Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are essential for the growth and improvement of your practice. If you do not know precisely how your practice is doing, how do you know what changes you need to make? How do you know if things are going well or worsening? Some people use gut feelings or a sense of impending disaster to motivate them to make changes. You can also have a false sense of security and think that things are going well, and yet they are not. By using precise production indicators, you are a lot more likely to succeed!
What are “performance indicators”?
Let’s start off by saying that statistics are performance indicators and are a number value measuring how much of something is produced. They are a measure of how well the person responsible for that production is actually doing.
For instance, how many new patients (not emergency patients) did you see this week or this month? That is an actual number (or KPI). It is a performance indicator that tells you whether your internal and external marketing are working. (Related video: Low Cost Marketing Strategies for your Practice)
Know in Order to Grow
There are tons of statistics you can keep for your practice. Some, however, are KEY – hence “Key Performance Indicators.” These are the essential ones that you want to keep your eye on at least.
If you want to grow your practice, you need to know what your KPI’s are saying to do.
If your stats are going up, keep doing what you’re doing. If your stats are going down, find out what’s going wrong and change it. If it is going down or not going up to the level you would like quickly enough, you would know that you need to take some actions to change things for the better. If the stats go up from those actions, you know that you need to continue that action and DO NOT DROP IT OUT. If nothing changed, you would know that what you tried did not work, and you would try something different.
Which KPI’s to keep?
There are many stats that you can keep for a practice, but the main ones (KPI’s) should be kept weekly and monthly: Number of New Patients, Billings for the practice as a whole, Billings by provider, Collections, Downtime by provider (unbooked time), Percentage of Next Appointments Booked (i.e. how many patients booked for their next appointment before leaving the office – always a good indicator), Accounts Receivables, Number of Patient Visits (for some practices), Number of No Shows, Number of Hours (or Days) Worked by provider, and so on.
There are many subdivisions for those statistics, but if you kept at least the ones above and took care to act on them to make them go up, you would have a successful practice.
Control Equals Income
If you want some training to become an expert at making your stats go up and taking control of your practice growth, we have 2 short courses that make it easy to create growth in your practice. Contact us for more information on these.
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