👍Act Now: Align Your Goals And Potential For 2025

As 2024 draws to a close, it’s time to start setting your sights on 2025. Setting ambitious goals for your practice is exciting, but it’s equally important to consider whether you have the provider potential and practice structure to make those goals attainable. 

This time of year offers an excellent opportunity to evaluate and adjust how your practice runs day-to-day so that you can set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely) objectives for 2025. Goals that foster growth, patient satisfaction, and team fulfillment. Forbes article for more information on SMART goals

In this article we will give you some actionable ways to ensure that your goals match your practice potential, so you’re fully prepared for success in the new year.

Evaluating Provider Potential: Do You Have the Capacity to Meet Your Goals?

First, take a step back and look at your current team structure. Consider how many patients your practice serves now, and whether you expect that number to grow in 2025. Goals are great, but without the capacity to reach them, they can lead to frustration and burnout. One of the most critical factors in achieving your 2025 goals is ensuring you have the provider days—both hygiene and doctor time—necessary to accommodate your patient base.

 – Assessing Hygiene Provider Days

The hygiene department is the backbone of a thriving dental practice. Your continuing care program plays a crucial role in keeping your schedule filled and patients returning to your practice. Calculate how many hygiene provider days your practice currently offers each week or month and compare that to the patient count you serve.

Consider this: for every 800 active patients, you’ll generally need one full-time hygienist to maintain a healthy continuing care system and provide adequate appointment availability. If your current hygiene schedule is booked out for weeks or even months, that’s a red flag. You might be overdue for additional hygiene provider days to meet demand, improve scheduling flexibility, and prevent patients from seeking care elsewhere due to long wait times.

– Assessing Doctor Days

Just as with hygiene providers, it’s important to make sure your practice has enough doctor days to meet your production goals. Ask yourself:

– Are you aiming for a specific revenue target in 2025?

– Is your provider team adequate to meet that target?

Consider factors like case acceptance, your average production per doctor hour, and any increases you anticipate in new patient appointments. If you or your current team of doctors is already operating at maximum capacity, achieving higher goals may require increasing doctor days, adding part-time providers, or bringing in specialists.

Review Your Schedule Flexibility: Are You Catering to Patient Needs?

In today’s fast-paced world, patients increasingly expect convenience when it comes to scheduling their appointments. Take a closer look at your scheduling structure. Do you utilize ‘perfect day scheduling’? Are you offering flexibility that meets your patients’ needs? Being flexible with your scheduling can improve patient satisfaction and reduce the number of missed or canceled appointments.

Here are a few aspects of scheduling to consider when planning your 2025 goals:

– Expanded Hours

Offering early morning, evening, or even weekend hours can make a significant difference for patients who have busy schedules. Many practices find that adding just one early or late shift per week increases accessibility and brings in patients who would otherwise delay care. Not only does this improve patient satisfaction, but it also opens up your schedule, potentially attracting new patients looking for a practice that’s willing to work around their availability.

– Online Scheduling Options

In addition to extended hours, consider implementing or optimizing online scheduling tools. With technology available at patients’ fingertips, many people expect the convenience of booking appointments online. A study by Accenture found that nearly 77% of patients would prefer to book online if given the choice, and practices that offer online scheduling may see a rise in patient retention and an improvement in overall patient satisfaction.

– Appointment Availability

Evaluate your hygiene and doctor appointment availability to make sure it matches your current patient demand. If patients have to wait more than a couple of weeks for a routine cleaning, it’s time to add more hygiene days. Similarly, if patients struggle to get in for treatment promptly, that could lead to a loss of case acceptance and revenue. Building in extra time for urgent appointments can also demonstrate that your practice is committed to meeting patients’ needs when they arise.

Implementing the Right Structure to Achieve Your Goals

Once you’ve assessed provider days and schedule flexibility, the next step is to look at your practice structure to ensure it can support the growth you’re wanting. Having a systemized structure not only enhances the efficiency of your team but also fosters a supportive work environment that in turn leads to greater patient satisfaction.

– Analyze Staffing Needs

Make sure your practice has the right mix of leadership, administrative, and clinical staff to keep your day-to-day operations running smoothly. An understaffed practice can lead to frustrated team members, longer patient wait times, and a reduction in productivity. 

If you’re planning on increasing provider hours or adding new providers, be proactive about expanding your support team as well to ensure you continue to deliver high-quality service.

– Strengthen Team Training and Communication

Staff training and strong communication are vital to achieving your goals. Are all team members aligned with your practice’s mission and patient care philosophy? Providing training opportunities—whether in customer service, technology, or clinical skills—helps your team perform at their best and deliver a seamless patient experience.

Consider implementing regular team meetings to keep everyone on the same page. If you already have team meetings, make sure you are reviewing your practice goals with your team, setting expectations, and celebrating wins as a team. 

– Use Technology to Maximize Efficiency

The right technology can help you streamline operations and improve productivity. Are you using the best practice management software for your needs? Are your team members comfortable with it, or do they need more training? 

A well-functioning software system can help you track and analyze KPIs (key performance indicators), simplify scheduling, manage patient communication, and keep records organized. These benefits free up time, enabling your team to focus more on patient care and less on administrative tasks.

Setting Realistic, Data-Driven Goals

In review, make sure your 2025 goals are specific, measurable, and aligned with your practice’s resources. Set goals based on data—use metrics from this year to help predict what is achievable next year. This could include setting monthly production targets, tracking patient retention rates, or aiming for a specific number of new patient appointments. 

It’s also helpful to break larger goals into smaller, actionable steps. For example, if one of your goals is to increase hygiene production by 15%, identify concrete actions to reach that number, such as adding an extra hygiene day each week, implementing accelerated hygiene, expanding hours, or looking at how to improve case acceptance for certain procedures.

Preparing for a Successful 2025

As a dental practice owner, your goals for 2025 can become a reality with the right foundation in place. By evaluating your current provider potential, adjusting your scheduling flexibility, and ensuring a supportive practice structure, you’re setting your team and your patients up for a positive year ahead. 

Taking the time to plan strategically now will help you create a roadmap that keeps your practice thriving, your team motivated, and your patients satisfied well into the future.

Please feel free to reach out if you need guidance. We’re here to help.