Important KPIs Your Specialty Practice Should Be Tracking

While data can be useful, it is sometimes difficult to know exactly what data your practice should be tracking. Specific data points are often referred to as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). But what are KPIs? By definition, KPIs are metrics that are directly aligned with your business goals and tracking them allows you to measure how successful your current efforts are at achieving your objectives.

Analyzing KPI data will help you gain a better understanding of your practice’s position, identify irregularities and guide future decisions. KPIs can help you to focus on continuous improvement by ensuring that your practice’s activities are linked to your overall strategies. They can also help to ensure that staff have a common goal and share in its accomplishment. 

What KPIs Should Your Practice Be Tracking?

You should begin by looking at your goals in four key areas—Financial KPIs, Patient KPIs, Services KPIs and Employee KPIs. Once you’ve identified these goal areas, you will need to determine how to measure your success at achieving them. The right Practice Management software can do much of the work for you, with reporting and analytics tools.

Below are examples of specific KPIs to consider for the abovementioned key areas:

Financial KPIs

• Revenue per charge category
• Average revenue per encounter
• Discounts per category
• Retail sales
• Device revenue

Patient KPIs

• Number of appointments
• Number of new vs. established patients
• Number of patients that convert from medical to elective
• Number of patients that purchase products at appointment
• Average wait time
• Retention per provider

Services KPIs

• Number of new patients referred by other providers
• Number of new patients referred by internet services
• Number of new patients referred by existing patients
• Number of cancellations within 24 hours of scheduled appointment
• Conversion rate of procedures by PCC

Employee KPIs

• Patient satisfaction
• Time to room patient/work-up patient
• Total patients managed per hour
• Conversion of consults to procedure

Create a KPI schedule

Now that you know what your goals are, you should next create a schedule for running and reviewing KPI reports. Since you will want to review progress over time, you don’t want your review periods to be too close together. For example, this is not something you that you need to do every day. The frequency of your KPI reviews will depend a lot on your practice’s size and patient volume. If you have a larger practice with high patient volume, for example, you might want to do this on a weekly basis. However, if you have a smaller practice (1-2 practitioners) with a lower patient volume, you might only need to do this on a monthly basis.

The longer you track KPIs over time, the better equipped you will be to track progress, failures, trends and more. In situations where you are seeing success, you will know to continue doing what you are doing. When you see failures or continued problems, it shows you that further changes or process modifications are needed.

On-Demand Webinar

Would you like a more detailed education on how you can leverage KPIs to help drive improvements at your practice? Check out our “Determining Key Performance Indicators for Your Practice” webinar, now available for on-demand viewing.

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