Every dental practice management system comes with built-in reports. Production by provider. Collections by month. New patients this quarter. On the surface, these seem helpful. But here's the problem: default reports answer default questions, and your practice isn't default.
I've spent years in quantitative finance, where the difference between a good decision and a costly one often comes down to how you measure, not just what you measure. When I started working with dental practices, I noticed the same pattern — the data was there, but the framing was off.
The Production Trap
Take production reports. Most systems show you gross production by provider. That number feels important, but it masks critical questions: What's the case acceptance rate behind that number? How much of that production actually converts to collections? What's the production per hour — not per month — for each provider?
When you reframe the question from "how much did we produce?" to "how efficiently are we converting clinical time into collected revenue?" the picture changes dramatically. I've seen practices where the highest-producing provider had the lowest effective hourly rate once you factored in re-work, write-offs, and scheduling gaps.
What You Should Be Measuring
The metrics that actually drive practice growth aren't in your PMS defaults:
- Effective hourly production rate — production divided by actual chair time, not calendar time
- Case acceptance by treatment type — not just an overall percentage, but broken down by category
- Revenue per new patient over 12 months — the real ROI on your marketing spend
- Schedule utilization vs. schedule availability — are your chairs making money or gathering dust?
These aren't exotic metrics. They're fundamental business measurements applied to dentistry. The challenge is that pulling them requires connecting data across systems and doing analysis your PMS was never designed to do.
The Pareto Approach
This is exactly what our analytics platform is built for. We connect your practice data, apply the quantitative rigor it deserves, and surface the insights that actually move the needle. Not more reports — better questions, better answers, better decisions.
If you're making decisions based on default reports, you're navigating with a compass that's pointing in roughly the right direction. We can give you GPS.