With Dental Intelligence, you can turn raw numbers into easy growth opportunities. The Analytics module makes setting goals and tracking progress towards those goals a breeze. Your practice's goals are unique, so we designed Dental Intelligence to give you unique answers. This isn't what a faceless, nameless, hypothetical practice needs to know, it's what your practice needs to know in order to achieve your practice's goals and reach new levels of performance.

In this article, we will explore:

Clinical Hours (also known as Scheduled Hours) are the hours the provider is available to be chairside with patients. Actual Hours are the hours the provider is expected to be in the office. If a provider comes into the office at 8:00 am and leaves the office at 5:00 pm, they have worked a 9-hour day. However, this provider has a 1-hour lunch and a 2-hour meeting with the team. This means that the provider is scheduled for 6 Clinical Hours.

We break out these metrics so that we can set accurate production per hour goals for each provider. Then we can automatically calculate daily, weekly, and monthly production goals. Enter in the number of hours that each provider is available for production. Every day must be scheduled or set to zero hours.

For Analytics to be able to calculate the Production per Hour metric, we need to know how many hours each provider is available to be chairside with patients, ie, Clinical Hours.

Access Clinical Hours by clicking on the Settings icon in the top bar navigation and then select Clinical Hours.

As a best practice, assign a team member to update Clinical Hours every day. On the first day of the week and the first day of the month, review and ensure that providers scheduled hours are correct for the coming week or month.

Click on the Scheduled Hours number. This will open a menu where you can change the hours as well as set a frequency for the new hours (they can be applied for a single day, recur once a week, or recur every other week).

Next, set Actual Hours. Click on the Actual Hours number or N/A. This will open a menu where you can now enter the Actual Hours for this day. Unlike scheduled hours, you can only set Actual Hours one day at a time. They should only be adjusted when the provider's worked hours for a day change unexpectedly. If a provider is planning on having different hours on a future date, it is best to change the Scheduled Hours instead.

Setting goals is invaluable when tracking performance and celebrating growth. You can reference 2 basic categories to help identify what your goals should be:

Data driven goals are more likely to be met and will help to motivate you and your team. Use historical performance from previous quarters to provide better insight into the goals that your team is likely to reach, as well as provide motivation to reach the next level.

Reference the Industry Benchmarks below to better determine Provider Goals:

Once you have determined a baseline goal for your practice and each provider, set provider goals and hours in Dental Intelligence.

To begin setting Provider Goals, access Settings by clicking the gear icon in the upper right corner.

From the Settings page, click on Team Management from the left side menu. Click on the User that you want to set goals for.

From the user page, click on the Goals tab and then select the goal you would like to add. This will allow you to type in and save the desired goal.

Practice goals allow you to view performance and identify growth as a team. When establishing the Practice Goals in the Dental Intelligence settings, you can choose to enter goals manually, or enable Automatic Goals.

Access Practice Goals by clicking on the Settings gear icon in the upper right corner, then select Practice Goals from the left side menu.

Practice Goals are optional. The decision to use one or the other is dependent on your preferences and what you feel would be best for your practice. When you've added your goals, click the blue Save Goals button at the bottom of the page.

You can also choose to enable Auto Calculated Goals by selecting the Toggle at the top of the page. Once toggled on, click the the Save Goals button to enable.

From there, monitor progress towards your goals using the Performance Board, and adjust your strategy as needed to ensure that you stay on track.

Track the previous 3 months of how your practice or provider performed previously. This will give you a baseline to set your goals from.

Set specific, measurable goals for each metric you want to improve. For example, you may set a goal to increase production by 10% over the next 3 months. Click on the green number to set a new goal.

Monitoring your goal progress is critical in keeping your team on track and motivated to reach their targets. Using the Performance Board within Analytics, you can drill down into specific metrics that are important to you and the goals you have set.

The Performance Dashboard gives you a general overview of how your practice is performing, giving you metrics that breakdown Visits, Production, Unscheduled Patients, New Patients, Restorative Elective Case, Hygiene Case, Hygiene Re-appointment as well as Cancellations and No-Shows.

Access the Performance Board from the left side menu in Analytics. Hover over the Dashboards icon and then click on the Performance Board.

Learn more about navigating the Performance Board by watching this short video:

Providers who have specific goals and clinical hours to meet are more accountable for their performance. Using the Provider Pulse within Analytics, you can help your practice improve productivity by identifying any bottlenecks in workflows and processes that may be slowing you or your team down. By identifying these areas, you can make changes to improve productivity and efficiency.

The Provider Pulse captures metrics related to these 4 categories:

Access the Provider Pulse from the left side menu in Analytics. Hover over the Dashboards icon and then click on the Provider Pulse.

The Provider Pulse allows you to view performance of all providers in the practice broken down into specific metrics for specific date ranges. This will help provide visibility into the metrics that matter most to your practice.

Watch the short video below for more information about using the Provider Pulse metrics in your practice: