well, and one last point here on this knob.

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The thing that I think even a lot of dentists fundamentally are missing in all

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of this is they don't have the ability to measure all of these,

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whether that's through being able to see the call volume, the missed calls,

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tracking the conversion rates.

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They don't have metrics hooked up. And so they're not looking at these things.

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But the one thing that dentists know is that

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it's painful to make marketing activity decisions because

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I need to choose where to allocate money and I need to

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you know I feel like that's the source of

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all of our patient flow issues so ironically the areas that they need to be

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the most astute about often they can't even see and if they can see they often

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don't have the skills or the policies to move the needle on those so I you know like you said this is,

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future episodes that we're gonna have to dive into to multiple aspects here

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but it's just amazing how far off you know the average dentist might be based on these it's.

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It's it's too cliche to say

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yet again well they didn't teach us that in dental school but

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you know that cliche is actually pretty correct you know we learned so much

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about so many other things that that are less important to our lives and something

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like this but could you imagine being like a cardiologist and trying to diagnose

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disease of the heart and never having blood work on patients,

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never having lipids, never having heart rates and never having EKG readings,

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never having blood pressure readings.

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How on earth could you be a good cardiologist?

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You'd just be reacting to things that just walk in and hoping for the best.

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And you as a cardiologist would absolutely pay for the machinery needed to measure

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those things so you could properly diagnose your patient.

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Us CEOs, so many of us are missing the EKG machine and we're trying to decide

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if the heart rhythm is okay or not without a freaking EKG machine.

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We have to know what those reappointment rates are. We have to know what the

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conversion rates are on the phone. We need the EKG machine to be a good, effective CEO.

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Otherwise, it's so much more work and so much more stressful.

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And the results are so much worse in treating our practice than had we had a machine like that.

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So the second knob, I said, so first knob was patient flow. People walk in.

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We're going to have four or five numbers there. Done. Easy.

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Second knob, after they walk in, we diagnose them. All right.

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Well, what are some things we could measure?

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Let's still have this whole theory of we're going to measure a number.

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We're going to look at an EKG machine to see are we healthy or not.

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Before we dive into what to actually do to make it better, how can we first

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diagnose the issue? What are some numbers you might think about?

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So diagnosis, we would say maybe dollar amount per new patient or per existing patient per exam.

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Yeah. So what you're saying is, and correct me if I'm wrong,

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but some dentists diagnose a larger dollar amount per patient on average.

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Some diagnose smaller dollar amount.

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Or another way of saying it is, some practices seem to bring in patients that

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need a bigger dollar amount.

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And some practices tend to bring in patients that need a smaller dollar amount.

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I'm curious, if you had to guess, if a practice has a low dollar amount diagnosed,

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is that primarily because of the philosophy of the dentist or is that primarily

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because of the demographic of the patient base of that practice? What would you guess?

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I would guess that the skill set of the dentist, both from the,

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here's the procedures that we do and that we're comfortable doing here in our

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office, as well as the skill set of the dentist of bringing up hard things and

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resolving, you know, patients' doubts and concerns,

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in my opinion, I think would play a bigger role than the average demographic, but I could be wrong.

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Yeah, I totally agree. From what I've seen,

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it's so heavily weighted on the fact that dentists are diagnosing based on what

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they know and not necessarily based on what people need or what people could

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use to prevent problems or what people could use to benefit themselves themselves

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cosmetically, for example, right?

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We've got disease we can diagnose, we got prevention, but we've also got elective care.

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And like, you know, when you think about a hundred patients getting exams,

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what percent of those patients could benefit from fixing disease or preventing

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disease or elective care?

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What would you think? Out of 100 people, who would qualify for a diagnosis of

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at least one of those three things?

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98% to 100%?

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Yeah, it'd be a big number, right? So what's interesting is when I talk to these

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dentists that, to the number you listed, the dollar amount per exam diagnosed.

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When I talk to the dentists that have lower dollar amounts, so common.

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I hear things like, well, it's the demographic of my practice. It's my patient type.

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They've had a lot of work done. They don't need a lot of work.

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I so often hear that. And I think that is short-sighted for most dentists to

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say that's what's happening.

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What I see is happening is that they are just choosing not to diagnose the complete

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list of things that we could possibly diagnosed.

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They're looking for a much more narrow list of things.

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And that's a whole other conversation too.

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But there's another number that I could pair with your number that you already mentioned.

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What percent of exams actually get something diagnosed?

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And to your point, gosh, maybe it should be like 98% because 98% of people might

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either need something or should have something preventative or would qualify

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for something elective.

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And it's our job as clinicians and as a dental practice to show them everything

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that they could benefit from.

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So maybe that number should be something like 98%. Well, when you look at the

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national averages, it's in the 30s.

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It's in the 30s. So there's a big opportunity there in diagnosis if we can embrace

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being more comprehensive in what we talk about.

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And that doesn't necessarily just mean be aggressive.

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That's not what I'm talking. I'm not even talking about it. I don't even think

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there is really much of a thing as aggressive.

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You know, if someone has a cracked tooth, what's the conservative thing to do?

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Fix it. Someone has a small cavity, what's the conservative thing to do? Fix it.

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Maybe it'd be aggressive to not fix it. But we somehow have told ourselves,

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if we diagnose something that's not being conservative, I don't really see it that way.

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So if we look at this big knob then, to your point, we need a high percentage

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of exams resulting in a diagnosis if we truly are comprehensively communicating to patients.

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And we'd like to know and measure, well, well, what a dollar amount of dentistry are we diagnosing?

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And there's not necessarily a right or wrong number when it comes to the dollar amount,

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But the trend is important. And of course, that's an opportunity to better ourselves financially.

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If we can learn a bigger procedure and add that to our mix, we would see that dollar amount go up.

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So that might mean we go learn how to place an implant. And maybe we don't go

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learn about bonding agent or occlusal schemes just yet.

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Maybe we're going to choose something that drives that specific number up a

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little more. Am I making sense to you?

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Absolutely. And the question I have for you is, you know, we talked about clinical

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education, expanding your skill set.

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I think there's also the conviction behind what I'm diagnosing and why it's

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needed and preventative care.

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Okay, so it looks like we're running out of time here on going through all five of these knobs.

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Recap really quickly for me. These two knobs that we've talked about today,

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we've got the patient flow, we've got the diagnosis as the first two that we're

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looking at, and where we're going next.

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Yeah. So again, what we're trying to do here is like, all right,

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let's visualize a very straightforward kind of CEO level dashboard.

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And there's these five categories on this dashboard to start with.

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And the first two we've talked about on this episode are, okay,

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patient flow and diagnosis.

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And on that dashboard, we see patient flow comes from reappointed patients from hygiene.

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That's a number. Reappointed new patients.

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That's a number. And then we've got the new patient flow side.

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How many new patients and how many calls are we answering and how many calls are we converting?

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And that is going to alert us. Is something healthy? Can we move on?

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Or is something not healthy? Do we need to dive deeper?

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And then that second knob, the diagnosis side, we're looking at these kind of couple main numbers.

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What percentage of our exams are resulting in some sort of diagnosis?

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And that percent, ideally, is really high because the vast majority of patients

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would benefit from some sort of dentistry.

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So we need to look at that. If it's low, that causes us to act.

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And then, of course, the other thing is, well, okay, how much dollar-wise are we diagnosing per exam?

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Because maybe if we find that that number isn't a lot, it might be because we

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just don't have the skill set in-house to do kind of the larger kind of cases we want to do.

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And maybe someday we want to transition to a practice schedule that has less

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patients per day without having less production per day, right?

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So that's where we're at right now. Now, we've got these other three super important

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knobs of case acceptance, capacity, and of course, collections that we definitely

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need to add to this dashboard.

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But so far, that's what we've had time to talk about.

Host Track: :
Perfect. Well, I'm excited to get in this next episode, those next three knobs.

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And then after that, we'll come back and talk about the application of all of

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this and turning this into systems for the CEO to hold themselves accountable

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and disciplined. So thank you, Scott. This has been a blast.

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Awesome. Thank you.

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We'll talk to you next time on the Shared Practices Podcast.