Encouraging Your Dental Patients to Keep Their Appointments

If any more than 1% of the appointments made at your dental practice are canceled last minute or result in a no-show, it’s costing your practice time and money. If this behavior is common at your dental office, you need to find a way that you can prevent it from happening as frequently.

Encouraging Patients to Keep Appointments

Below are a few ways you can help to encourage your dental patients to keep their appointments at your office:

• Educate patients – The best way to encourage your patients to keep follow-up appointments, especially for treatment of a dental problem, is to educate them about their oral health. If they know the reason for the problem, how treatment will help, and how to prevent the problem from happening again, they’re more likely to keep an appointment. Build up a relationship and rapport with your patients and they will trust you, your staff, and the diagnoses you make.
• Update technology – Consider investing in a confirmation system that will send automated phone calls, texts, or e-mail reminders to your patients in the days before their appointment. This will cut down on the number of no-shows and cancellations you get for your dental practice. Make sure to ask patients for their phone numbers and e-mails so that you have access to the for your system.
• Quickly follow-up – Lastly, following any no-show, have a member of your staff attempt to contact the patient to make sure everything is ok. If it’s the first no-show for this particular patient, you may want to consider waiving the cancellation fee as a courtesy. Call the patient back in a day or two to offer up a time slot that has “just opened up.” 

Using all of the above tactics can help to decrease the number of no-shows and cancellations you see in your dental office. Here at CTC National, we can help you reach your goals, and provide dental office training, dental coaching, and consultation to your dental office.