When was the last time your team met to discuss your practice mission and goals? Everyone needs measurable goals, including your assistants, the front office scheduling coordinator, financial coordinator and the doctor. One of the largest gaps in profit and productivity can be an inconsistent scheduling and cancellations, or the loss of a portion of your active patient base. Without a constantly revolving door, you lose profit by default. It doesn’t have to be this way. By learning how to retain dental patients through effective scheduling and cancellation management, you can better provide the care and treatment of every person who walks through your office.

Patient cancellations as a part of dental revenue cycle management

Let’s look at your system for cancellation prevention first. Cancellations can have a significant impact on your revenue in both the short and long term. When a patient cancels an appointment, you lose out on the opportunity to bill for that appointment slot. In addition, last-minute cancellations can disrupt the practice’s schedule and lead to lost productivity and staff morale.

To put it simply, suppose a patient cancels a hygiene recall appointment that was scheduled for an hour. In that case, you cannot bill treatments for that hour, which could result in a loss of revenue. If this happens frequently, your practice could experience a substantial decline in revenue over time. Cancellations can also create compounding scheduling problems. If a patient cancels at the last minute, it can be challenging to fill that appointment slot with potentially an entirely different type of treatment. When subject to many cancellations or no-shows, it creates scheduling inefficiencies that can impact your practice’s ability to serve patients effectively.

Strategies for how to retain dental patients

To minimize the impact of cancellations on your practice’s revenue, several strategies can be employed to streamline operations as well as establish contingencies for the inevitable:

Implementing a cancellation policy
A clear policy can help reduce the number of last-minute cancellations and no-shows. This policy should be communicated to patients when they make an appointment and be reinforced in appointment reminders. Some examples include offering at least 1 cancellation per calendar year per patient before stipulations kick in. You can also implement a fixed “missed appointment fee” equal to a flat percentage of treatment. Make sure to have your staff designate “repeat offenders” by removing them from prioritized time slots until a routine treatment schedule has been established

The boundaries of your specific cancellation policy do not need to be extraordinarily harsh, but they do need to be properly worded and explained in plain terms to patients. For extra consideration, ask patients if they have any questions about your policy before they need to use it, and give them an incentive to follow through from the first appointment. Your dental revenue cycle management depends on it.

Reminding patients of appointments
Sending reminders to patients via phone, email, or text message can help reduce the number of no-shows and last-minute cancellations. This can be an effective way to encourage patients to keep their appointments but needs to be implemented in a way that makes sense for each specific patient. If you have some patients who have a landline phone attached to their information in your PMS, you need to make sure you aren’t sending that number any text message reminders. Similarly, some patients may not want phone calls or texts at all but prefer email reminders that hit their inbox directly and allow them to set a personal reminder through their calendar software. Don’t want to worry about categorizing each and every patient on your roster? Full Schedule can help take the burden of personalized scheduling off of your plate.

Overbooking appointments
Some practices overbook appointments to ensure that they have a full schedule even if some patients cancel. While this strategy can be effective in reducing the impact of cancellations on revenue in the short term, it can also lead to longer wait times and reduced patient satisfaction. No one wants to be rushed through their treatment or feel as though their time isn’t valued. The more time that we offer to each patient, the better we can manage and plan out procedures for the next appointment. There’s no need to go nowhere fast. Instead, remove overbooking from your procedural list and take care of the essentials first.

Filling appointment slots
When a patient cancels an appointment, you should make every effort to fill that slot with another patient. This can be done by maintaining a waitlist with “VIPs”, reaching out to patients who have previously expressed interest in an appointment at that time, or offering incentives for patients who are willing to take an available slot at the last minute. Your VIP patients should all have a consistent value: they answer the phone, are willing to give up preferred time slots to rearrange things for their treatment and pay their copay upon visiting.

Your practice needs an effective retention system in place. Yet with daily tasks including insurance processing, customer service, and overhead, finding yourself unable to fully dedicate time and strategy to your recall system isn’t unheard of. If this is the case, Full Schedule is the premier solution to your needs.

How to retain dental patients and achieve peace of mind in scheduling

Full Schedule is a customizable patient recall and retention program designed to get more patients in the chair and full fill your schedule. Whether you’re wondering how to retain dental patients without spending hours on the phone or need help with how to improve patient experience in the office, Full Schedule provides you with a hands on, human approach to recall appointments and more. Your dental practice’s cash flow projection doesn’t need to be a mystery due to inefficient scheduling processes. Talk with a Business Development Specialist today about utilizing the power of Full Schedule to set your practice up for continued success in caring for your patients.