Yes.  PracticeLight provides 12- and 24-month memberships for which we bill our Members in regular monthly installments.  As of July 1, 2011, we do not offer pay-as-you go monthly memberships.  Why?  There are four very good reasons:

Practice performance needs to be analyzed over the right time frame for the analysis to be credible. Experience has demonstrated that performance management and benchmarking techniques can only be effective if they’re applied consistently over an appropriate period of time.  As a practical matter, this means collecting and analyzing data—and then acting on what you’ve learned—over at least one business cycle (1 year).  A 12-month membership gives Members the opportunity to see how their clinics really perform in narrower weekly and monthly timeframes while also highlighting the seasonal ebbs and flows of their businesses across the full year.  A 24-month membership lets Members track the development of their practices and assess patterns and changes in the data over a longer period of time.

Some clinic staff may need time to get comfortable with using PracticeLight. While we do everything we can to make onboarding quick and easy for new Members, even small changes inside a practice can sometimes take longer than anyone would reasonably expect.  A 12-month membership gives Members plenty of time to become accustomed to collecting and submitting their Daily Close and Monthly Close data.  It also ensures that new Members will have enough time to gain confidence in the data and learn how to incorporate it into decision making.

Submitting practice information is part of being a PracticeLight Member. PracticeLight is here to help you make the most of your investment in private practice, and the people behind PracticeLight are here to help you make the most of your membership.  But for this to work out, every Member needs to make two small contributions to the success of the group—a modest membership fee and at least 12 months’ worth of accurate, timely performance data.  This is the beauty of shared-cost economics.  By pooling resources, our Members can each have access to decision-making tools that none could afford on their own.

PracticeLight membership allows you pay over time for immediate access to proprietary benchmarking and market pulse information. We understand that PracticeLight’s benchmarks and market information are very unique and valuable resources.  Part of the reason they’re so unique and valuable is that (1) they’re regularly updated based on both internal Member reporting and reliable external sources and (2) they’re available exclusively to our Members.  While we’re committed to making PracticeLight as financially accessible as possible (hence the monthly billing arrangement), our team feels strongly that it would be unfair to existing Members to disclose this same information to any practice owner or manager who has not made at least a 12-month membership commitment in good faith.