At this appointment I am going to be counting the charts and verifying the information given to me.
So I was looking for suggestions on counting charts. What is a good technique? What would you consider an active patient- seen in the last year? What types of things would you recommend looking for?
Thanks for the help
What I want to know is the number of patients that are coming to the office on a regular basis.
The baseline number is those patients that are seen twice per year in your hygiene program. Therefore, even looking at the hygiene schedule for the past six months or the last 12 months and dividing by 2 will give you a good baseline. You could even count the number of hygiene appointments in the last 18 months and divide by 3, you'd still get approximately the same result.
I usually add 10-15 % to that figure to arrive at the "active" number. Let’s face it, the patients going through the hygiene schedule will almost always drive the production of the office, they are the backbone.
There are always many more charts, I just don't consider them "active".
Are they important? Probably, I just wouldn't rely on them in terms of assessing what I’m buying.
This post first appeared on DentalTown.
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2 comments:
Tim, why not calculate active number by ADA codes 120A and 150A for yearly exam and new patient comprehensive exam? Then you could punch the numbers for hygiene production (above numbers x20) and see how effective their recall program is. I could be very wrong but what is your feedback.
What are codes 120A & 150A, are they "yearly exam" and "new patient comprehensive exam"? If so, how many of those exams are done on patients that come in once every 3,4,5 years? How do we know? I'm also not sure what numbers I'd be punching in for hygiene.
My preference is to get a handle on the # of patients flowing thru the hygiene dept on a consistent basis as those patients will "drive" the general dentistry of the practice & it's those patients that I view as the life-blood of the general dentistry practice.
So I'd rather count the # of prophy's done in any 6,12,18,24 month period & divide by the appropriate # to arrive at what I view as the "active" patient of a practice.
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