Establish an effective patient recall strategy at your dental practice

In order to grow your dental practice, you need to focus not only on new patient acquisition but also on patient recall. What is recall? It’s your ability to keep your patients coming back after their first office visit. In order to maintain a healthy dental practice—regardless of location, size, or specialty—you need to have an effective recall system in place for your patients.

Why patient recall is so important to dentists

It can take time to establish a relationship with a patient, and build upon that trust. However, helping your patients understand the value of regular dental cleanings and encouraging them to return to you can be rewarding not only for your patient’s overall oral health but for your practice as well.

Once a patient has been entered once into your system, you want to make sure that their information doesn’t get lost in the general communications chain. If you start seeing declines in your hygiene department, soon you might see declines in the operative and restorative side of your practice as well.

So how can you take action to prevent such a decline?

How Demandforce helps you get more from your practice management system

Ask yourself this: how does your current recall system operate? Are you sending one notice and then waiting for patients to call you? According to one study from Dental Economics, only 20% of patients call the practice after they receive a notice. And even if you have your staff call patients, this system is not that much more effective, and also takes 20-40 hours a month to do for many dental practices.

If you’re looking for a more effective, efficient way to recall patients to your practice, consider Demandforce. Demandforce is a patient communications and marketing platform that reconnects with and reactivates lost patients by leveraging the data in your current PMS.

77% of Demandforce dental practices actively use the recall reminder feature – and it works!

For patients who booked appointments after receiving a reminder, 80% scheduled their appointment after only one reminder was sent (Demandforce survey, 2015).

Demandforce not only provides workflow automation tools that can have an immediate effect on the number of patients who rebook appointments with you, it also offers a high level of customization and targeting so that you make sure you’re sending the right message to the right patient, at the right time.

Demandforce’s custom recall reminders can be adjusted based on how busy your practice is, and how far out your schedule is booked. You can also rewrite any emails before you send, to create specific offers relevant to your patients.

Here are a few other features of Demandforce that help you reconnect with patients and bring them back into your practice:

  • Automated appointment reminders
  • Patient surveys
  • Ready-made newsletters
  • Custom recall messages sent via email, text, or voice call
  • Personalized emails celebrating life milestones like birthdays, we miss you campaigns, and special offer emails

To find out more about Demandforce’s patient communications solutions, visit demandforce.com or call (888) 272-7821.

  • Posted in
  • Comments are closed.