An orthopedic marketing KPI dashboard should help a practice owner or administrator make a decision: which work is complete, where enquiries progress, what evidence is missing, and what deserves attention next. Agree on the definitions behind the numbers before comparing locations, service lines, or marketing providers.
I’m Mandeep, founder of Sprout Sage Solutions. I use the public website and enquiry path to frame a scope discussion, then agree what measurement work the practice needs. My orthopedic marketing service covers that wider conversation. This guide gives you a working structure for the report.
Start with a question the dashboard can answer
Choose the business question first. You may need to understand whether a location receives suitable enquiries, whether appointment requests reach the scheduling team, or whether a service line has capacity to accept additional demand. Record the locations, services, reporting period, and decision owner.
Keep clinical suitability and treatment decisions with clinicians. Subsequent care can provide practice-approved context, but surgery rates should not become marketing targets. An attended new-patient visit is a distinct outcome, whether the clinician recommends operative care, non-operative care, or further assessment.
Define each stage and its evidence
Use separate counts for enquiry receipt, administrative qualification, booking, and attendance. Agree a unique enquiry unit and deduplication rule; rescheduled or repeated appointments must not create extra booking or attendance outcomes for the same enquiry. Define how the team handles repeat contacts, tests, spam, reschedules, and unresolved records. A change in definitions can change the reported trend even when the underlying activity is similar.
| Dashboard measure | Definition and evidence owner |
|---|---|
| Received enquiries | Unique new-patient enquiries received in the chosen period. Evidence: Intake owner reconciles call, form, and referral records. |
| Qualified enquiries | Enquiries meeting practice-defined administrative criteria. Evidence: Practice approves criteria and outcome codes. |
| Booked appointments | Qualified enquiries in the same cohort that led to at least one booked initial appointment; count one booking outcome per enquiry. Evidence: Scheduling owner verifies booking status. |
| Attended visits | Booked enquiries in that cohort whose agreed initial new-patient visit occurred; count one attendance outcome per enquiry. Evidence: Practice records owner confirms attendance. |
| Pending and unknown | Enquiries awaiting an outcome or lacking reliable information. Evidence: Administrator assigns reconciliation responsibility. |
| Enquiry-path checks | Calls and test forms reach their approved destination. Evidence: Website and intake owners verify delivery together. |
| Allocated costs | Documented spend supporting the defined scope. Evidence: Finance owner approves inclusions and allocation. |
For each rate, show the numerator and denominator alongside the percentage. For a funnel measured in unique enquiries, booking rate means qualified enquiries leading to at least one booking divided by qualified enquiries. Attendance rate means booked enquiries leading to an attended initial visit divided by booked enquiries. Apply both within the same cohort and follow-up window, and count each enquiry once at each stage. Keep those labels consistent and report a zero denominator as undefined.
Follow received cohorts through their lag window
A cohort is the group of enquiries received during a stated period. Follow that group through qualification, booking, and attendance. Comparing this month’s visits with this month’s enquiries can mix people who contacted the practice at different times.
Agree a follow-up window that reflects scheduling and the visit type. State the review date and identify cohorts that are still developing. Later appointments, reschedules, and unanswered follow-up can change the count. Compare groups with similar maturity and make any changed window visible.
Review service lines and locations separately where the records support it. An overall practice total remains useful for orientation, but local capacity and enquiry handling can differ. Use the orthopedic intake guide to examine the operational steps behind the counts.
Distinguish website measurement from practice outcomes
Google Analytics records events, and important actions can be designated as key events. Google Ads conversions serve advertising measurement and bidding purposes. Google explains the distinction in its key events and conversions guidance.
A phone-link click shows an interaction; a form event shows the configured event occurred. Neither alone confirms that the practice received a suitable enquiry or that a patient attended. Test the route and reconcile aggregate outcomes with approved practice records before labelling them as appointments.
Keep a record of tracking changes, broken routes, and missing periods. An apparent improvement may reflect repaired measurement. Show what changed so the owner can distinguish better visibility into the process from a change in actual demand.
Keep sources, overlaps, and costs interpretable
A referring clinician can recommend a surgeon, and the patient can then search online before calling. Preserve the reported referral source and the observed digital source as separate evidence. Use an unknown category when the source cannot be established.
Google describes attribution as assigning credit across interactions in its attribution guidance. Your dashboard should state its source rules and relevant settings. Attribution credit does not establish how many additional patients a campaign caused.
When reporting acquisition cost, state whether the spending includes agency work, media, software, projects, and internal coordination. Document shared-cost allocation and count outcomes once within the combined total. The orthopedic acquisition cost worksheet helps define the cohort and cost basis before calculating ratios.
A blank measurement worksheet
Complete this record for each priority measure. Use aggregate figures from approved systems and leave unavailable information marked as unknown.
| Field | Practice entry |
|---|---|
| Business question and decision owner | ________________ |
| Location, service line, and source grouping | ________________ |
| Metric definition, numerator, and denominator | ________________ |
| Received cohort period | ________________ |
| Lag window, review date, and maturity | ________________ |
| Received / qualified / booked / attended counts | ________________ |
| Duplicates, pending records, and unknown outcomes | ________________ |
| Measurement system and reconciliation owner | ________________ |
| Source uncertainty and overlapping influences | ________________ |
| Costs included and allocation method | ________________ |
| Tracking or definition changes | ________________ |
| Next action, responsible person, and review point | ________________ |
Turn the report into an accountable review
Agree a review cadence around the decisions and the maturity of the evidence. Bring the administrator, intake owner, marketing lead, and finance owner into the relevant discussion. Ask what changed, how reliable the comparison is, and which explanation needs investigation.
Before changing spend, examine capacity, routing, response handling, source mix, and measurement gaps. Record the next action and its owner. A small cohort needs its actual counts beside the ratio; an incomplete cohort needs its limitations stated.
Document the agency’s reporting deliverables, approved access, account ownership, and handover arrangements in the proposal. Keep patient records and identifiable clinical details out of marketing enquiries and advertising reports. The practice decides what aggregate information and access are appropriate.
Discuss your practice’s reporting scope
Share your public website, role, locations, priority service lines, and the decision your current report cannot support. I can review the public enquiry path and discuss possible measurement work. Fees, deliverables, responsibilities, and access terms are agreed privately in a written proposal.
