Increasing Efficiency Through ROI Calculations
As a dentistry practice, your priority is always to deliver great oral healthcare outcomes. But there is always a business side to running a dentistry practice. In order to keep delivering those great oral healthcare outcomes, you need to be able to calculate the return on what matters for your practice.
Inefficiencies at your practice can eat up staff time and increase operational costs. The ability to calculate return allows you to measure the benefits of the investments you’ve made. Then, you can identify where your practice can reduce redundancies and maximize the good systems you already have in place.
But how does a good ROI calculator, or formula, do that? In this blog, we will explore how ROI calculators show you results that can guide your practice’s decision-making. Plus, we’ll talk about how a good ROI calculator can take the stress out of doing those equations!
What to Consider to Calculate Return
When we talk about measuring what matters to calculate the return for your practice, what do we mean?
- Time: Saving time for your staff is paramount for efficiency! Investing in solutions that will increase time savings will allow your staff to use work time to the fullest. Staff who are given the tools to be efficient also feel valued.
- Operational Costs: Reducing operational costs, without sacrificing the quality of care and service that you provide your patients, is huge.
- Patient Experience: The patients that have a good experience at your practice become both return patients and advocates for your practice. Plus, prepared patients reduce the likelihood of last-minute cancellations.
It’s not always obvious how these things can contribute, in terms of hard numbers, to return on investment. Of course, reducing operational costs is obvious. Some investments are costly but necessary to run a dental practice.
Time savings are so essential because the resources that you’ve invested in your staff are being used efficiently. Staff time – a precious financial resource – is maximized. Creating efficiencies for your staff has broader effects, too. Valuing how your staff spends their time inspires loyal employees. This can reduce employee turnover, which in turn reduces time and money spent on training new members of staff.
Providing a good patient experience is key to many aspects of your practice, such as:
- Engaging with patients by their preferred communication method, i.e., text, email, or voice message
- Make appointment processes easy for patients – offer digital options for sending instructions, appointment reminders, and more
- Employ consistent messaging without overwhelming the patient
Investing in tools for your practice that facilitate this shows in your revenue. Returning patients, and patients who are excited to talk about your practice, translates directly into increased ROI!
Patient Communication Software & ROI
Of course, one of the main things that dentistry practices want to calculate return on is technology and software. This is understandable. These are both, usually, huge investments for your practice. It’s urgent that they work out!
While your instincts can guide you a little here, it’s important to calculate some hard numbers! In essence, what a good ROI calculator will allow you to do is calculate the ratio between how much value an investment brings to practice, and how much it costs.
Take patient communication software. As an example, let’s say that you have an OMS practice that doesn’t do surgeries on Mondays. The reason for this is that there is no staff in the office to call patients to remind them to fast or to take pre-medications. What this has usually resulted in was patients coming unprepared for appointments that then had to be canceled. The loss of revenue was high enough that it wasn’t worth scheduling patients for Mondays at all.
After some careful consideration, your OMS practice chooses to invest in patient communication software. This software – like Intiveo’s! – allows you to automate your patient communication. What this means is that you can send reminders to take pre-meds and to fast over the weekend, outside of staff time. Suddenly, your practice can add a whole other day of surgeries to the workweek, increasing revenue that will surpass the cost of the software.
Here, you would be producing a ratio of the cost of the software to the amount of revenue it has allowed you to generate – showing that your ROI for this software is very good indeed!
The Complexity of ROI Factors
Of course, it’s not always so straightforward to calculate a return. Your dentistry practice is going to have a lot of costs. There are many different factors to consider. It can be hard to keep all of these factors in mind – much less calculate out a formula that will tell you how much return you are seeing for all of your investments! How can you be sure that one particular investment created such a great ROI? What if it’s a different investment that you aren’t even aware of, that you could maybe lean into even more?
This is where an ROI calculator becomes so important.
This month at Intiveo, we are offering an ROI calculator that will help you balance all of these factors and provide insight into your practice’s investments. We come from a place of wanting to provide you with insight and transparency about your operational costs. Ultimately, what we want your dental practice to be able to do is recoup costs and avoid inefficiencies.
Ultimately, this will keep your practice aligned with what matters to you. Again, the most important thing you can do for your patients is deliver great oral health outcomes. But, to facilitate that, you need a successful practice with a strong return on all your investments.
What Intiveo Understands About Calculating Return
At Intiveo, we’ve had the opportunity to liaise with a lot of different dentistry practices, including general practitioners, OMS, periodontic, pediatric, endodontic, and orthodontic practices. While each practice is unique, there are commonalities. Among those commonalities is the desire to create a sustainable practice that serves its patients well.
What can that look like in the field?
From among the practices that we’ve worked with, we’ve seen some truly solid results. Clinique Poirier Centre Dentaire was struggling with inefficiencies among its staff and a high cancellation rate. After investing in patient communication software, this dental practice saw a 70% decrease in cancellation rate. Likewise, Lakeside Pediatric Dentistry saw an 80% decrease in no-shows after investing. In terms of guaranteed revenue, numbers like these are significant!
Through these in-the-field examples, Intiveo has been able to gather the relevant information to assist practices all over North America in measuring what matters to their practice. Get started by exploring our ROI calculator!
Meeting Your Bottom Line & Measuring What Matters
At Intiveo, we help dental practices measure what matters. While there are many factors to a successful practice, meeting your bottom line and seeing a positive return on investment are certainly going to be high on your list. This is where an ROI calculator can serve you!
That’s why Intiveo is pleased to present a new ROI calculator that will give you a greater degree of transparency into operational costs due to inefficiencies in your practice.
Curious to learn more about Intiveo’s patient communication software? Book a meeting today!
