Article

Insights
Oct 09, 2024 // 8 min
Dental Business Management Part 2: Financial & Non-financial Monitoring
Hayley Brown
Colin Campbell
Katherine Hare
DOI: 10.3290/iti.fi.45737
Dental practice management small business financial management clinical audit
Series overview

In October 2023 the ITI launched its Digital Dental Entrepreneurial Program powered by the Campbell Academy. This innovative and interactive online modular course is designed for dental practitioners to enhance and improve their knowledge of business concepts, to improve their practice, their team and their patient experiences. It is hoped that this course will be able to inspire a new generation of dentists to improve their working environment for both themselves and their teams, and therefore improve their satisfaction, their well-being and their enthusiasm for the industry.

This course is set around six modules over a four-week period and the modules include vision setting, dental practice finance, marketing, human resources and leadership, and sales and strategy, together with discussions regarding social legacy and corporate social responsibility.

To accompany the launch of this course, a series of short papers have been devised around the subjects of the modules in the course to assist practitioners in their understanding and learning and to augment the course material. It was felt that this course was necessary, and indeed that these publications were necessary, because it is clear that healthcare practitioners throughout the world are struggling with overwhelm, burnout and difficulty in organizational management. There is a raft of research and evidence related to this including physician burnout in the United States, which in some cases is reported to run at approaching 50% (Shanafelt et al. 2012). In a recent study in the United Kingdom 43% of practitioners said that they were very engaged with dentistry (BDJ 2019). But the sad part of this is that it means more than 50% of practitioners are not highly engaged in dentistry. Certainly, one of the things that lead to burnout and stress and disillusionment is the inability to create and nurture organizational structures and strategies to reduce the overwhelm of administration and non-clinical tasks. Developing an excellent structure in dental business not only improves the lives of the practitioner and potentially their appreciation and satisfaction in their work, but also improves the lives of the team, the supplier-partner relationship and, most importantly, the patient outcomes.

This series of articles, in conjunction with the ITI Digital Dental Entrepreneurial Program powered by the Campbell Academy, is designed to augment clinical education and development for practitioners around the world, ultimately feeding into the aspiration of the ITI to improve patients' lives worldwide.

Introduction

The subject of financial management is perhaps one of the most emotive and divisive subjects in business management. 

For some people, financial management is the quintessential purpose of business, and measuring the numbers is the only thing that matters. This ignores the fundamental subjects of team building and human resource management together with marketing and the overall philosophy the business is working to build and grow. This inevitably leads to failure in the financial aspirations of the business. 

On the other hand, for those who shy away from the responsibility of financial management for the more attractive and creative aspects of business management, they are effectively working blind, with no idea of the successful (or otherwise) progress of the business. 

For business founders, financial management is extremely emotive, and of course emotions can cloud judgement. Therefore, the need for objective and true metrics is essential. It is for this reason that objective financial management is the cornerstone of building any business. The development of staging posts or key performance indicators, which allow one to assess the business at regular intervals, is essential to remove the personal interaction often associated with finances. 

In this article we will explain some of the key performance indicators and metrics and how to measure these, together with the principle of developing a monthly dashboard which allows the senior members of the business to review the finances subjectively at regular intervals (although not too frequently) to allow well-informed and well-managed decisions to be made. 

It is also essential to remember that prospective financial management and forecasting are the essential elements here, as retrospective analysis of finances sits in the past and may not represent the current view of the business.