It’s getting a little drafty in your practice when you leave the back door wide open for patients to slip out and go out and find a new dental home. I think sometimes dental practices focus so much energy on bringing in new patients that they forget to cultivate the relationship with their current patients. Your Dentrix software is the tool to help you find your patients who are not scheduled, then it is up to you to do what it takes to get them scheduled, build better communication, and give patients the accessibility they are craving.
Every office will have natural patient attrition because they move out of town or die. Sorry if that sounds rude, but it’s true. The issue we need to tackle is when the patient attrition starts to creep above 10% or we could look at patient retention dipping below 90%. So, my question to all of you is . . . . What is your patient retention percentage?
The first thing I want to identify in this second quarter of 2022 is where is your practice currently when it comes to retaining active patients and how can that be improved. Before we walk down the path too far, I want to lay out for you the topics that we will be taking a deeper dive into as we move through Q2. Here are the top three conversations we are going to be discussing over the next few months . . .
- How to calculate your current patient retention and how it stacks up to the dental industry average. Since you are using Dentrix software I am going to walk you through how to identify this key number so you and your team can monitor it on a regular basis. I would recommend adding this conversation to your regular monthly numbers meeting and see if you can celebrate your patient retention or if you need to tweak your systems.
- What can you do in your schedule to make sure you have enough room in your schedule to take care of patients of record? If you are booking patients out too far in the schedule or you cannot accommodate new patients for perio therapy, then we need to take a look at adding or tweaking appointment book protocol.
- Is it easy for your patients to update their health history, look up their future appointments, or message the office? Patients these days want immediate and personalized service. Together, we will look at solutions that will fulfill that need and help you increase your patient retention.
I look forward to helping you discover ways to close that back door . . . at least to just a small crack 😊
