Practice rescue: the nightmare dissapates

So, there we were, in a beautiful, fully staffed, heavily advertised, yet almost empty, office.  And we had our data showing a 4.5% conversion rate which was heavily driven by the fact that only 20.2% of patients showed up for their appointments.

Now, when it comes to getting patients to show up for their appointments, a number of different options emerge.  Some experts will advise you to offer something to patients to entice them to show up (a gift, a chance to win something, etc.).  Others say that you shouldn’t give something away when patients should already be fulfilling commitments made to show up.  Others have specific guidance on when and how to contact patients.  As a more general rule of thumb, find a system that you think will provide the best possible customer service, implement it and monitor it.  

In this case, we simply wanted the office to have a system of some kind to follow up on consultations.  They had none.  We asked that the office take 3 simple steps:

1. Have a person with a good phone presence to call consult patients 3 days and 1 day before the appointment.  They would simply confirm whther or not the patient would be coming to the appointment, offer directions and let them know about the fall special offer that was being run (we created a fall promotion for a free whitening after the completion of orthodontic treatment).
2. If a patient could not make the appointment, find out why.
3. If a confirmed patient did not show up, call that patient up to 3 times to find out the reason that patient would be unable to make the appointment.

We asked the staff to do this consistently for 3 months and then we would reconvene.

Just with this simple process, the show up rate improved from just over 20% to 50%.  Better, but lots of room for improvement.  To get that improvement, we went through the data on why patients did not show up.  The data revealed that the patients who did not show up mostly discovered that they had a scheduling conflict at the last minute.  Some end of the day hours were added and a rescheduling program was implemented to address that.

Finally, we asked the doctors to take the attitude that any patient in need of treatment who showed up would not leave the offices unsigned.  Now, that still did not (and should not) ensure a 100% signup rate, but the office did spend time to find out why patients didn’t want to sign and then tried to overcome those objections.  If the fee was a problem, that was adjusted.  If hours were an issue, the office offered to open up extra time.  You cannot accommodate every patient, but desperate times call for, well, you know.

As a result, the office’s contracts moved into the mid to high teens on a monthly basis.  And while we still see room for improvement, the office is now profitable and able to properly compensate staff and give raises when merited.