Stop Guessing: The SMART Way to Hit Your 2025 Practice Goals

 

When Pearl asked AADOM members to name their top challenges and goals for 2025, their answers revealed a clear gap—practices know where they want to go, but don’t always know how to get there.

Consider this familiar list of 2025 practice goals: Almost 70% of respondents said “scheduling efficiency” was a primary focus while 61% said “meeting production goals” was a top priority. Meanwhile—no surprise—77% said filling schedules was their biggest challenge last year.

If this sounds like your practice, ask yourself: Are you setting goals and measuring progress in a way that sets your practice up for success? Or are you running on gut instinct?

Sheela Roth, head of clinical education at Pearl, learned the difference during her own early career transition into the front office. “‘When the doctor asked me for metrics, I explained that while I didn’t have exact numbers on hand, I could see that new patient volume was increasing and our existing patients were keeping their appointments.”

“If you want it, you have to measure it,” Roth realized. “If you can’t measure it, forget it.”

Start by Setting SMART Goals

Practices can start by setting SMART goals. The acronym—Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound—isn’t new, but isn’t always applied in dental practices. A goal like “meet our production target” might sound strategic, but it’s too broad to drive action. SMART goals force practices to draw sharp lines around the progress they want to see.

So next time you’re setting a goal like “meet our production target,” run it through the SMART filter:

• Specific: Define what meeting production goals means for your practice—more completed treatment, fewer gaps in the schedule, or higher-value procedures.
• Measurable: Choose KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you can reliably track and determine how your team will track them.
• Achievable: Set a realistic goal—like boosting weekly production by 8% or improving case acceptance by 5%—and determine what you will do differently to meet that goal.
• Relevant: Align your goal with what drives practice success—whether that’s filling the hygiene schedule, reducing cancellations, or completing more restorative work.
• Time-bound: Set a clear deadline—such as reaching your target by the end of the quarter.

Now your goal sounds like this: “Increase production by 20% over the next 6 months,” something Bush Dental achieved with the help of Pearl’s Second Opinion.

From Lagging to Leading: Measuring What Matters

Most practices are measuring something. In the Pearl survey, AADOM members said they would monitor progress by tracking the most straightforward metrics. 71% are looking for an increase in daily production, and 60% are looking for a reduction in cancellations and no-shows.

These important metrics are lagging indicators— they tell you what happened, but not why it happened or how to improve. To learn that, you’ll have to look at the downstream activities that drive your ultimate success and identify a leading indicator—a metric that will help you measure how well your team is completing those activities.

For example, we have seen that when a practice network rolls out Second Opinion across multiple offices, the locations that use Second Opinion to scan images daily uncover more untreated needs than those that use it infrequently. In this case, the number of images scanned each day is the leading indicator, and the amount of dentistry uncovered is the lagging indicator.

Case study: Dental network Onsite Dental found that offices where clinicians embraced Pearl saw a significant increase, up to 408%, in per patient production.

Leading Indicators: Signals of What’s to Come

Roth also emphasizes the importance of tracking and maximizing treatment opportunities. “I think that’s the first metric,” she says. “Are you making time to do exams on all your hygiene patients? Because the more hygiene visits we check, the more doctor exams we do, the more restorative opportunities we find.”

Down the line, while practices track appointment attendance and daily production, only 49% track case acceptance—a key leading indicator of both scheduled appointments and production, according to AADOM respondents. For example, when Dr. Kunal Rai included Pearl in his treatment presentations, he boosted treatment acceptance by 48%, which led to a 64% increase in production.

“Tracking how many patients walked out the door without scheduling treatment is a great metric to focus on because we can look at ways to improve that metric,” says Roth, citing long insurance verification times as a significant leading indicator. “When we fall behind on insurance verification, we miss the chance to present treatment opportunities while the patient is in the office,” she observes.

Other Leading Indicators:

• Treatment identified: When clinicians uncover more disease, more treatment is planned
• Case acceptance: Signals future production and revenue. If patients say yes now, treatment (and revenue) follow.
• Treatment scheduled: Booked treatment means production is coming.
• New patients: A pipeline metric, more new patients today usually means more revenue tomorrow.
• Cancellation rates: Impacts future efficiency and production—rising rates warn of gaps ahead.
• Insurance claims acceptance rate: High rejection rates can delay collections and hurt cash flow downstream.

Other Lagging Indicators:

• Production per visit: Reflects how much value you generated across all scheduled visits.
• Production by procedure: Tracks historical revenue performance by treatment type.
• Production over time: Summarizes past output—daily, monthly, or yearly totals.
• Collections: A pure lagging indicator; you only collect after treatment and claim approval.
• Patient attrition: Reflects past retention success—or failure.

Building a Metric Pipeline (And Accelerating It with AI)

Once you have determined which indicators lead and which lag, you can organize and track your data to understand exactly where your team is performing well, and where they should adjust. This is known as a performance pipeline. And it may look like this:

Opportunities Identified →    Case Acceptance →    Treatment Scheduled →    Cancellation rates →    Production per Visit →    Production Over Time →    Collections

AI-enhanced software can help improve performance at almost any stage of this pipeline by identifying patients with unscheduled plans,, automatically verifying insurance in advance, and highlighting areas of concern on x-rays to assist in patient education during case presentation.

This last ability is particularly useful: 64% of patients don’t understand black-and-white x-rays.

Get a Baseline

Just like treatment planning for a patient, creating SMART goals and choosing KPIs starts with knowing the current state of your practice’s health. Pulling the last 3 months of data from your PMS can give you a starting point:

• How many patients have unscheduled treatment plans?
• How many have unscheduled recare appointments?
• What is your average production per patient?

If all this sounds like a lot of work, it is—but it is essential work. And it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. You can get started in three simple steps:

1. Identify one or two overall goals that engage the whole team by lifting the delivery of care, not just revenue.
2. Include your team by explaining what the practice hopes to gain by achieving those goals—new equipment, new benefits, new employees.
3. Track team progress using KPIs that are appropriately aligned with your goal to get a finger on the pulse of your practice.

Interested in learning how Pearl can help your practice meet its 2025 goals? Sign up for a demo today.