Your schedule must reflect the requirements of your active patient base. Working 4 days per week with 1,000 or more patients will result in a strong schedule, but a significantly underperforming practice.

Hugely overlooked schedule/provider capacity can appear to be a complicated topic. It isn’t, in fact it’s straightforward. Ask yourself a couple of simple questions:

• How many ‘active’ patients do you have?
• What percentage of the patient base are adult?
• What percentage of the patients are healthy (prophy)?
• How many new patients do you expect to see in a month?

example:

active patients: 1,000

adult patients: 90%

• 900 active adult patients

healthy patients: 75%

• 675 patients require 2 prophys = 1,350 visits
• 225 patients require 4 perio maintenances = 900 visits
• 2,250 visits. Patients aren’t 100% compliant, so factor 80% = 1,800

new patients: 20 per month = 240 appointments

SRPs diagnosed on 5% of patients probed = 110 patients/440 quads of SRP = 220 appointments

• total appointments required = 2,260 or 188 per month

@ 8 hygiene appointments scheduled per hygienist:

• Minimum Capacity = 24 hygiene days per month
• (Factoring no-shows at one per day, then 28 days would be required)

Never underestimate the importance of the telephone in your office. In particular when, and how you use it to maintain contact with your patients. The schedule is not a mystical manifestation.

There are a lot of email & text solutions on the market, if they work for you it’s probably because you have too little capacity on your schedule. If your staff really like these solutions, it’s because they don’t enjoy calling the patients.

The strength of the schedule really needs to be one person’s responsibility and you must make sure they have enough time to be able stay on top it.

We love Confirmation, never seen an office with a strong confirmation system that didn’t perform well. A schedule can look strong, but it really isn’t until it has been confirmed. Starting to confirm the schedule one week out is essential as you really want to remove anyone from the schedule that won’t be able to make their appointment as early as possible so that you have time to fill it. A staggering amount of offices don’t really try to confirm their schedule until a day or two before and unsurprisingly they never get to fill the lost appointments.

You need a strong and robust structure for your confirmation system, address these key points:

• When do you make your first call to confirm an appointment?
• How long do you wait for the patient to respond to a left message?
• What do you do if the patient doesn’t respond to the follow up call?
• Do you remind patients of their appointment after it has been confirmed?
• Who do you exclude from confirmation calls?
• What time of day do you call?
• How do you use email & text?
• What is your goal?

If you have managed to provide a decent amount of capacity on your schedule and you are working hard on your confirmation you will have a number of openings on your schedule.

You can look at Recall & Reactivation as a necessity to fill these empty appointments, we look at this differently. Having the right capacity and a strong confirmation system creates the space you require to find appointments for patients you bring in through your Recall & Reactivation efforts.

We recommend putting the patients that are overdue and need to be called into two camps. The first group is Recall and this group are patients that are about to become due, or recently became overdue for their next hygiene appointment. The second group, Reactivation have been overdue for some time. The reason behind the split is that Recall Patients are much more likely to answer the phone and make an appointment than those on the Reactivation list and we want to optimize our calling.

To be clear, Recall & Reactivation calls should be made daily and there should be a structure to how you do this.

• Which patients do you define as being recall patients?
• Which patients do you consider needing reactivation?
• How regularly should you print recall and reactivation lists?
• How regularly should you call recall patients?
• How regularly should you call reactivation patients?
• When is the best time of day to call?
• How many calls should you make each day?
• What are you goals for calls made and appointments scheduled?

It’s a lot easier to be concise about marketing when you are not in the business of selling marketing, which I’m not. Marketing is important, new patients are important but your marketing efforts should be in line with what the practice needs and within whatever budget you have set for your practice.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What in house marketing do you do?
• What in house marketing should you be doing?
• What external marketing are you doing?
• What external marketing should you be doing?
• How would you describe your online presence?
• How do you feel about your online reputation?
• What do you expect your online presence to deliver?
• How many new patients does your practice need each month?
• How many new patients can you schedule each day, ensuring that the time you allocate allows for an impressive experience and meets the new patient’s expectations?
• How much money have you allocated for your monthly marketing spend?
• What do you think is a fair amount to spend to get a new patient in?
• Which new patients are the best kind?
• How do you value a new patient vs an existing patient?
• List the 3 strongest reasons that you can think of that would make a new patient choose your practice
• What can you offer patients that don’t have insurance?
• Social media, really? Here I am escaping my dismal reality on Fakebook, I see an ad and do what….

Hmmm, being concise isn’t quite so easy when it comes to marketing. Maybe this explains why so many Doctors look to sign up with someone to take care of it for them. But as with everything, address each area one at a time and put together a realistic affordable plan.

Internal Marketing is important. Referred patients typically spend agree to more treatment and reappoint more consistently than those generated through external marketing. They also tend to be more respectful to the practice. Which is nice.

• Let your patients know that you are always happy to welcome new patients
• Make sure the method is simple, elegant and repeatable.
• We like to use a 2-part business card with a tear off that can be handed from your patient to their acquaintance.
• You need to thank your patients when they refer someone, a card is a must and including a little something never hurts
• Having a monthly draw where both your patient and the new patient have a chance to win a gift really helps
• Your team should make this part of every encounter, within reason
• Your team should also be eligible for the thank you and the draw, their referrals are at least as important as any others
• It’s interesting to point out, that the more generous the practice is with their thank you and the draw the more successful the campaign. No shit Sherlock…

External Marketing is a gamble. Campaigns that work brilliantly for one practice deliver nothing for another. We would not suggest this is a 50/50 gamble. Our experience has seen very few successful campaigns and many failed campaigns. In the failed cases, it is generally suggested that the practice pulled out of the campaign too early for it to have gained traction…