Using the system in this article will help you increase production, improve patient care, save time & engineer success for your practice.
Greg Mahoney at Mahoney Family Dental has told us, "For the last 7 weeks, we have averaged 20 reactivated patients". This equates to $84,000 of annual collections added every month!
Get similar results by using the suggestions below!
Follow Ups
The first place to start is Follow Ups. Your follow up list is the highest priority list of unscheduled treatment. The best time to schedule patients for their treatment is when they are in the practice, and in front of you. If the patients don't schedule, the Follow Ups help you keep track of their progress once they leave your practice.
These patients represent those patients that may have left without scheduling and you created a follow up to contact them or had an agreement to call and get them scheduled. If you want to learn more about the follow ups, how to turn the automated follow ups on, etc, watch these two videos:
This alone is what the most successful dental practices are doing - this acts as their unscheduled treatment list.
Performance Board
Unscheduled Patients Metric
Maybe you have called through your follow ups, where can you go now? The Unscheduled Patients Metric found on your Performance Board will help you identify your active patient that do not have a future appointment:
Each slice of this pie chart represents patients who have completed treatment within that time frame but do not have a future appointment scheduled (example: 0-6 months will include patients who completed treatment in the last 6 months but are unscheduled). Once you click on any of the slices of pie, a list of your patients will be revealed.
You can sort the last column to see the highest dollar treatment plan and it will descend to the lowest. These patients might have active follow ups that you and your team are working on. This list helps to identify patients that may have slipped through the cracks.
Restorative/Elective Case
The next place to identify unscheduled treatment is your Restorative/Elective Case metric details:
This is a great place to double check and identify your unscheduled treatment. We recommend that you view this every day because you will find patients that scheduled their hygiene appointment, so they won't show up on the Recare Metric, but did not schedule their treatment. For example, this patient:
You can see once you click on the patients name that her next hygiene appointment is 8/8/2022 but she has $1,584 of unscheduled treatment! The question now becomes: do we want to wait for the hygiene appointment to schedule the patient for their treatment? The answer is NO!
These are great ways to identify your patients that have unscheduled treatment. Once you have identified them, make sure you are using your follow ups to increase your odds of reaching them and scheduling them. You can see how this goes full circle.
Now that we have identified the three areas where your patients and treatment will get lost, using the follow ups and being proactive by tracking patient opportunity , you are setting yourself up for success!