4 Benefits of Taking a Data-Driven Approach to Run Your Dental Business

This is a guest post by Bash Sarmiento

With how hectic the everyday operations of a dental practice can be, sometimes big-picture strategies are left on the back burner. However, adopting a data-driven approach and analyzing your dental business’s data is one of the surefire ways to recognize opportunities that can improve your practice.

Here are four reasons why you should run your dental business with a data-driven approach:

1. You figure out what works and what doesn’t

Managing your private dental practice means that you’re monitoring a lot of moving parts, from your patients to your staff to your inventory and everything in between. Being able to gather information about the different aspects of your business allows you to assess what’s working, what needs improvement, and what can be eliminated.

You are also able to distinguish any blind spots or weaknesses in both your business and actual practice. While trusting your intuition is always a good approach, this may cause you to overlook crucial opportunities for improvement, SoftwarePundit points out. Not studying your data may lead you to overestimate certain features of your practice that can be detrimental to your performance.

Being more mindful of your business’s data, staying on top of collecting, measuring, and analyzing them, helps you identify opportunities to improve. It can also maintain and enhance cost-benefit ratios for both the dental care providers and the patients. Gathering and analyzing data doesn’t have to be labor-intensive like you might think, you can easily create an automated Google sheet dashboard to better showcase your data.

Improvement does not always have to be grand either, as big-picture metrics may not properly encompass the day-to-day way things operate. Adopting changes according to your data analysis may not present an immediate impact, but over time and with the right approaches and techniques, you will find that you are getting your desired results in the most efficient way possible.

2. Your patients will receive better care

Analyzing your data makes it easier to catch details regarding your patients’ oral health, like whether or not you are experiencing high patient attrition rates or you could possibly be underdiagnosing certain oral diseases compared to the national statistics. Of course, to realize the latter, you must first be able to gather the appropriate data in your own practice to refer it to the national averages.

The best way to gather patient data efficiently is to consider switching to electronic dental health records (EDRs). This gold mine of data can greatly help you better organize your patients’ information and assess your delivery of quality care.

Your metrics coupled with discussions with your staff on how to better approach these oversights will greatly benefit your patients as you provide them with quality care and services. It also keeps your practice running efficiently to deal with different cases.

3. The numbers are great motivators

By having the hard data, not only are you able to see how your business is doing currently, but it also helps you set reasonable and attainable goals moving forward. Sharing your data with your staff can also help them understand any problems you, as a collective, might be facing or any points of improvement everyone can contribute to refining.

Your data can support any areas you are excelling in, while also presenting any probable lapses in services or operations. Since each team member has their own role, they can focus on the data related to their responsibilities and possibly help their colleagues in their respective fields too. Your team may be able to effectively meet and even exceed their goals given the data available to them.

As you continue to measure your data and see that the metrics are improving, presenting the positive changes to your staff can be a great motivational tool for them. Recognizing your staff’s hard work and being able to back their improvement with tangible data can make the praise all the more rewarding. This can also improve your employees’ satisfaction rate in the business which in turn creates a culture of growth and continued improvement in the team.

4. Improvements beyond your own practice

The data you gather will not only help improve your own business but can serve a greater purpose for the dental community as a whole. Newer technology makes it possible to provide and access a plethora of dental record data which makes it easier to study which dental therapies work and which need updating, according to Dental Economics. Problem-solving and advancements in the dental industry may now be easier to develop as the data required to promote these changes will be easier to gather, manage, analyze, and access.

Data in this day and age is a valuable commodity. While it may take some time getting used to staying on top of recording and analyzing your data will greatly impact your business. Adopting a data-driven approach to your practice will not only propel you to a more efficient and successful dental practice but will also aid in the movement towards an improved dental industry.