Improve Profitability through Clean Claims

With almost 11 ADA recognized dental specialties and having a burgeoning market share, the specialty dental business is here to make significant gains in the coming years as we take a cursory glance on the latest trends of the dental industry.

Listen to Ryan Arnold, Principal, Wisdom Teeth Guys as he explains the possibilities that lie ahead for Dental Specialty business and how he has paid attention on patient care,technology adoption and brand management to further sustainable practice growth for his specialty.

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Creating Sustainable Specialty Dental Businesses

Dentistry's Inner Circle Podcast

A series of podcasts from practice owners on how they navigated the change and successfully transitioned to CareStack. 

How Dr. Williams' Practice Optimized Growth with CareStack

Case Study: How Dr. Williams' Practice Optimized Growth with CareStack

Expanding Dental Care beyond the Clinic

Expanding Dental Care Beyond the Clinic

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Embracing Change To Grow Your Group

Enable Dental Completes Its Migration To CareStack

Enable Dental Completes Its Migration To Industry Leading Cloud Based Dental Software

Beatrice

Ishtiaq Rouf

Dana Veach

Dr. Himesh Kana, DDS

Himesh Kana

 Penny Filipe

Promoted to Manager, Now What

Promoted to Manager, Now What?

Top Trends in Dental Software for 2025

Top Trends in Dental Software for 2025: What Practices Should Prepare For

Brand Guidelines for Dental Offices to Attract and Retain Gen-Z Patients

Reducing patient no-shows and cancellations begins by accepting that 

it’s impossible to guarantee that your patients will always keep their appointments

. Once you accept that this falls outside your control, you can pool your efforts on the aspects that are within your control, and which help reduce no-shows and cancellations.

missed appointments cause a ripple effect

 that impacts your schedules, revenues, and the effectiveness of treatments. It strikes a serious blow to your bottom line. But with that said, there are 

effective safeguards you can put in place

 to address this issue. Before we explore these safeguards, let’s examine the key reasons behind no-shows and cancellations. 

Typically, patients miss their appointments when they:

Don’t understand the importance of keeping their appointments

Misunderstand when their appointment is scheduled

Self diagnose and decide to skip their appointments

Worry about bad news and try to avoid the situation

Have a shallow relationship with the provider

There is a wide range of reasons for patients to miss their appointments, but most can be mitigated with improved patient-provider communication and by implementing the following safeguards.

It became widely accepted as a care delivery method after the 2020 pandemic, but thanks to the convenience offered to patients, 

 is here to stay. Outside the initial check-up and actual treatment, consultations and routine post-op visits can be performed remotely. The virtual interactions offer patients the opportunity to 

receive treatment in the comfort of their living room

 or office. The added benefit of leveraging teledentistry is it adds one less reason for patients to rethink or opt out of their dental appointments. 

Another approach that has gained traction is using 

 to collect vital patient information. E-forms are a key feature of modern practice management software (PMS). This feature is now used widely to stay in line with the COVID-19 safety protocols. With this new norm, practices have completely replaced the clipboard and embraced digitization. Another fact that supports this approach is that 

98% of patients who take time to fill out online forms commit to their appointments

COVID-19 has added fuel to the fire of dental anxiety among patients. The risk of exposure is a valid fear. The best way for you to 

 is with communication and education. Ensure you convey the safety protocols and measures followed at your practice to reduce the risks from COVID-19. Launching targeted email campaigns, and updating relevant information on your practice website and 

convey your commitment to patient care and safety

 and encourage patients to follow through with their appointments.

When you provide your patients with the option to make payments in advance, it reduces the instances of no-shows and benefits your collections and accounts receivable. Get paid upfront instead of having to wait for 2-3 months. Paying cash in advance leads to 

. You can provide this option during patient checkout, especially when both you and your patient agree with the importance of scheduling the next appointment.

Offering upfront payment at this stage is apt, as the patient is likelier to take action and commit to their oral health. Another way to make it easy for them to pay is by providing an 

. Make sure that you inform your patient about your prepaid payment options. Market it through your campaigns, newsletters, and phone scripts.

Reminders are an effective way to reduce patient no-shows. Plan your 

and decide on a frequency that works best for your target clientele. Start off with a postcard, followed by email and text reminders. Add a phone reminder a few days before the scheduled appointment. Ensure that you cut down on reminders once you receive confirmation from your patients. Practice management software aids you to launch, coordinate and track your recall campaigns effectively.

reward patients who keep their appointments

. The reward initiatives can include discounts or gift cards. The benefits of such an approach are twofold. You encourage your patients to follow through on your appointments and 

convey how much you value their participation

. Moreover, curating such experiences helps you retain your customers.

Sometimes, patients simply forget an appointment. Send 

 that can include a “We missed you at the practice” message. Follow this up with a phone call to encourage them to reschedule immediately.

It is crucial that your patients know the impact of your treatments on their oral health. If your patients are not invested in the outcomes of your treatment plan, it is unlikely that they will uphold their commitments. 

 before every appointment. Remind them of the benefits of the procedure and the progress they’ve made so far. 

 of the scheduled appointment and ensure that they are fully onboard. A phone reminder before the appointment will help refresh what they already know about the 

Patients skip appointments because they owe your practice money or are worried the procedure will be too expensive. When this happens, it’s time to 

. It’s important that payments never come as a surprise to the patient. This causes anxiety in the patient, especially when they expect hidden expenses from each visit. When 

 and benefits are discussed upfront and agreed upon, patient no-shows due to financial concerns can be avoided. 

 allows you to effectively educate and communicate with your patients. Automating tasks like appointment reminders or confirmation/cancellation emails, filling last-minute openings, and sending online forms and other notifications to engage patients, practices can drastically cut revenue loss and staff workload while reducing patient no-shows and cancellations.

Eliminating No-Shows and Cancellations at Dental Office

For a dental practice, revenue cycle management is the equivalent of the body’s circulatory system and the heart of a practice’s financial success. The revenue cycle incorporates data capture, claims and denials management, and the collection of payments from both patient and insurance receivables. A healthy system works in concert with industry best practices and technical solutions to optimize efficiencies, identify “leaks” and improve operational workflows. As every practice is unique, it is difficult to prescribe a “one size fits all” approach. However, there are key performance indicators, which can and should be followed to measure practice performance. There are several potential KPIs which provide valuable insight into the collection’s performance and financial health of practice including, but not limited to: Collections percentage, Production growth, Aging accounts receivable, Days sales outstanding, Adjustments percentage, and Credit balances. 

Since 2011, the dental industry has experienced a steady and upward trend in aging receivables, with the majority of balances aged greater than 90 days. The good news is that CareStack offers a solution that combines modern technology, effective processes, and industry expertise to kick start the heart and breathe life back into the revenue cycle.

Revenue Cycle Playbook for Dental Professional

Revenue Cycle Playbook for Dental Professionals

From small, solo practices to large, multi-location clinics, these case studies demonstrate the versatility and value of CareStack in improving the patient experience and driving practice . 

Key Performance Indicators are metrics to track the success of your business. Do you measure them right? Join our practice heroes to learn all about how regularly measuring the key indicators will keep you focused to drive growth.

Analytics_ What gets measured, gets done

Analytics: What Gets Measured, Gets Done!

The core philosophy behind tracking KPIs at a dental practice is simple and straightforward. You get to improve only what you measure. As you continue to grow, you will begin.

Dental practices cannot afford to leave practice analytics behind. Here are the top 10 

 is simple and straightforward. You get to improve only what you measure.

As you continue to grow, you will appreciate the importance of data and metrics that aid you in monitoring, tracking, and improving your practice performance.

“Data insights help narrow down and prioritize the areas that require immediate attention.”

This includes the decision on increasing or decreasing treatment fees, tracking and reducing canceled appointments and no-shows, monitoring the effectiveness of treatment plan presentations and calculating the revenue generated from each treatment category. Moreover, KPIs can help you improve the efficiency of collections and clinical operations, reduce overheads and monitor patient growth.

key performance indicators for dental offices

 across production, collections, and costs.

 to track as it directly impacts your practice’s health. Keeping track of the practices’ production on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis will unveil a better picture of how well your practice is performing. Dividing the monthly practice production goal into weekly and daily targets and integrating strategies to achieve the right-level production is crucial. 󠀠󠀠

Smart Goals for Smarter Practice

A benchmark production and a system in place to ensure that the production and collection go hand in hand are crucial for seamless dental practice operation. Communicate to your staff about your goals, probably during your morning huddles, and motivate them to put in their best to achieve them.

The number of new patients is a crucial metric to be tracked. With that said, this KPI is more than just the sum of total patient visits. Tracking new patient intake helps you calculate a target for each specialty your practice offers.

According to the Levin Group Data Center, a model could be engaged in which 75% of practice production comes from the dentist and 25% from the hygiene department. Further, the dentist's 75% can be divided as 50% of production coming from hygiene patients, 40% from new patients, and 10% from emergencies. Once the yearly target is locked, practices can split it and identify their new patient target.

Monitoring the new patient KPIs can also determine the revenue from specialty services such as oral and maxillofacial surgery, orthodontics, and endodontics.

Most specialty services bring in new patients, representing over 90% of new patient revenue.

However, these figures also depend on the niche services offered at your practice. Breaking down your annual production goal is another approach that will help you calculate the target KPIs for new patients.

The other end of the KPI spectrum measures patient attrition. Every practice wants to reduce its attrition rates and drive the percentage share for new patients. While there is no way to avoid attrition altogether, monitoring this KPI provides insights into the strategies you currently have in place at your practice. Some of the metrics you can track to keep patient attrition in check include:

Patient Attrition

Dental hygiene pre-appointments are future appointments that patients schedule for their regular dental cleanings and check-ups. By tracking them, practices can ensure that their patients are returning, which in turn will improve patient retention and practice revenue. The hygienist or hygiene assistant arranges the patient's follow-up appointment before they depart from the hygiene room. It is crucial to achieving a high rate of approximately 95% of hygiene patients leaving with their next appointment already booked, as this is a significant factor for success.

Schedule utilization rates show you how effectively schedules are managed and help you determine the average production per patient. 

 ensures that your appointment book achieves the monthly production goals for operative and hygiene schedules. Tracking these helps you prioritize daily schedules based on appointments that add the most value or generate the most revenue.

Schedule utilization, along with the average production per patient, demonstrates the financial worth of a patient to your practice. Potentially, you can maximize the opportunities from each patient visit by increasing the number of whitening cases, adding a periodontal diagnostic program, or implementing a new service such as sleep apnea treatment.

On average, one-third of all practice revenue comes from reappointments or re-care. Hence, measuring this KPI becomes crucial. This helps you compare the percentage of patient acquisition vs. retention for your practice. There are instances when a practice experiences limited growth despite a steady inflow of new patients. Such a situation is commonly referred to as a “leaky boat.”

At 20%, dentists experience the highest churn rates in the medical profession.

These figures can be attributed to competitive pricing, a saturated market or a relatively high concentration of dentists, and a lack of service distinction. These KPIs, other than showing you the current status, help you justify the initiatives or control measures that help you improve practice performance.

Broken appointments are the rates of patient no-shows and cancellations. Practices that don’t have a good grasp on cancellations and no-shows or that don’t have a system to minimize broken appointments often struggle with profitability.

Subsequently, this KPI lets you measure the effectiveness of implemented actions to reduce patient no-shows and cancellations. This includes monitoring how quickly your schedules are filled up, the pace of follow-ups and 

, and the effectiveness of including payment options while setting up appointments.

Case acceptance rates, while being a vital KPI to measure production, also help you determine the effectiveness of your plan presentations. Case acceptance rates are considered the most variable KPIs in dental practices. It is important to set targets for case acceptance that reflects the type and complexity of treatments. For instance, a 90% target for single-tooth procedures is acceptable, while this figure could be lower for more complex treatment procedures.

Compute Collections

Collection rates are a powerful KPI and can ultimately make or break the cash flow and income at a practice. An average practice forfeits around 9% of its yearly production to uncollected insurance revenue. This accounts for the average annual revenue lost to uncollected insurance benefits to around $135000. The dimensions within this KPI include over-the-counter collections (OTCs), AR status, aging, and outstanding claim status.

Overheads can be widely classified into fixed and variable overheads. These include everything from infrastructure overheads, equipment, tools, labor costs, and dental supplies. It is recommended to consider the staff labor percentage as an independent KPI because labor is the single largest expense in practice. This covers the defined percentages for general practice, orthodontics, pediatric dentistry, oral and maxillofacial surgery, and other clinical and non-clinical staff overheads.

 for vital KPIs help refine the performance of your practice. Not only does it help you stay abreast of the performance narrative, but it also lays the foundations to set effective goals and targets. Moreover, this is the best approach to measure your return on efforts and make informed decisions. CareStack presents you with vital KPIs and associated data metrics, thus providing you with a single source of truth when it comes to tracking practice performance. Having a set of relevant pre-defined KPIs in hand, analyzing the practice’s performance will be a lot easier.

Top Key Performance Indicators for Your Dental Practice

Profitability is a crucial aspect of effective practice management. Healthy profits better enable a practice to provide cutting-edge services and convenience to their patients.

But before we explore the various methods to increase profits, let’s establish how profits are calculated in a practice. The following formula sums this up well.

Profits = (Total no of visits Production per visit Collection efficiency) – Overheads

Keeping in mind the key elements of the profit equation, namely patient visits, production, collections, and overheads, let’s dive into some best practices to increase profits at your practice.

Best practices to increase profits at your practice

Expanding the range of services offered at your practice will help double your revenue. Practices that refer out patients end up performing 60 procedures per year, while practices that make the most of their offered services may be able to perform up to 120 procedures per year. By offering more procedures, you reduce the number of patients you need to bring in to achieve the same revenue goals.

This approach increases the production per patient, as you maximize the revenue from each patient visit. You no longer have to rely solely on increasing patient visits (for a limited range of services) to increase your profits. Additionally, when you decrease the range of services, you will need to refer your patients elsewhere. Simple oral surgery, Invisalign, cosmetics, occlusal guards, mini-implants, sedations, automated endodontics, and soft tissue programs will all help increase your profits.

Challenges in insurance payments largely occur, thanks to the tug-of-war between insurance carriers and dental practices. While a practice seeks to collect payments from carriers, insurance companies reject claims that don’t fall within their parameters of acceptance. Add to that, the complexity of claims processing, and we can see an average practice forfeiting around 9% of its yearly production to uncollected insurance revenue. When you crunch the numbers, the ramifications are astonishing.

Annual revenue generated by an average dental practice is around $1,500,000. The average annual revenue lost in uncollected insurance benefits is around $135,000. The average uncollected revenue over 30 years is $4,050,000. To add insult to injury, to write off the debt as uncollectible, a practice has to clear audits by the IRS and prove that it has taken reasonable steps to collect the debt but was unable to do so.

To excel in insurance billing and payments requires knowledge, experience, and efficient processes. Challenges in maintaining the right staff and expertise, managing staff turnover rates, and the ever-evolving complexities of the insurance ecosystem, makes 

 a viable alternative. The core responsibilities handled by your practice, naturally make it difficult to provide uninterrupted time, attention to detail, and the consistent focus required for insurance collections. Hence it is vital to seek out a billing support provider with high-caliber staff, round-the-clock support, and an excellent track record.

What differentiates you from the competition, and why does it even matter? If you don’t stand out from your competitors, your patients will choose the least expensive service available. Your website should have key messages that appeal to your niche. This includes the services you offer (extractions, implants, restorative services), the people you wish to serve (seniors, children, young adults, ethnic or religious communities, women, working professionals), the locations where you serve, and the value benefits that are unique to your practice.

The cardinal rule for generating leads is to provide value-based content for your audience. Content can be classified into awareness-based content and consideration-based content. Blogs, videos, how-to guides, testimonials, and success stories fall within awareness-based content. Consideration-based content generally includes industry-specific 

 which are fact-based, include supporting data, and provide valuable insights. These help you establish credibility as both a professional and an expert in the eyes of your audience. Professionalism and credibility are key factors that influence patient purchase decisions. 

 button on your website is a vital call to action that qualifies as a ‘must have.’ These need to be embedded across most pages of your website and should allow visitors to schedule their appointments, within minutes. An efficient 

 can be linked to your website to instantly log appointment requests to the software. It also helps you with 

 that make scheduling a breeze for new patients. 

Dental anxiety among patients is a leading factor that impacts visitations. Thanks to Amazon, reading reviews before every purchase is the new norm among consumers. Negative reviews will add fuel to the paranoia that patients already have about dental procedures. But what happens when you do get a negative review? During such instances, it is crucial to take the interaction offline and ensure that you resolve patient concerns. Follow this up with a request, asking them to reconsider and update their reviews. Handling negative reviews is one half of the coin, the other has to do with religiously collecting positive reviews from your existing patients.

Practice management software allows you to 

 in a manner that is convenient to both the practice and the patient. Use the law of averages to work in your favor. A higher count of reviews reflects positively on the professionalism of your practice and encourages new patients to choose you over your competitors.

Your front office marks the first interaction that patients have with your practice. This includes your team of receptionists, scheduling & treatment coordinators. The front desk handles activities that range from answering phone calls, resolving queries, handling new patients, verifying insurance, managing registrations, scheduling appointments, follow-ups, rolling out reminders, and presenting patients with their treatment plans. While patients acknowledge the need to visit a dentist, they must pay for a service and put their faith in the dentist's expertise. There are no trial runs or tangibles to measure the quality of care.

Patients are left with no choice but to rate treatment and assess a practice based on its conduct towards them. This includes how they’re greeted at the front desk, the cleanliness and hygiene of the practice, how quickly their concerns get addressed, conveying the importance of hygiene and oral health, payment plan customizations, and how treatment plans get discussed. This is not the best way to rate treatments, but this is how patient perception works. To ensure loyalty and revisits from patients, it’s important to delight your patient through every stage of their journey within your practice.

The hygiene department at a dental practice can contribute up to 1/3rd of the total revenue received from treatments. A large chunk of these treatments come from re-care patients. The primary objective of a dental hygienist is to provide a framework of patient care that helps identify the oral health conditions that can be prevented by dental hygiene care. Having a patient coordinator dedicated to driving engagement for re-care patients ensures that you grow your patient base while having ready alternatives to fill your schedules in case of no-shows and cancellations. The bottom line is that focusing on your recall systems is guaranteed to grow your production volumes.

 is where your patients receive special benefits and discounts for a yearly or monthly subscription to the services offered at your practice. The obvious benefits of such programs are it guarantees a predictable source of recurring revenue and helps you stay prepared to streamline insurance payments from known patients.

When patient referrals account for a major chunk of new patients for a dental practice, it becomes vital to pay attention to your referral programs. Thanks to social media, people are connected like never before. It plays a vital role in multiplying word-of-mouth referrals. Once you’ve nurtured a loyal pool of patients, it’s important to acknowledge their contributions when they refer a new patient to your practice. Create referral cards, send out thank you notes, offer incentives, and leverage email & social media marketing to reward loyal ambassadors of your practice.

Last but not the least, reducing overheads directly impacts your profits. A general approach that is followed to reduce overheads is by cutting unnecessary expenses or finding a less expensive supplier. But the major chunk of overheads comes from payroll, which usually runs from 20-55% of overall practice expenses. Ideally, this figure shouldn’t cross the 35% mark. Outsourcing and investing in practice management software that provides value without adding more staff members help mitigate expenses.

Boosting patient volumes, flawless and timely 

, and lower overheads help drive the profitability of a dental practice. 

 that reduces costs while adding value to all aspects of your practice formula for profitability.

How To Improve Dental Practice Revenue and Profits

Whether you're looking for e-Books, webinars, podcasts, or articles, CareStack® Resources are full of helpful & informative topics to improve your practice.

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