Picking the right Key Performance Indicator (KPI) consists of a process that everyone involved in practice management needs to understand in order to effectively track, manage, and modify the cause-and-effect relationships that are critical for your chiropractic clinic’s performance and growth.
The metrics practice owners use most often to measure, manage, and predict results, include both quantitative and qualitative aspects. Charges, payments, patient visits, pay per visit, referrals per patient, no-shows, and no future appointments are the most frequently used quantitative KPIs. Qualitative KPIs typically include patient loyalty and service quality.
We distinguish four stages for managing your KPIs:
Stage 1: Define your main objective
This step is essential because it guides your capital allocation. In a free market system, the most logical objective is creating economic value. It’s determined by the value of your practice, which is often determined as a one year value of your gross income. But such a simplistic way to value the practice discounts patient referrals and the growth potential. An alternative way to define the practice value would be to add up the values of all of its patients. It requires a methodology to compute patient’s value, that takes into account an average visit value, average number of visits, number of expected referrals, and loyalty.
Stage 2: Develop a theory of cause-and-effect presumably driving the main objective:
Generally, such a theory focuses on sales and costs. For your practice, it should be earnings growth and cash flow growth. They depend on your patient visit growth, new patient growth, and average pay per visit, as well as non-financial measures, such as patient satisfaction, patient loyalty, and perception of teamwork and expertise. If you determine that patient satisfaction is indeed persistently and predictively linked to revenue and cash flow growth, then you can start figuring out which specific staff activities drive patient satisfaction.
Stage 3: Identify specific activities your staff can perform to help achieve the main objective:
Your goal is to maximize your main objective by applying skill to the controllable measures that are linked persistently and predictably to your main objective. So, if you determine that a satisfied patient makes more referrals and that patient satisfaction depends on the perception of teamwork and expertise, then you can use this information to determine specific opportunities and phrases your staff can use to improve your patients’ perception of teamwork and expertise.
Stage 4: Evaluate your statistics:
The drivers of value change over time and so must our KPIs. For instance if demographics of your patient base is changing or the insurance reimbursement rules are changing, you need to review the drivers of patient satisfaction or the set of physician skills you need in your practice to continue to drive your main objective. As the patient base becomes younger and more digitally savvy, your online patient portal and online patient education become important tools in driving patient satisfaction.
By adjusting your selection of KPIs to the changes occurring at your chiropractic clinic you will be able to measure performance and growth more effectively.