It’s easy to look at your number of active patients and think you’re doing well, but the reality may be different, because of one metric: Unscheduled Active Patients. It measures the number of active patients who do not have a future appointment scheduled, and its impact is powerful!
We recommend having between 1,200 and 1,500 active patients per full-time provider, so if 50% are unscheduled, you’re only looking at 600 to 750 active patients, which signals some problems:
- Gaps in your schedule
- Lost revenue
- Missed opportunities for preventative care
It also artificially inflates your active patient value, because they are included in your active patient count, yet are not tethered to your practice. Furthermore, leaving patients unscheduled impacts their health, because 40% of patients who do not make follow-up appointments never come back, meaning that any issues they have will continue to progress.
Reducing your number of unscheduled patients is crucial to a healthy practice, and you can get started today by using these strategies:
- Ensure your team is aligned on the expectation to pre-schedule patients for their next visit.
- Align around using value-building language when discussing patients’ next visits.
- Incorporate proactive follow-up systems as part of your daily and weekly checklists.
- Focus on systems for recapturing unscheduled hygiene patients, unscheduled treatment, unscheduled new patients, and patients at risk of going inactive.
The strategy is twofold: pre-schedule patients to prevent them from becoming unscheduled, and create an outreach system that’s personalized and nurturing to bring as many unscheduled patients back to the schedule as you can.
Making this change starts with awareness, so look at your active patient count and calculate how many are unscheduled. If you’re unhappy with the number, implement countermeasures and watch your practice turn around!
