Using patient lifetime value to future-proof your dental practice

Dental practices are a small business. Like any other business, they need cash flow management and financial planning to be viable, if not highly profitable. What a lot of practices may not realise is that they are sitting on a treasure trove of data to be used in more ways than plain accounting and financial forecasting. This paper focuses on longitudinal data, such as the timing of each patient's visits and the value of their treatments since joining the practice. It aims to show how such data can be used by practices to understand their patient base and make plans for the future development of the business. There are plenty of business metrics. Here, the focus is on one metric: patient lifetime value (PLV), derived from customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is well established in retail and other sectors. This paper shows that patient appointment data can be used in methods adapted from CLV via the bespoke concept of PLV. The paper describes different approaches to calculating PLV, the advantages and disadvantages of each approach and the ways in which they can benefit a dental practice.