BerganKDV just released their bi-annual overhead survey. This is best of its kind. It samples privately owned mature area practices. This is the overhead yardstick that you’ll want to use to compare your expenses.

Dental Office Overhead remains around 64% of collections. The typical Dentist netted 36%. The big expense – Gross Wages – is 25.9%. That is very close to the same percentage of two years ago.

Doctors’ average income went from $291,432 to $309,090, a $17,658 increase per year…an annualized change of just under 3% per year. In this two year period, Lab Fees decreased from 6.6% to about 6.0%., probably due to more Cerec, E4D, etc. Supplies decreased from 7.5% to about 6.9%.

The typical practice is spending 2.1% of its revenues on Advertising. Up from 1.7%.

So the average office in the survey spends $18,000 per year in Advertising vs. $14,000 per year in 2014.

It’s interesting to note that according to APM data, the typical practice writes off more than 10 times that amount in a typical year due to PPO discounts. As big a hassle and expense that advertising is, we feel that practices would be better off taking fewer write offs and investing more in practice independence. Investing in Continuing Education and staff training pays off too.

This Overhead survey along with Technology, Fee surveys and much other good stuff is on our website at: AdvancedPracticeManagement.com Our thanks to BerganKDV (www.BerganKDV.com) for this excellent survey.

Tactfully Turning Away Medical Assistance Patients

Many of you are currently not taking new Medical Assistance patients. Still, we all know it can be difficult for these patients to find care and you want to help them.

Call us at APM (952-921-3360) for a list of clinics that are accepting new Medical Assistance patients. There are at least a dozen options for Metro Area Dentists to refer M.A. patients to.

Unfortunately, after extensive calling, we found that for the Outstate Areas, there are not as many options. We did find a few (less than 10 for the entire Outstate Area).

We suggest that your front desk tactfully turn away patients. Instead of saying, “We don’t take M.A., call the customer service number on the back of your card…” (which can really frustrate people). They can instead say,

“Thank you so much for calling. We are not currently able to take on more new patients with your insurance but we can refer you to some nearby clinics. Would you like us to do that?”

We all know that people on Medical Assistance may not be on it the rest of their lives. Also, they may have relatives or friends, so this helps keep things on a positive note for everyone.

Goal Setting

Goal Setting works. Put what you want in writing and see what happens! I’ve enclosed our popular annual format. Share your goals with us. It’s our job to help you reach them.