Dubai's competitive landscape means you cannot afford to run your clinic inefficiently. Statistics and analysis of your internal data can help improve patient experience and retention, guide marketing campaigns, and identify your best performing services and doctors.
In this guide, we'll be going through 7 key statistics every clinic owner should monitor and try to improve. Each of them tell a story about how well your clinic is operating. For every statistic, we will also tell you exactly how to interpret it, and what to do to improve them.
We'll be showing examples from a real clinic using Oryx Medical AI as their EMR. In this case, this is a highly profitable dental clinic specialized in cosmetic dentistry in Dubai.
1. Revenue lost to cancellations
Your clinic loses money for every patient that cancels and isn't rescheduled. But to understand how much investment you must put into retention, you must first determine how much cancellations are actually costing you.
In this case, we see that this clinic is estimated to have lost AED 137.6k over a 3-month period. This is significant, as this clinic has generated AED 950.8k of revenue over the same period.
This is 14.5% lost revenue, on patient leads that were already warm (considering they at least had an appointment with the clinic)! Meaning, investing into reducing cancellations by as little as 10% can increase yearly revenue by 55k for this clinic.
Good ways to reduce cancellations include:
- Sending pre-appointment reminder messages, preferably on WhatsApp
- Sending post-cancellations follow-up messages, preferably on WhatsApp
- Increase response rate and response speed to patient queries (a lot of leads are lost simply due to not responding quickly enough to keep their attention, on social media or on messages)
- For patients that follow a treatment, send a follow-up reminding them that the outcome of their treatment may not be guaranteed if they skip appointments
Estimating revenue lost to cancellations itself is not easy, and requires complex statistical modelling to infer the value of a patient depending on its treatment stage, or whether they are new and revenue potential is conditional on consultation outcomes.
Similarly, it can also be challenging to keep track of all the messaging that must be done to reduce no-shows. For any clinics that wants to grow, the volume of message will quickly necessitate more staff or become unbearable.
Oryx Medical AI can help you with all of this: our EMR uses a proprietary algorithm to precisely estimate revenue lost to cancellations, and fully automates WhatsApp communications using AI, meaning your clinic never fails to follow-up with leads.
2. Consultation time deviation
The number 1 cause of patients waiting more than expected is failure by clinics to accurately estimate the time they spend in consultation. One consultation taking more time than expected early in the day can have a catastrophic domino effect.
All patients in the rest of the day are frustrated to wait more than expected, the X-Ray machine is now clashing across appointments because the schedule has shifted, and the doctors and nurses must end their day 2 hours later, driving burnout and increasing their turnover.
This is why it's essential to estimate the accuracy of your scheduling.
This shows the clinic's ACTUAL consultation time, against what was booked on the schedule. We break it down into over-estimation and under-estimation. We can see this clinic is not performing well at all in estimating appointment length accurately, and even has gotten worse over time.
Both over-estimation and under-estimation are bad and must be minimized. Over-estimation has the worst effects of course, but under-estimation also hurts your clinic by creating idle doctors, rooms, equipment, and reduces daily revenue.
In a sense, these deviations are assessing the performance of your receptionists in estimating consultation times accurately.
Another element to take into account is the "style" of your doctors. Some doctors like to take their time with their patient, and have more lengthy conversations with them. Some doctors are more straight to the point, and can close appointments quickly.
Consider the following charts of appointment length per doctor (names have been anonymized):
Dr Ahmed Al Farsi takes on average 15 minutes more to close an appointment than Dr Sara Khan. Not considering this in how you manage your schedule is certain to degrade your patient's satisfaction as they end up stuck in the waiting room.
Good ways to reduce consultation time deviation include:
- Asking patients for clear reasons for their visit ahead of time
- Mapping procedures to the time they take, strictly
- Adjusting for the specific doctor's style of care (fast or lengthy)
- Continuously assess consultation time deviation to add or reduce padding (too much over-estimation means you should increase padding)
Oryx Medical AI automates all of this: our EMR's algorithm continuously assesses consultation time deviations, doctor statistics (and many more variables we haven't mentioned), and automatically advises padding. Our AI chatbot always asks the patient for the reason for their consultation, and books for the perfect amount of time but utilizing deep statistics about your clinic.
3. Patient earliness and lateness
When your patients arrive to your facility has a huge impact on how your day is going to go. If they tend to arrive late, your doctors will be sitting in their rooms waiting, and the next patient (who will wait for an extra 30 minutes) will also inevitably have a bad experience.
To make sure your patients arrive on time, telling them to come 1 hour early won't cut it either. A patient won't give you a 5-star review after living through absolute boredom. You need find the correct balance, but there are tricks to improve your life (and most importantly, that of your patients).
Consider this chart of patient earliness and lateness:
In this clinic, we see that early patients will arrive ~23 minutes early, while patients that are late tend to arrive 34 minutes after their scheduled time. To have the perfect patient experience and the maximum throughput for your clinic, you need to minimize both.
Good ways to reduce patient lateness/earliness include:
- Sending a pre-appointment reminder the day before, and a few hours before the appointment, preferably via WhatsApp
- Asking patients to come 15 minutes early
- Providing information on how to access your clinic and how to park (a lot of patients arrive on time but spend 20 minutes on parking)
- Sending appointment confirmation message, preferably via WhatsApp (a lot of patients don't arrive at the right time because of miscommunication)
- Tagging patients that consistently arrive late so they may be scheduled appropriately, such as towards times when the scheduled is less stacked
Oryx Medical AI will empower your clinic with all of the above: our EMR natively supports and automates WhatsApp communications. Our AI chatbot is always available to provide detailed, branch-specific information the help patients access the clinic's premises. Patients that always arrive late are automatically tagged as such, and our chatbot will push to schedule them at times that are less busy to reduce their impact.
4. Key patient demographics
Understanding who your patients are and what niche your clinic is tapping into is crucial to your marketing efforts. When running a marketing campaign, you are looking to spend money, but that has to transform into real appointments.
This means you must target the right demographics, with ads that appeal to their specific culture, age-group, gender, language, etc...
Consider the demographics of the dental clinic we are studying here:
Age, gender and nationality should always be your starting points. Here, we see that this clinic is particularly popular with women aged 30-39, with a lot of appeal from Egypt, Morocco, and UAE locals.
Noticeably, all three are Arabic speakers. A good idea for a marketing campaign would be to target such demographics with an Arabic ad. For this clinic (which is oriented towards esthetics), "befores and afters" featuring female clients are a good idea.
Without studying your demographics, you'll never know who your clinic actually appeals to, and therefore what leads are the cheapest to acquire. Demographics have a huge depth, and can be looked at from many dimensions.
Consider this heatmap of age groups broken down by nationality:
We already had a good intuition in targeting women of 3 nationalities for this clinic. Using this heatmap, we can narrow down our targeted ad campaign even more. Our final demographics could be: UAE locals and Egyptians aged 20-49, and Moroccans aged 20-39, women only.
There are many more dimensions to demographics that must be considered to achieve the best results for your clinic. The first step is to visualize them.
Oryx Medical AI studies your demographics from many more angles than we've shown here (above are just a few examples). Our system will dig deep into your clinic's data to narrow your demographics down to the type of services that are more popular, or will identify that a certain doctor has an affinity with a certain demographic, amongst other tricks.
5. New vs Returning patients
A good clinic must have a good mix of new and returning patients. Having returning patients means you are providing a good service, and a patient is interested in continuing their treatment with you. But having few new patients means that in a few weeks or months, once ongoing treatments finish, your clinic will suffer.
Consider these charts of new and returning patients for the dental clinic we are studying:
We see a healthy mix overall. By observing these statistics, this clinic knew in June they were getting fewer new patients, which made them run an ad campaign.
In July, they had a reduction in returning patients, so they ran an email campaign with their existing patients to update them on their treatment progress and remind them to book an appointment.
Good ways to keep a good New VS Returning patient mix:
- When new patients decrease, run a targeted ad campaign (using the right demographics as seen previously)
- When returning patients decrease, run an email campaign for patients with ongoing treatments
- Always follow-up on patients cancellations or no-shows (with a WhatsApp message, preferably)
- After doing a procedure on a patient, always schedule a series of follow-up emails 1 week, 2 weeks, and 1 month if they don't book a new appointment
- Assign patients to doctors they have a high affinity with: UAE locals with an Arabic speaker, young patients with young doctors, etc... (demographic statistics can help you as seen in [5])
- Connect with your patients on Instagram so they keep seeing your content, which keeps you top of mind
Oryx Medical AI computes these statistics for you and advises you on what you need to do in realtime to maintain a good New/Returning patient mix. Our automated AI chatbot always makes sure to follow-up at the optimal time with patients throughout their treatment, in case of no-shows, and in many other situations to help boost your clinic's numbers continuously and without effort.
6. Appointment volume by time slot
Staffing your clinic is expensive, so it's important to know when things get busy and when staff would otherwise remain idle in the absence of patients. To keep costs low without impacting the patient experience, it's important to understand at what times you need an extra receptionist, if you need an extra nurse in the afternoons only, and on what days of the week you should get an extra part-time doctor.
Consider this heatmap of appointment density per day and hour of the day:
This heatmap tells us when the clinic tends to be busy.
We notice:
- Obviously, the clinic is closed on Friday
- Sunday is the busiest day, and can use extra staffing
- Early mornings are less busy, so lengthy procedures or reliable patients may be booked at those times (see what we previously discussed in [2])
- Late afternoons are less busy, meaning a share of the staff may be under contract on fewer hours without too much impact
- Mid-day to 2pm is busier, so it's important to add some padding to appointments to prevent a runaway schedule
Oryx Medical AI has many more statistics of the sort that can help you deploy assets more efficiently, across time (weekday, hour, etc...) and space (room utilization, equipment utilization, etc...). If you're interested in optimizing your clinic using deep statistics, Oryx Medical AI has the most comprehensive toolbox available.
7. Patient revenue and categories
Understanding what makes money is understanding your clinic's identity. For most clinics, revenue is driven by patients that enjoy a small subset of services.
We observe across Oryx Medical AI clients that the clinics that perform the best are the ones that are able to target a certain niche of medical services, and dig deep into such niche.
This clinic we showcase in these statistics is particularly efficient in cosmetic dentistry, and their statistics show that:
The value of this breakdown goes beyond simply knowing which procedures generate the most revenue. By comparing revenue across procedures, categories, and patients, a clinic can identify its strongest areas, understand where demand is coming from, and make better decisions about where to invest its time, marketing, and resources.
In this example, the clinic’s strong performance in cosmetic dentistry provides a clear opportunity to further develop and promote this area rather than spreading its efforts evenly across every service.
Oryx Medical AI turns these insights into actionable statistics, helping clinics identify their most profitable procedures and categories, track how they evolve over time, and uncover opportunities for growth. Instead of relying on intuition, clinic owners can use their own data to decide which services to promote, which specialties to develop, and where to focus their growth strategy.
Conclusion
We've only scratched the surface of what your clinic's own data can be an absolute goldmine when it comes to growing your business.
Once again, Dubai is a competitive market. Even a commercially successfully clinic cannot afford inefficiencies. Tomorrow, a new competitor may target your niche very effectively, or beat you on price because their costs are much more optimized.
Using statistics in your practice can help you market better, operate faster, increase patient satisfaction, and therefore simply cannot be ignored.
How Oryx handles it
Computing deep statistics is something most EMRs already don't do. Interpreting them and taking automated action is something only Oryx Medical AI is capable of.
In this article, we've already shared very valuable visualizations, but that's not even 10% of what Oryx can do for your business.
One small example is that some AI Chatbots exist on the market, but are only trained in simple appointment booking. Oryx Medical AI communicates with your patients via WhatsApp and utilizes data about your clinic to advise the right appointment times, with the right doctors (amongst many other variables) to optimize scheduling, maximize patient satisfaction, and minimize costs. This is something only an AI-powered EMR can do.
Our team has a background in healthcare and investment banking, meaning clinics and statistics is what we know best.
If you're evaluating EMR software in Dubai, Oryx Medical AI can help you run a data-driven clinic by making the most of your data.
So if you're looking for a compliant, easy-to-use EMR that can do all of this for you, do reach out to our team!