Dashboards are instrumental in measuring and tracking several aspects of your practice. They provide a high-level overview of key data points in a visual and easily digestible way. Dashboards are a helpful tool for strategizing, data management, and identifying trends.
Video Transcript
Katrina Whitehair (KW): Hello and thank you for joining us today. I’m Katrina Whitehair. I’m accompanied by Glenn Morley. We’re both consultants at BSM working in medical aesthetics. We recently did a vlog talking about our BSM EOS system and traction by Gino Wickham. And in that vlog, we talked about dashboards. So, we would like to dedicate some time today to talk about our efficiency dashboards in detail. So, Glenn, I’d love for you to kick it off and tell us about these dashboards.
Glenn Morley (GM): Sure. So, dashboards and data management have been a part of the BSM DNA for 40 years. Our founder, Bruce Maller, was a proponent of measure, identifying key metrics and organizations and then figuring out accountability at every level and tracking those key performance indicators (KPIs) so that you could make decisions based on good data. You could drill down to problems, very quickly identify problems even before they emerge and impact a business in a negative way, and anticipate trends. So, we’ve developed a dashboard that serves this basis for almost every practice that we work with in medical aesthetics. And we customize those dashboards by specialty and by focus. And we’ll talk a little bit today about the components of that dashboard. Katrina, can you tell me, in the last, I don’t know, week, how many different dashboards have come across your desk?
KW: You know, Glenn, I am a big fan of the dashboard, and almost every client we work with has one. I look at these daily, weekly; we do a lot of coaching with administrators and owners, and we share the dashboard. And we look at this data together. I personally used a dashboard in a practice that I managed for several years. It started as a small dashboard with two or three tabs, and as we scaled up the business, added providers, and added service lines, my dashboard grew, but it still served the same purpose. I was able to keep a pulse on month-to-month, but also get that year, look back and be able to track trends looking forward. So, we look at utilization at first. So, we look at providers. How much time are they available? How much time are they out of this and, of the time available, time was used? So, we get a utilization of provider activity. And that gives us a glimpse into capacity. Glenn, would you like to speak more to this component?
GM: Yeah. So, you know, I will say that we have worked really hard as an organization to perfect the dashboard, and one of the goals in any good dashboard is that it actually serves a purpose as a management tool. And Katrina, when you talk about the time component in a dashboard, never is that more true than when we are drilling down on a page-by-page basis and looking at each provider in an organization and the time available to our schedulers. And so, you know, when it comes to time management, yes, each provider has a role in managing the time in the clinic and in the patient treatment room. Well, but we also have an obligation as an organization to fill the schedule and to work the schedule and to polish the schedule, so that at the end of the day we end up with no patient no-shows if we can avoid it, and having a good no-show prevention plan in place at the end of the day, if we are tracking that metric, a utilization rate for a provider. It is a critical key performance metric for every provider in any organization. And there’s a lot of ownership throughout the organization and making sure that that utilization rate is high. So, it ends up hitting a key performance metric for front desk, for schedulers, for medical assistants, and for the provider and I could go on and on.
KW: I love that Glenn. It’s a very powerful tool. So we—one component is the utilization. Another component is, we break down revenue, and we don’t break down revenue in the weeds by every service provided by every provider. We looked at kind of big-picture buckets. If you do a functional insurance medicine, we look get those reimbursements revenue. If you do cosmetic surgery, that could be a bucket if you are a non-surgical aesthetic provider—that would be a bucket of revenue. And then we can start to see each provider’s revenue streams by their service lines. If you’re an esthetician and you have high product sales, we would like to track product sales separately. So that way, we get a pulse on how the different divisions within our organization are performing, and how that rolls up into each provider and into the whole organization. How are we performing in each area?
GM: Yeah, you know it becomes strategic. It’s a strategic operating tool. When you are collecting that data on a monthly basis. You will start to see trends emerge. Ideally, the data that we’re tracking or that you are tracking in a dashboard, you’re collecting productivity or revenue data but you’re tying it in a dashboard back to overhead expense. And so there, you know, is a desperate need, and every organization that I work with to track marketing, spend, and return on investment from marketing. And so we do that in a lot of different ways, but one of the key areas that we see in a dashboard, when we see a large marketing expenditure, then we absolutely expect to see a return on investment by way of an increase in revenue that month. If you know it’s made in the early part of the month, and we would expect to see it in the same month. But for sure in the in the subsequent month or subsequent months. And so, you know, as we’re developing a dashboard with a practice and helping a practice learn how to populate a dashboard or pull data into a dashboard, we’re also coaching and educating leaders in how to use the dashboard, how to think about your business, using the data that you’re seeing in a strategic way and understanding your business in a profound way. I will tell you I have had the joy of working with managers and administrators who sort of have “Aha” moments for the first time to see all the data in the practice pull together key data, high-level data. Important monthly data pulled together in a way that helps them make sense of it, help helps them make sense of trends, and allows administrators and managers to have important conversations with individuals in the practice that report up to them, but as important with owners, so that owners are kept in the know and have a virtual finger on the pulse of their business by seeing the right information at the right time. And you know, this allows them to make great decisions.
KW: I couldn’t agree more Glenn. In my experience using a dashboard, it helped me sleep at night. I had the pulse. I was comfortable. I understood how everyone was performing, how the business as a whole was performing; and we do track trends, and if a number looks off trend, we drill down. We, you know, get in our EMR system. We run some alternative reports to see what we’re looking at. You know, maybe our cost of goods was exceptionally high one month, and I don’t remember that we made a big purchase that month. So, things like that can come to light if you’re expanding your footprint, and we can tie back to the utilization and capacity of your providers when we’ve expanded our space and we can measure our revenue and productivity. So, no matter if you’re just starting your practice, if you have a mature practice, or if you’re winding down your practice, this tool can help you strategize and look at the big picture. And better understand how each component is performing.
GM: I love it. Well, I love that you tied what an owner is seeing in a dashboard back to drilling down into opportunities or issues. And I think it’s important to also provide perspective around what it’s not. So, I think you know a dashboard is a monthly tool or a quarterly tool. It’s a way to operationally manage your practice. But there are other tools that give you a higher-level, strategic perspective, financial benchmark analysis that compares year over year over year. Potentially a three-year trend report. Those have equal value, but a different perspective. And so, this operational dashboard certainly does not replace the need for that higher strategic level, financial benchmark, and efficiency dashboard. It doesn’t replace the need to dig in deeper on specific areas. But it is an essential tool, in my opinion, in every practice.
KW: I couldn’t agree more, Glenn. If you’re interested in our efficiency dashboards and would like to reach out, please feel free. We’d be happy to share. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you.
