Are you hearing “I can’t come to your office any more”?

If you don’t participate with every carrier under the sun, you may be hearing this. Did your Team get a chance to correct the perception of that PPO patient?

“I can’t come to your office anymore!” is something that I hear frequently when I contact patients who haven’t been in to an office for some time. Did the office tell them that? Of course they didn’t, but in the absence of any other information, these patients came to their own conclusions, and called another office to schedule. An office “in the book”. How could this situation have been prevented?

Maintaining regular contact with your patients may not eliminate the chances for confusion, but it will give you a better chance at keeping patients who are about to fall through your cracks.
A recall system, ANY recall system, is always better than no recall system. There are multiple outside sources, DemandForce, etc. that can be integrated with your Practice Management Software, generating email reminders and confirmation messages. This is automated and depends on your having an accurate patient database. If you don’t inactivate patients whom you know aren’t returning, you’re sending reminders to the wrong people. And likely paying for it. Getting an accurate data base is a critical component in any recall or reactivation effort.
An in-house recall system must be maintained, worked, and updated each and every day. No matter what staff turnover you have, what Practice Management Software package you use, or how busy you are, this can’t be put off till later, or its accuracy plummets. The key to any recall system is consistency. Working with it daily is just as critical for your Administrative Team as printing that Day Sheet, confirming, or checking emails and voice mail.

There are many advocates of the “They are adults, and are responsible for their own appointments” school of thought. Yes, in a perfect world, this is true. Your patients live in a world where they have more obligations than they have time. Their kids are signed up with 12 clubs, their boss has made it clear that taking time off is not going to get them any brownie points, and they haven’t had time to balance their check book in 4 months. These are your patients, by and large. Any little help you can give them, will make it more likely you will get a chance to see them on a regular basis.

Helping them is also very profitable for you. Every missed recall appointment is a lost opportunity for you. It places the distance of time between you and your Patient. What happens in that distance of time? They heard a coworker receiving a post-op call from their dentist. They knew it had been awhile, and wondered why you hadn’t called them. They forgot that they were responsible for that, because their dog’s Vet and their Eye Doctor sends them that postcard. Your patient got their benefit book and thought they couldn’t come to see you, and called the name in their book. They didn’t leave because of your dentistry, or because of the experience they had when they were in your office. They just left and nobody noticed until it was too late.

If you produce a report on patients who are due for recall, but not scheduled, and your Team indicates that the report isn’t accurate (as is very very common), it is time to do the hard work of getting it accurate. There are highly effective scripts for dealing with the conversation I mentioned in the beginning. If you don’t have the conversation in the first place, you won’t ever have an opportunity to use those scripts. Take some time to evaluate what is actually happening in your Practice- not what is supposed to happen in a perfect world, but what is happening on a regular basis. It’s just as easy for your Team to put off working with your past-due patients as it is for your patients to put off scheduling their recall. It’s not intentional neglect, but without systems in place, the distance of time just finds its way between them.

And that….is how you lose your patients, without even knowing they’ve left.