Indicators for Managing a Clinic

The clinic management indicators that help most with decisions are few: revenue, amounts collected versus outstanding, appointments with their cancellations and no-shows, diary occupancy, and new and returning patients. What matters is not having lots of figures, but knowing exactly what each one counts and always comparing it with an equivalent period.

Which indicators to watch and how to compare them

A useful dashboard for a clinic fits on one screen and answers three questions: how much you bring in, how well the diary is used and whether patients come back. These are the indicators that tell you:

Indicator	What it tells you
Invoiced revenue and average invoice value	How much you have invoiced and how much each invoice amounts to on average
Collections and outstanding debt	How much has actually come in and how much is still to be collected
Appointments, cancellations and no-shows	How much of the diary is lost along the way
Occupancy	What proportion of your practitioners’ working hours is booked with appointments
New and returning patients	Whether new patients are coming in and whether existing ones come back
Output per practitioner	What volume of completed work each practitioner contributes

The comparison matters as much as the figure. Comparing the first fourteen days of a month with a whole month gives a drop that does not exist. In Mi Clínica’s statistics you choose month, quarter or year, and the previous period covers the same number of elapsed days: 1 to 14 September is compared with 1 to 14 August. You can also filter by specialty or by practitioner.

By default, the statistics are seen by the “Dirección” (Management) and “Administración” (Administration) roles. The “Inicio” (Home) screen gives the whole team the day’s figures (anyone who only sees their own diary gets the figures for that diary), and the money figures are shown only to those with invoicing permission.

Invoiced revenue, collections and debt: three different figures

Invoicing is not collecting, and mixing up the two figures is the most common mistake when reading a clinic’s accounts. It helps to separate them like this:

• Invoiced revenue: in Mi Clínica it counts issued invoices, by their issue date. Drafts do not count, and a corrective invoice that replaces another is not added on top of the original.
• Average invoice value: invoiced revenue divided by the number of ordinary invoices in the period.
• Collections: what was collected in the period, each payment by its own date, whether or not it has an invoice.
• Outstanding debt: what has been issued minus what has been collected, overall. It is a snapshot of today, not of the period you are looking at.

Read them together. If invoiced revenue rises and collections do not follow, debt grows even if the month looks good. We explain how to balance what comes in each day in payments and the daily cash balance in a clinic.

A practical detail: invoices carry neither a practitioner nor a specialty. That is why, when you filter the statistics by practitioner or by specialty, the invoice figures are not split using an invented percentage: they disappear, and the monthly chart switches to showing output, which can be attributed.

Appointments, cancellations and no-shows

Appointments that do not take place are lost diary time, and measuring them properly starts with defining them. In Mi Clínica:

• Appointments are all those in the period except the cancelled ones.
• Cancellation rate: cancelled appointments over the total number of appointments, cancelled ones included.
• No-show rate: no-shows over non-cancelled appointments.

Appointments, cancellations and no-shows are also shown month by month in a chart of the last twelve months, which is where you can tell whether something has really changed or it was just an odd month. For the figure to be reliable, the team has to mark each appointment with its real status: an appointment left as “planificada” (planned) counts neither as attended nor as a no-show.

What should you do if no-shows rise? First, see whether they are concentrated in one practitioner, one time slot or one type of patient. Then act at reception: confirm appointments by phone and keep a waiting list to fill the gaps, as we explain in the waiting list in a clinic. In Mi Clínica, automatic reminders to the patient by email, SMS or WhatsApp are still being switched on and are not sent yet.

Diary occupancy: how it is calculated

Occupancy tells you what proportion of your practitioners’ available time is taken up by appointments. In Mi Clínica it is calculated as the booked minutes divided by the available minutes in the schedule, and booked minutes do not include cancelled appointments or no-shows: an appointment that did not take place does not occupy the diary.

Available minutes come from the schedule that applies to each practitioner: their own if they have one, otherwise the clinic’s and, if nobody has configured one, a default one from Monday to Friday, from 9:00 to 14:00 and from 16:00 to 20:00. That is why the first thing to do is enter the real schedule: with the default one, the occupancy of a clinic that opens on Saturdays or closes at midday does not tell the truth.

Only active practitioners, with a diary and a specialty, count; anyone who does not see patients, such as reception, is not included in the calculation. This way you can see the occupancy of the whole clinic, of each specialty and of each practitioner. If you want to review how to organise the diary when there are several of you, you will find it in the diary of a clinic with several practitioners.

New and returning patients, and output per practitioner

A healthy clinic needs both things: new patients arriving and existing ones coming back. In Mi Clínica:

• New patients are the records registered in the period. If you brought in patients from another program that month, they are included in the figure too: bear this in mind in the month of the import, which we cover in importing patients from Excel.
• Returning patients are patients with a completed appointment in the period who already had another completed one before.
• Repeat rate per practitioner: what proportion of each practitioner’s completed appointments is followed by another appointment for the same patient with the same practitioner.

To compare practitioners and specialties, the figure is output: the sum of the price of completed appointments. It is not invoiced revenue, and the screen warns you of this: it is the value of the work carried out, which can be attributed to whoever did it. Alongside it appear the most frequently performed treatments in the period.

Use it with care. Output and repeat rate depend on the specialty and the type of treatment, so compare each practitioner above all with themselves over time.

How to read the indicators without fooling yourself

An indicator is useful if it changes a decision. A few rules to make that happen:

1. Compare equivalent periods, with the same number of days.
2. Look at the twelve-month trend before reacting to a single month.
3. Compare yourself with yourself. Average figures from other clinics rarely refer to your specialty, your schedule and your type of patient.
4. Do not mix up invoiced and collected, or invoiced revenue and output.
5. Look after the source data – appointment statuses up to date, schedule configured and invoices issued, not in draft.
6. Choose one action per indicator: if no-shows rise, confirm appointments; if occupancy falls, review schedules or attract patients.

If you want to work with the figures outside the program, the statistics screen can be exported to a CSV that opens in Excel. The summary of Mi Clínica’s features is on its main page (in Spanish).