If you ask a dentist/dental practice what they need to increase practice profitability, then chances are that 99 out of 100 would reply the same answer: “We need to increase the new patients’ number.”
And, we can’t agree with them or agree either. Because new patients are a vital part of dental practice’s growth.
New patients are only a small portion of your potential visits. And visits, in turn, only show half of the story of your practice’s production. In this blog, we’re going to dive into visits and uncover all the other pieces that lead to the important metric. Have a look at the three tips that can increase new patients and the dental practice’s profitability.
Tip #1: Re-Appointment
What is the percentage of patients, who visited your practice without a follow-up appointment? Unless you’re tracking your practice’s re-appointment rate closely, it’s a big problem, probably more than you think. The solution is: You need to keep close track of your re-appointment rate.
Tip #2: New Patients
Of course, every dentist needs new patients to grow their practice. New patient visits are great, but you know, they’re also kind of the worst. Getting new patients is not difficult, it’s a ton of work. You need to do marketing very effectively, you must ensure your online information is up-to-date and accurate, and you should make your patients schedule their appointments online easily with your practice.
Once a new patient is in your dental practice, you have to spend a lot of time getting them into your practice again, building trust, etc. Even when you can do all this perfectly, new patients are enough on their own to grow your practice.
Tip #3: Reduce no-shows
There are several ways to knock out no-shows. You’re probably already employing one or more.
Schedule the follow-up as soon as possible
- Utilize automated reminder calls
- Confirm the patient’s appointment the day before
- Make rescheduling simple and painless
But what about patients, who even don’t respond well to your efforts to reduce broken appointments?
Well, rather than wasting time chasing down and rehabilitating those patients, you’re usually better off focusing on filling your schedule with patients who value your time.
As you use the above-discussed tips to increase your visits and fill your schedule with patients who consistently keep their scheduled appointments, those less reliable patients will naturally visit your practice for their appointments. That’s it, problem solved.
It is very important to track the dental practice’s key performance indicators (KPIs), which helps to keep focused on growth. If you need help with the dental metrics, Dentistry Automation can provide an out-of-box and seamless dental KPIs software to track the key metrics of dental practice.
We want to help your dental practice succeed with our KPI dashboard software.
Schedule a free demo and learn how Dentistry Automation’s KPI management software is the perfect choice for your practice management.
