The Practice Advisor Report provides recommendations on how to improve your business, saving you time and making it easier to keep track of your practice’s financial health.
Would you recommend a treatment option to a patient without making a full diagnosis first? Providing great care means using all the relevant information available to choose a course of action. Why not apply the same logic to your practice management? According to Amy Morgan, CEO of the Pride Institute, a dentist has only two ways to make decisions for their practice: based on their judgment alone or informed by statistics. With an understanding of your practice’s statistics, you can be certain your decisions are based on the best information available.
Dentrix Practice Advisor gives you the insight you need to make sound, evidence-based decisions for your practice. With all your key performance indicators (KPIs) together in a single report, you can quickly capture a comprehensive overview of your practice’s performance statistics. Practice Advisor also identifies opportunities to increase your bottom line.
Practice Advisor doesn’t just collect the data; it gives deep insights, helping you know what to do next. For instance, Practice Advisor might identify that your hygiene department is exceeding expectations, but there is room to improve the ratio of treatment diagnosed to treatment accepted. Or perhaps your practice is meeting its overall production goals, but the doctor or hygiene department may not be meeting expected metrics, so you could make the needed corrections.
How could you and your team benefit from a better understanding of your practice’s performance? Practice Advisor can make a difference by empowering you to:
- Boost efficiency
- Compare your data against industry benchmarks
- Generate recommendations based on data analysis
- Gain insight into practice health
- Customize flexible options
Boost Efficiency
How much time does your team lose to inefficient reporting processes? You can take some of your time back with Practice Advisor, which allows you to work more efficiently by tracking all your most important data in one place. There’s no need to waste valuable time running and combining multiple reports to track different KPIs — Practice Advisor consolidates all your KPIs into a single report.
The image below shows how easy it is to share the Practice Advisor Report directly from Dentrix — the software can automatically generate a report in PDF format, which can be shared with anyone who needs to review it.
To generate the Practice Advisor Report:
- From the Office Manager toolbar, select Analysis and then Practice Advisor.
- Select Practice Advisor Report.
- Select the desired report options and click Preview.
You can see an example of what your Practice Advisor Report might look like below:
Compare Your Data Against Industry Benchmarks
Correctly interpreting your data is key to making sound decisions for your business. Without a background in statistics, it can be difficult to understand what report data really means. Practice Advisor doesn’t just give you data without any context —it automatically compares your practice’s data against benchmarks for the industry as a whole. With default benchmarks based on an average, solo and general practices’ performance, you can understand exactly how your performance measures up to the rest of the industry. You can also customize the benchmarks to reflect multiple providers, a specific specialty or any unique goal you (or a practice management consultant) might need to measure.
To view and configure the benchmarks for the Practice Advisor Report:
- From the Practice Advisor window, select Practice Advisor Setup.
- Select Benchmarks Setup.
- Customize the benchmarks as needed and click
Generate Recommendations Based on Data Analysis
Henry Schein One designed Practice Advisor with some of the top practice management consultants in the industry, including the Pride Institute and Jameson Management & Marketing.
Instead of reviewing a typical report that only includes data from your practice, the Practice Advisor’s built-in intelligence provides recommendations if your practice numbers are less than the benchmarks.
For example, if production is below expectations, you may see these recommendations on the report:
- Are there patients with significant treatment that can be moved up in the schedule?
- Are there patients on the Unscheduled Treatment Plans or ASAP lists you can contact to schedule treatment?
- Are there new patients already scheduled who have concerns that can be addressed right away?
- Are there patients of record already scheduled that have more treatment already planned that can be done at the same time? Can you recommend additional cosmetic needs like whitening?
These recommendations are designed to allow you to start a conversation with your team, sharing ideas to find the unique solutions that fit your practice.
Gain Insight into Practice Health
It’s easy to recognize the importance of regular checkups in our everyday lives. From an oral exam at a regular teeth cleaning to bloodwork at an annual physical, tracking important metrics at regular intervals is a key part of understanding any complex system. Practice Advisor meets this need for dental practices by providing a report of the KPIs that Dentrix automatically tracks. Once you understand how your practice is performing right now, you can plan for the future by identifying strengths, risks and opportunities to improve.
One surprising area where many practices lack awareness?
How many active patients they really have. But “the first step in any journey is to be aware,” says Gary Kadi, founder and CEO of NextLevel Practice.
This is often one of the first questions a practice management consultant asks, but many practices don’t know the answer and mistakenly overestimate how many active patients they have.
Practice Advisor keeps a thorough record of your current active patient base, which can help you identify opportunities for growth that you may be underestimating. “Most dental practices can double the amount of dentistry presently being provided by nurturing that which they already have: their existing patient family,” says Cathy Jameson, founder and CEO of Jameson Management & Marketing.
Another common mistake is underestimating the lost value of unfilled work hours for dentists and hygienists. Practice Advisor tracks Value of Dentist Unfilled Hours and Value of Hygienist Unfilled Hours.
With a dollar amount associated with these missed opportunities, you can fully understand the financial impact of unfilled hours on your practice. This data can be useful in team meetings and daily huddles as a way to start a conversation about working together to decrease the number of unfilled hours.
Customize Flexible Options
Henry Schein One built Practice Advisor to offer flexibility to fit your practice’s unique needs. The software allows you to customize benchmarks, choose how to define the active patient base and indicate what time span should be used to determine your active continuing care patients.
Fred Peck, DDS, FAACD, and a dental practice owner using Dentrix in Cincinnati, Ohio, says, “Practice Advisor is very flexible and customizable. We can easily adjust benchmarks and choose what information appears on the report based on our unique needs and goals. Practice Advisor is also the only report we’ve found that brings all the key performance information we need together in one place, makes it relevant and easy to understand, and even provides practical recommendations for refining our business and taking advantage of new opportunities.”
Go Beyond Simple Reporting
The Dentrix Practice Advisor offers much more than a traditional report. This valuable tool helps you keep track of your practice’s KPIs and informs your decisions with benchmark comparisons and built-in analytics. Bring your understanding of your practice to a new level and get the tools your practice needs to thrive in today’s economy with Practice Advisor. Henry Schein One is committed to continuing to develop Dentrix to help your practice boost efficiency and increase profitability.
Learn More
Want to learn more about the Practice Advisor? Read Master the Metrics that Matter or review the various topics listed under the Practice Advisor Report topic in Dentrix Help.
You can also request a free 30-minute Practice Advisor assessment and learn how to increase your practice’s profitability.
