Jeff Palmer, founder of the Case Acceptance Academy.
What I want to talk to you today is the exact statistics or exact metrics that you need to track to make your income 100% predictable.
That’s right, your income can be 100% predictable.
Here’s the statistics you need to track:
First of all, you need to track production. Everybody knows with the push of a button in your practice management software, what your production is, but if you’re just monitoring production, that’s not enough. There’s a statistic you need to monitor before production, which is Treatment Presented. What is Treatment Presented? Treatment presented is any procedure that you’ve diagnosed that a patient needs and you’ve sat down and gone over the findings and you’ve presented them with that treatment and you’ve presented them with the full cost. Treatment presented is not talking to a patient about getting a root canal post core and crown while they’re in the chair and the patient says “I cannot afford to do that” and you never had a chance to present them with the fees or handle any objections and actually close the patient.
Here is the truth, the reality of the situation, if you have a production goal of lets say of $100,000 a month, you will never produce more than you present. So the statistic that you must track before production is treatment presented. So let’s say that your closing rate now is 50%. That means if you want to produce $100,000 in a month, you guessed it, you have to present $200,000 in a month.
So where does treatment presented come from?
A majority of treatment presented comes from new patients. New patients come into your office, they have a problem, they haven’t seen you before and you’re diagnosing treatment on them that they need. Maybe they’re coming in for a second opinion, maybe they’re coming in for a toothache, maybe they’re coming in because they haven’t been to the dentist in a while, maybe they’re coming in because they want their teeth cleaned. During that exam, you will find things going on and you will present treatment. So you need to keep track of new patients seen, treatment presented, and that will lead to production. But there’s a couple more statistics that you need to keep track of.
The other statistic that you need to track in order to predict how much production you’re going to make is your Case Acceptance Percentage. So that’s what patients actually pay for and what the insurance company will pay for from what you present. So if your closing percentage, your Case Acceptance Percentage is 75% instead of 50%, you only need to present $135,000 to get that $100,000 in production. As opposed to if you’re at 50% you have to present $200,000 to get that same $100,000.
So it’s not just how much treatment you present, but it’s also how effective are you at getting your cases accepted. Because the higher the case acceptance, the more predictable the production given that you’re presenting the cases.
If you don’t track those statistics, then you have no idea how much production you’re going to have or how much income you’re going to have at the end of the month. Now, this makes your marketing work a whole lot better.
If you’re tracking New Patient Calls, New Patients Scheduled, New Patients Seen, and how much treatment you’re presenting, and your case acceptance percentage, you will be able to predict how much production and income you will have in the next few weeks. And that is very powerful!