Six Ideas to Increase Dental Patient Recall

If you are an endodontist doing a lot of single-session root canals, patient recall may not be a prime issue for your practice. However, for most periodontists, prosthodontists, orthodontists and pediatric dentists, increasing patient recall is critical to the financial well being of their practices.

Here are six ideas you can consider using in your own dental practice to increase patients recalls:

1. Never let a patient leave your office without scheduling the next appointment.
2. Treat your patients like gold. Great customer service will help you keep your patient recall rate high.
3. Do not overlook the obvious. Use telephone calls to remind patients that their dental work is incomplete or needs follow-up.
4. Ask new patients how they prefer to be contacted. Let them indicate whether it is through e-mail, home phone, work phone, cell phone or text message and then use that method to remind patients of their appointments.
5. Recently, we have heard about prosthodontists who use CEREC (chairside economical restoration of esthetic ceramics) and are willing to guarantee their restorations for life if the patient comes in every six months for an examination. We are not sure how this is working, but the argument is that the additional revenue generated by returning patients far exceeds the cost of materials for a replacement.
6. Use software. Depending on the software package you use in your dental practice, you may be able use it to send e-mails or generate “snail mail” reminders.