DATA – Are you leveraging it?

A few weeks ago, while reminiscing over a university floppy disk, reflections on technology’s astonishing progress were ignited. That 1.44-megabyte storage relic pales compared to today’s immense data generation and consumption, where the average person produces a staggering 108 megabytes per minute, according to DOMO’s Data Never Sleeps 11 2023 report.

Let’s pause for a moment and be amazed by the sheer volume of data we consume every minute.

Source: Domo: Data Never Sleep 11.0

This vast data generation raises a critical question: How effectively do dental practices harness this goldmine to propel business success? While relevant across all sectors, this query holds particular significance for the dental industry. Dental practices generate ample volumes of data every day, yet the real challenge lies in strategically harnessing this asset to strengthen operational excellence.

When owners are asked, “How do you leverage data at your practice?” a typical response is uncertainty about where to begin. This article, through practical examples of three fictional practices, Sydney Dental Lighthouse, Shining Smiles Clinic Melbourne, and Smile Til You Drop, explores how any practice can unleash data’s potential to effectively achieve its business objectives.

Business Strategy

What constitutes a business strategy? While every business has one, some execute it better than others. A business strategy comprehensively outlines a company’s future direction, decisions, and actions to compete and attain goals. As strategy guru Michael Porter articulated, it involves “carving a position, putting stakes in the ground, and winning mindshare.”

Like any business, dental practices must craft a well-defined strategy to thrive. Business strategies can integrate qualitative and quantitative elements. Essentially, a business strategy can be viewed as an operational GPS charting the course.

Sydney Dental Lighthouse: Geographical expansion, innovative care models, holistic collaborations, enhanced patient communication, and exemplary patient journeys.

Shining Smiles Clinic Melbourne: Expanding from 3 to 7 chairs by 2025, onboarding paediatric specialists, increasing digital marketing, 25% active patient growth, and fostering patient advocacy.

Data Strategy

The notion of a data strategy can often puzzle dental business owners. While acknowledging data’s omnipresence in the practice’s daily operations, they miss the strategic connection. However, just as business plans outline future direction and goals, data strategies provide the vital backbone for realising those ambitions. DAMA International defines a robust data strategy as “guidelines, thought processes, and methodologies to judiciously manage, harness, and leverage data.”

A data strategy involves identifying crucial data points, defining collection, storage, and analysis processes, and determining operational/strategic applications of insights. A well-crafted data strategy for dental practices can be an underrated key to unlocking value and powering success. One could view data strategy as the rulebook governing the data game.

Sydney Dental Lighthouse: Organising data sources like practice management and financial systems, secure storage, and extracting actionable insights aligned with objectives.

Shining Smiles Clinic Melbourne: Analyse patient age demographics to anticipate care needs, systematically track rebooking, recall, and retention trends, and uncover satisfaction-referral correlations via a feedback platform.

Aligning Data and Business Strategies

While well-defined strategies are essential, true power emerges from aligning business and data approaches – a strategic imperative yielding operational synergy, adaptability to evolving trends, and collaborative success enhancement.

Alignment involves three key steps: defining joint objectives, iterative refinement, and cross-functional collaboration. For instance, if the goal is to enhance the patient experience to boost retention and word-of-mouth referrals, the data strategy could survey satisfaction post-visit and analyse feedback to identify service delivery improvements.

Sydney Dental Lighthouse: Data-driven marketing campaigns, a satisfaction score-based referral program, and targeted paediatric care newsletters to support its business goals of innovative care, holistic collaborations, and patient-focused communication.

Shining Smiles Clinic Melbourne: Utilise its data strategy to establish correlations between patient satisfaction and new referrals, directly contributing to its objective of ensuring every patient becomes a practice advocate.

Data Governance and Privacy

As practices increasingly rely on data-driven strategies, robust data governance ensuring availability, relevance, usability, integrity, and safety becomes paramount – especially regarding personal healthcare information. Dental practices are prime cyber threat targets, and breaches can devastate reputations and finances. Implementing stringent governance like adhering to data laws, securing storage/access, and staff training is crucial for mitigating risks and maintaining patient trust.

Some important regulations and guidelines every Australian dental practice must be aware of and comply with are:

• Australian Privacy Principles (APPs): Privacy Act 1988 (Cth)
• State-based Health Records Legislations: Examples- Health Records and Information Privacy Act 2002 (NSW) and the Health Records Act 2001 (Vic)
• Notifiable Data Breach Scheme: Guidelines by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) for notification of data breaches likely to cause serious harm.
• Australian Dental Association (ADA) policies: Examples – 6.15 – Dental Informatics and Digital Health and 5.18 – Dentistry Privacy and Confidentiality

Sydney Dental Lighthouse: Maintains compliance by ensuring the data collected is of consistent quality and adheres to regulatory requirements. Access is restricted solely to authorised personnel.

Shining Smiles Clinic Melbourne: Abides by nationally enforced data protection laws, Victorian state health laws, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), employs cloud-based storage solutions featuring end-to-end encryption and IP address-restricted access protocols. Every new staff member undergoes rigorous training not only in clinical and operational protocols but also in data governance and privacy principles.

Ethical Considerations

As practices embrace data strategies, prioritising ethical principles is vital.

Key considerations include:

• Informed Consent: Obtain patient agreement on how their data, like feedback, will be collected and utilised. Ensure they understand whether it will be analysed while keeping personal details anonymised.
• Preventing Bias: Regularly audit insights from the data to avoid discrimination against certain demographics. If primarily using middle-aged patient data, findings and recommendations for younger/older groups may be skewed.
• Transparency: If raising prices based on data insights like higher demand for specialised treatments, clearly explain these data-driven decisions to foster patient trust and loyalty.

Ethical practices build confidence while protecting reputation. Following principles of consent, fairness and transparency allows for leveraging data’s potential responsibly while safeguarding privacy and rights.

Sydney Dental Lighthouse: Informs patients about data collection and usage. The practice audits analytics insights for bias and communicates all data-driven initiatives to patients via the newsletter.

Shining Smiles Clinic Melbourne: The clinic explains to patients the reasons for data collection, whether for marketing, education, or research purposes. The clinic openly shares research on AI caries detection accuracy and efficiency.

Learning from other industries

While the dental industry has its unique nuances, valuable lessons can be drawn from other sectors that have successfully harnessed the power of data to support their business strategies:

Retail: Amazon has perfected customer journeys through tailored product suggestions, increasing sales by analysing individual purchasing patterns and browsing histories.

Finance: Visa has implemented real-time fraud detection using data analytics, safeguarding assets and customer trust by monitoring transaction patterns and flagging anomalies.

Entertainment: Netflix masters viewer engagement through personalised content curation based on analysed viewing behaviours and preferences. Data even informs new show production decisions by assessing viewership trends.

Transport: Uber leverages travel data for demand prediction, dynamic pricing and driver availability adjustments. Data enhances driver safety training, route optimisation and city transit planning through anonymised trip insights.

The SCANNER Framework

Dental practices can follow a practical framework like the SCANNER approach to embark on their data strategy journey.

Smile Til You Drop Dental Clinic faced stagnant growth and recognised the need to expand its patient base and service offerings. This prompted them to develop a data-driven strategy utilising the SCANNER framework.

Strategise: The clinic developed an overarching business strategy to increase its patient base by 30% within two years. Aligning with this, their data strategy focused on capturing comprehensive patient demographic information, service preferences, and appointment frequencies to enable targeted marketing and service line expansion.

Collect: After implementing robust data governance protocols, the clinic consolidated data from patient registrations, appointment booking systems, and feedback forms into a centralised, secure data management platform adhering to privacy regulations.

Analyse: Leveraging advanced statistical modelling techniques, the clinic objectively analysed the collected data against their strategic KPIs.  They cross-referenced demographic profiles with service uptakes to identify treatment popularity across different patient segments.

Narrate: Interpreting the analysis, the clinic uncovered patients aged 30-40 responded particularly well to cosmetic dentistry offerings. These insights were effectively communicated through visualisations and presentations to the marketing team for crafting targeted campaigns, and the dental team for considering additional cosmetic procedure training.

Navigate: Guided by these data-driven insights, Smile Til You Drop navigated strategic decisions such as investing in new cosmetic dentistry equipment and enhancing digital marketing efforts tailored to the identified demographic. However, they faced initial challenges aligning promotional messaging with the demographic’s preferences.

Evaluate: The clinic implemented a comprehensive dashboard to continuously monitor evolving patient demographics, service popularity trends, and marketing campaign effectiveness against pre-defined KPIs. This enabled them to promptly adjust processes and strategies for better goal alignment.

Repeat: After the first year, the clinic revisited its strategies, leveraging the accumulated data to update its business plan. Based on the lessons learned, it expanded the target demographic to include the 25-30 age group and iteratively improved its marketing strategies to resonate with this younger audience’s needs and preferences.

By systematically following the SCANNER framework with a willingness to adapt based on insights, Smile Til You Drop Dental Clinic made informed, data-driven decisions. This strategic approach led to a successful expansion of its patient base and a significant increase in the uptake of its high-margin cosmetic dentistry services.

Concluding Musings

Strategically aligning business and data strategies is no longer theoretical—it’s a practical approach driving tangible results across sectors. As dental practices navigate this data-driven era, a holistic approach balancing data governance, ethical use, and cross-industry best practices is crucial. Adopting a robust roadmap like SCANNER empowers the responsible harnessing of data’s immense potential to shape future success.

The possibilities are boundless when leveraging data assets prudently. Today, we are surrounded by vast amounts of data – it’s not just about the numbers; it’s about the stories they tell, the patterns they reveal, and the futures they help shape.

Moreover, data enables proactively meeting the evolving needs of tech-savvy healthcare consumers. Analysing patient data allows personalising services, communication approaches, and amenities to surpass expectations. This patient-centric edge, powered by data insights, will be instrumental in attracting and retaining a loyal base to fuel sustainable growth in today’s competitive landscape.

The dental industry can join pioneering sectors capitalising on strategic data utilisation. By harmonising an unwavering patient-first ethos with data capabilities, forward-thinking practices can redefine benchmarks for service excellence and performance. The future favours those who masterfully harness insights from data and integrate them into the core of their organisation, crafting unparalleled patient experiences and driving profitability at the forefront of their industry.

Try Satora Today

Discover the many benefits of Satora and see how it can help you harness the insight you need to optimise your practice.