Most practices think about revenue in terms of production. Chairs filled, procedures scheduled, insurance claims submitted.
But there’s a different number worth thinking about. It’s not a production goal. It’s a membership number. And once you do the math, it tends to stick.
Start with 100. If your practice has 100 active membership plan members paying $35 a month, that’s $3,500 in monthly recurring revenue. Every month. Without a new patient acquisition campaign, without a big case closing, without chasing insurance reimbursements. That’s $42,000 a year sitting in your patient base, waiting to be structured.
Now consider that most practices already have the patients who would make those 100 members. They’re in your system right now. They’re the patients who come in for a cleaning and pay out of pocket. The ones who lost insurance when they changed jobs. The retirees who aged off their spouse’s plan. The self-employed patients who never had coverage at all. These patients already trust your practice. They just don’t have a structured reason to keep coming back with the same consistency that an insured patient does.
That’s where the math starts to matter. Membership patients behave differently. Practices using DentalHQ see case acceptance rates above 70% among members, and retention rates above 90%. Those aren’t software metrics. They’re what happens when a patient understands their cost, feels a sense of commitment to the practice, and doesn’t have an insurance company making decisions between them and their provider. When you remove the confusion, patients say yes more often. And they come back.
The 100-member milestone also tends to be a turning point for how practices think about growth. Before it, the membership plan feels like one of several things the front desk is trying to remember to mention. After it, it starts to feel like infrastructure. Practices begin to see their recurring revenue line as something distinct from their production number — something that shows up reliably, month after month, regardless of how many open hygiene slots are on the schedule that week. That shift in how a team thinks about revenue is hard to put a dollar value on. But it’s real.
For practices already running a plan on DentalHQ, this is a useful moment to ask: where are you in that growth arc? If you’ve crossed 100 members, what would 150 look like? If you haven’t reached 100 yet, what’s getting in the way? Sometimes it’s enrollment friction. Sometimes it’s inconsistent team conversations. Sometimes it’s a plan structure that hasn’t been revisited in a while. The answer matters, because the math only works when the plan is actually growing.
One hundred members is a simple number. But it has a way of making the case for membership plans better than almost anything else. It’s concrete. It’s achievable. And for most practices, it’s closer than it looks.
Your Success Team can help you look at where your plan stands today and identify what it would take to hit — or build on — that 100-member mark. If you’d like to talk through your growth strategy, book some time and let’s map it out.