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922: Metric Mondays: Recaptured Percentage – Miranda Beeson

You can’t recapture 100% of your cancellations — but you can get 80% or more! In this episode, Kirk Behrendt brings back Miranda Beeson, ACT’s director of education, to break down recaptured percentage, how to track it, and ways to create a strong system to increase reappointment. To learn the secrets for actively rescheduling patients, listen to Episode 922 of The Best Practices Show!

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Main Takeaways:

  • Aim to recapture 80% or more of your cancellations.
  • Create a script to help your team reappoint cancellations on the spot.
  • Track cancellations in real time and follow up with patients on the same day.
  • Strengthen your verbal skills. Don't just tell patients to, “Call us when you're ready.”
  • Build an active follow-up system. Contact patients within a day or two of a cancellation.

Quotes:

“When someone cancels and they don't reschedule, that means they go into our follow-up system. That means they go into our hygiene recare follow-up system, or perhaps our unscheduled patient list. That means time, effort, energy, money by way of the practice and the team to try to recapture them later. So, this metric of recaptured percentage is the percentage of canceled appointments that are rescheduled or recaptured right away. This is another one that — we talked last time about making sure you use your practice management software appropriately to break the appointments in order for them to be tracked appropriately and measured as cancellations. You have to do the same thing in order for the recapture percentage to be accurate.” (2:27—3:11) -Miranda

“[Recaptured percentage] is going to tell us how effective our team is at saving lost time and keeping patients engaged in their care when they break those appointments. But if we don't do it properly by way of how our practice management software requires us to do it, to log it on the backside of their programming, this metric is going to be harder to find. What we do find often with coaching clients, this shows up in Dental Intel. But a lot of times, it's not accurate. We'll find out later it's because the team isn't necessarily breaking, canceling, and rescheduling the way that the software needs you to. So, that's a key element right off the top that we need to make sure we mention in order for this to be accurate. If you don't have that in your software, you can do it manually. It's just way more labor intensive to have to track it manually.” (3:12—3:59) -Miranda

“Strong practices are going to aim to recapture 70% to 80% of their cancellations. I have really high expectations, so you’d better be at 80% or higher — because if we have systems in place, we can. So, that benchmark of at least 70% to 80% of the people that cancel, we want them back in the schedule. Now, you're probably not going to be at 100% because sometimes people are canceling because they're leaving the practice, or sometimes they're canceling and we've identified that they're not a right fit for our practice, so we're not rescheduling them. So, 100% is lofty, if not unrealistic. Seventy to 80% means you're doing pretty well.” (4:51—5:25) -Miranda

“When we're in that high recapture rate range, we're reducing the impact of cancellations on production, on our provider utilization, and also on our administrative team, like you said, exhausting themselves trying to recover that time. Those low recapture rates, if we're below that percentage, if only 50% or 40% or 30% of our cancellations reschedule in the moment and we recapture them, that's going to lead to holes in the schedule, lost revenue, and our shrinking active patient base, because even if you're getting new patients, 20, 30 of them a month, if we're not rescheduling patients when they're canceling, they're going to end up inactive and our net growth of patients will be down. So, we will, over time, continue to have attrition in our patient base. [Low recapture rates] impact hygiene retention. It impacts patient care by way of the patients are not going to now be within that desirable customized routine program of care or schedule of care. It might end up being that they don't finish treatment because it was a treatment appointment that they were canceling, and then we didn't recapture that appointment. And now, they're just floating out there because they fell through the cracks with unfinished care. So, it does impact patient outcomes. A really strong recapture system is going to increase predictability in your schedule. It's going to protect the momentum of production and the goals, and get you where you want to go profitability-wise throughout the year as well.” (5:26—6:50) -Miranda

“When [recaptured percentage] is going well in a practice, cancellations are tracked in real-time. Those cancellations are processed appropriately through the practice management software, and the team starts to follow up same-day, and/or they have systems in place for how to recapture before they even get off the phone. The verbal skills are aligned to reinforce the importance of rescheduling rather than leaving it open-ended. For example, if someone is sick, a lot of times, what we'll hear when we're in a practice is, ‘Oh my goodness, Mrs. Jones. I'm so sorry. You feel better. Give us a call back when you're feeling better, and we'll get you scheduled.’ But instead, you could encourage the team member to say, ‘I'm really sorry, Mrs. Jones. I hate that you're not feeling well. We hope you feel better fast. Let's do this. Let's move your appointment about four weeks out to give you enough time to recover. Do you prefer Tuesday mornings, or do you prefer Thursday afternoons?’ That way, we are recapturing that appointment right away, but we're also being empathetic and giving Mrs. Jones plenty of time to recover from the tummy bug or whatever it is that she woke up with that morning.” (7:12—8:18) -Miranda

“If you're doing this well, the schedule is going to stay full despite that natural churn of cancellations. Again, you're never going to have 100%. A bit of your patients are going to cancel. It's going to happen, always. But if you're doing really well with recapturing patients, it's going to help to support the amount of energy that has to go into recovering from that natural churn, and production is going to be more steady and consistent.” (8:19—8:46) -Miranda

“If it's not going well, if [your recaptured percentage is] below 70%, that tells me as a coach that cancellations are probably not being tracked. We're probably leaning a lot more into our feelings, like, ‘I feel like everybody is worried about the recession right now,’ or, ‘Everybody that's calling us is sick right now.’ I actually did that with a team not too long ago. I said, ‘I want you to actually draw a table on a piece of paper that lists out the top five reasons that people typically cancel, and I want the person who's answering the phone to put a hash mark next to the reason for this whole week.’ It really only ended up being about 30% of people who were sick. But the feeling that everybody in the practice had was like, ‘Everybody is sick right now. There's nothing we can do.’ What we saw was 70% of those cancellations weren't unavoidable illnesses. They were other things. So, again, it helps us to look outside of feelings.” (8:49—9:40) -Miranda

“When [recaptured percentage is] not going well, we're probably not tracking it, or we’re leaning into our feelings. There's probably no system, no language that we've aligned around on how we answer the objection of a cancellation. A lot of times, patients are just told, ‘Call us back when you're ready. No problem,’ or we don't say anything at all. We just say, ‘Okay, sounds good. I'm going to take you off the schedule. Have a great day.’ That's the worst of it all. But we hear it. The team is constantly fighting holes. The doctor is in their office, stressed out, not wanting to have to go up there and ask again about why there are so many holes in the schedule. They feel that anxiety because it does impact production. So, over time, it's going to lead to issues with production and issues with profitability. It's going to result in patients not having that consistency of care. It'll impact their health in the long run. Then, again, our patient base is going to slowly attrit to where we don't perhaps even have enough active patients to really support the practice anymore. So, it is really important that we're making sure we have systems in place to manage this.” (9:40—10:43) -Miranda

“If you can't find this data, or perhaps you have Dental Intel and you look in there and there's inconsistent data or no data, step number one is we need to get on with our customer support with our practice management software and learn the steps for how to break appointments and recapture them appropriately so you can start having accurate data. Once you do have that data, if it's not where you want it to be, a couple of simple things. One, develop a loose script to help your team manage cancellations and ensure that they're reappointing in the moment. Again, using that reinforcement of value-building language. We talked about that in the last couple of podcasts on Metric Mondays, making sure that we're using that value-building language. Again, like the example I gave earlier, are they just saying, ‘Okay, no problem. Call us when you feel better,’ or can we write into our system a bit of a loose script or a few ways in which we could say that differently that would guide the patient to going ahead and recapturing or reappointing in the moment? A little verbal tip. I really love using the language, “customized program of care” instead of like, “due for”. ‘Well, I’d really hate for you to not reschedule because you're due now.’ That's very different than explaining that, ‘Your hygienist, Miranda, has customized this program of care for you based on your needs. So, I’d really hate for you to fall behind. Let's go ahead and take a look at something three or four weeks from now and reappoint and reserve some new time for you.’” (12:11—13:40) -Miranda

“Have an active follow-up system. So, if you're not able to recapture in the moment, we do want to make sure that we're doing some follow-up so that they don't end up six, seven, eight, nine, 18 months down the line and they still haven't made it back into the schedule. So, having a follow-up system — calls, texts, verbal outreach — that within 24 to 48 hours of that cancellation, we’re able to speak directly to that patient and offer them the opportunity to recapture and recover that time.” (13:47—14:13) -Miranda

Snippets:

0:00 Introduction.

1:48 Recaptured percentage, explained.

4:40 How this percentage impacts your practice.

6:51 What it looks like when recaptured percentage is high.

8:47 What it looks like when recaptured percentage is low.

11:47 Countermeasures.

14:13 Join ACT’s BPA.

Miranda Beeson, MS, BSDH Bio:

Miranda Beeson has over 25 years of clinical dental hygiene, front office, practice administration, and speaking experience. She is enthusiastic about communication and loves helping others find the power that words can bring to their patient interactions and practice dynamics. As a Lead Practice Coach, she is driven to create opportunities to find value in experiences and cultivate new approaches.

Miranda graduated from Old Dominion University, and enjoys spending time with her husband, Chuck, and her children, Trent, Mallory, and Cassidy. Family time is the best time, and is often spent on a golf course, a volleyball court, or spending the day boating at the beach.
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