The Big Picture: Why Keeping Track of Non-Starts Can Make Your Practice More Profitable

Just like a movie with varying angles and detailed close-ups, every aspect of your business has different camera shots. Usually, Orthodontists are “zoomed in,” focusing only on the very small details of their business.  But it’s equally important to zoom out and capture the often overlooked bigger picture.

For instance, practices typically zoom in and track patients who start. But many practices forget to zoom out by not keeping track of patients who didn’t start.

Neglect the bigger picture and this will result in lost revenue. According to practice consultant Roger Levine, only 46% of practices keep track of patients who don’t start treatment. Practices that keep track of these metrics typically produce 15% more than those who don’t.

The problem is found within practice management tools. They are great for keeping track of those who start, but they don’t zoom out wide enough and are vastly deficient in keeping data on patients who didn’t start. Typically, financial data is only entered in the system until the patient has agreed to treatment.

This leaves a large gap in analytics that are useful in understanding the bigger picture and making business decisions that could amplify your starts.

For example – ever wonder what the average fee is of those patients who declined your Herbst appliance? By keeping track of all these “lost opportunities” it will help your practice set goals to improve conversion rates, and determine whether you need to make adjustments to your presentation rules or follow-up protocol for this particular appliance. Any slight improvements on conversion rates for this type of client, could result in thousands more per month in additional revenue.

With SmileSuite, we cover Orthodontists from consult to contract. This means that all patient presentation data is instantly available for analysis, including those who didn’t start. No more digging through reports or spreadsheets. SmileSuite’s, StartAlytics  is a data engine that offers groundbreaking “Dynamic Reporting,” changing the way Orthodontists navigate through data. No more graphs, and most importantly, no more data we can’t make sense of. 

It’s time for a revolution and SmileSuite is leading the way with smarter analytics for Orthodontists.

SIGN UP FOR A FREE DEMO TODAY. PRACTICES USING OUR SOFTWARE AND SERVICES ARE SEEING AN 11% INCREASE IN PENDING PATIENT START RATES. SEE WHY SMILESUITE IS THE FOLLOW-UP SYSTEM EVERY ORTHODONTIST NEEDS.