6 ways to reduce cancellations and broken dental appointments

[Anonymous]

Even an effective dental patient scheduling system will not maximize practice productivity if too many patients fail to keep their appointments. When a patient doesn’t show up or cancels at the last minute, your practice suffers from unproductive gaps and lost income that can never be replaced.

Although this problem is not new, it has grown in recent years due to the slow recovery of the economy. Fortunately, there are several techniques you can use to “retrain” patients, reducing the number of missed appointments and minimizing their impact on the practice schedule and revenue:

1. Build value for all appointments. If patients value dental appointments, they will be much more likely to keep them. There are several ways to build value with excellent scripting … from the very first conversation with a new patient … to the confirmation call 48 hours before the appointment … to the enthusiastic welcome when the patient arrives on time. Reinforce the importance of appointments by building value for the doctor and team, and for their clinical skills.

2. Initiate a six-month patient retraining system. The first time a patient fails to show, call immediately to inquire if everything is all right (the implication being that something must be very wrong for the patient to miss such a valuable appointment). Whatever the reason, be sympathetic but indicate that unfortunately there are no openings in the schedule for 10 to 12 weeks, but they will be put at the top of the short list in case something opens up. Let a few days go by before calling back to offer an opening that is at least 10 days away. This training may be sufficient.

3. Deal with a second failure to show in six months. If the first retraining technique does not prevent the patient from again breaking an appointment, move to the next level. Point out that practice policy is to charge for missed appointments, but that the doctor requested the fee be waived in this case.

4. Permanently short-list the chronic latecomer. If steps 2 and 3 do not correct the behavior, the patient will continue causing scheduling problems. Realistically, the way to avoid this is to only put the patient on a short list for last-minute openings.

Conclusion

To minimize costly gaps in the practice schedule and maintain practice productivity in this tight economy, you must create and follow a step-by-step system that trains patients to value their appointments and keep their commitments to the practice.