Statistics are like x-rays or a car's dashboard. Statistics tell you and the employee what's going on in a specific area of the practice. Some statistics can be assigned to a specific employee. For example Number of Patients Reactivated.

If a statistic is trending down, then it is likely that something changed which means you need to figure out what changed and get it reverted back.

Typically this happens when someone new takes over a position and changes things or some successful action is changed or stopped.

As an example, you see that the New Patients statistic is trending down and you discover that referral cards are no longer being handed out. Obviously you want to make sure that referrals cards start getting handed out again.

In the above example, you'd have one employee who was overall responsible for the statistic of New Patients. That's where accountability comes in. You know that the key successful action is getting referral cards handed out. So you would set a quota for the number of cards handed out on a daily and weekly basis.

Note: The Morning Huddle is a perfect to time to review the statistics for the week and month, then assign daily quotas.

On the other hand if a statistic is doing OK, then make sure nothing gets changed.

The example above is the real use of statistics. There's quite a bit more to using statistics, but essentially they’re useful tools so that allow you to quickly know what's going on in your practice and take appropriate actions as well as set goals and daily quotas.

We use to assign lots of statistics to all employees. We no longer do so. Many consultants, as part of old management systems, used to recommend doing so but we've found blindly assigning statistics because "you're suppose to" is actually counter productive.

Some statistics make sense to assign to a specific employee but not all of them.

A perfect example are Dental Assistants. We use to have a very complicated point system that we used to create a statistic for Dental Assistants. It was stupid. The only statistic that makes sense for an assistant is production; but of course a Dental Assistant is not the only one responsible for production.

So you can't be rote with statistics. Each practice is different. How statistics should be set up in an office vary from office to office.

Kevin Tighe, Cambridge Dental Consultants, Senior Consultant, got bitten hard by the business and marketing bug during long summer days working at his dad's Madison Avenue ad agency. After joining Cambridge as a speaker in the mid-1990s, Kevin went on to become Cambridge’s senior consultant and eventually CEO. Cambridge Dental Consultants is a full-service dental practice management company offering customized dental office manuals. Frustrated? High overhead? Schedule a chat with Kevin at