Do you know what your patients are thinking?

To introduce today’s discussion, a story for you (some names and irrelevant facts have been changed to protect the innocent).  Some time ago, I visited a dental office for a cleaning.  The service there was less than spectacular.  To be more specific, it was terrible.  I waited at the front desk a good 5 minutes before being acknowledged by the front desk manager (apparently, there was a new LeBron meme that could not be missed).  Upon being acknowledged, I was greeted with all the enthusiasm of someone who wanted to anywhere else than in front of a paying patient. 

After an interminable wait, I was taken to the clinical area by another person not in the mood to be at work.  Not rude, mind you, but just a tone of communication that conveyed something between boredom and “when it is quitting time?”  By contrast, the doctor was extremely friendly, helpful and, to the best of my knowledge, very technically skilled.  But before getting to that person, I had to wade through a phalanx of folks who simply did not care about the happiness of the patient.

Some time later, the dentist, struggling with growth, asked me for some help.  One of the first questions that I asked was, “What do you think of the way your staff treats patients?”  Her response was, “We do very well in that area.”  Now, the visit I made may have come on a bad day, but follow up discussions confirmed that there were lots of bad days around there.

Getting patients to show up: the scheduling solution

We’ve discussed the importance of shortening the time from patient call to appointment in order to improve the rate at which patients show up for appointments.  Without requiring you to read the whole article, let me give you a quick summary.  The prime opportunity to get to show up for a new patient appointment comes within the first 7 days after the call.  After the first 7 days, the chances for a patient to show up fall off and after 14 days, the show up percentage drops precipitously. 

As some evidence of this, I’d like to present the case of an office in a city that shall remain nameless, but is within spitting distance of the happiest place on earth.  In 2013, the office had patients showing up at a nice rate: 72%.  In other words, of every 10 patients that made a new patient appointment, more than 7 of them actually showed up for that appointment.  On average, patients waited 10 days from the time of call to their appointment.  Not a bad rate at all.

In February of this year, things changed.  The show up rate fell from 72% to 50%.  The average wait time from call to appointment ballooned to 25 days.  Of the 148 consultations appointed, 98 of those patients had to wait at least 3 weeks for an appointment.  In this “now” society, 3 weeks leaves plenty of time for a patient to find another option or to fill up their schedule so that a new patient consultation gets pushed back.  Clearly, a result of the drop in show up rate, new patient closings fell off as well.  What happened?