New patients are not scheduling appointments.
Without question, if a practice fails, this is most often the reason. If you are awash in new patient activity and not making money, there are a number of relatively uncomplicated solutions to that. If people simply are not interested, that’s a much bigger challenge. This is almost entirely a marketing issue. How is the practice marketing? How much is it spending? What is the competition doing? These are all questions any owner should constantly ask themselves and review.
Whatever marketing path you choose – visits to referrers, internet-based ads, school marketing, etc. – you must determine what is working. There are a number of methods to split out marketing types to see what might be effective. As one example, you can put a different link or phone number on each of your Facebook and TikTok ads. All of the links and numbers lead back to the same place, but you can look at the results for the originating numbers/links to see what looks effective. Adding multiple phone numbers and links are usually free so there’s no cost other than your time to set them up.
Additionally, you can ask the patient at the first appointment how they heard about you. You can assign identifying numbers to flyers and hand out those flyers to their numbered group to see which ones get mentioned or returned most.
There are many more methods, but any practice must beware of conflating information. A patient may hear your practice name at a school function and then Google your practice name to get the information. When you ask where the patient heard about your practice, that person might respond “oh, I looked you up online.” However, that is not entirely accurate. Any method can be subject to these factors, but as with anything, you want to do as much as possible to filter out the noise to see exactly what works.
One method that almost never works: hoping. Opening the doors and hoping that people will just find you is the best way to have those doors close forever in a short period of time.
Appointments get scheduled, but those new patients do not show up
For me, this is the one of the worst feelings in any practice. The schedule is full with new patients. In fact, things are looking so busy that you hit up the local temp agency for some extra help on that day so you can accommodate everyone. Then, a tiny percentage (as low as 0%) of those people show up. Not only have you not gotten the revenue you had hoped for, but you’ve incurred extra cost and possibly crammed out new patients who might have been serious about visiting. On top of that, the deflation of expecting a big day and getting a disaster can linger emotionally with even the strongest of personalities.
What happened? In our business, one of the things we see frequently is that the patient, not the responsible party, schedules the appointment without first notifying the person tasked with driving to appointments and paying for treatment. That responsible party isn’t ready to start or the appointment conflicts with a work/school schedule. So, rather than go through the hassle of cancelling or rescheduling, they don’t show. The practice hasn’t charged the patient for anything yet, so no harm, no foul.
Practices have responded by doing things like requesting a payment at the time the appointment is scheduled. That may help with no-shows, but it tends to shift the decision window into the “not even scheduling” phase.
Whatever the decision, one part of this process is critical: a practice must attempt to communicate with the responsible party prior to the appointment. The exact nature of the discussion varies wildly, but at the least, the caller should try to gather basic contact information and find out the person’s reason for coming in. With that, a minimally perceptive person can gauge how serious the patient is about visiting the office. If your practice tries to communicate multiple times with no response on any channel, that’s a major red flag.
Patients schedule appointments, show up, but do not need treatment
This point goes beyond treatment decisions that are made by the doctors (more on that later). In any practice, the doctor is entrusted to ensure that they do not put braces on a patient with serious periodontal problems, for example.
Rather, the patients that show up are not at all a fit for the practice. This includes things like adults showing up to a pediatric dentist or patients looking for a cleaning at an orthodontic practice. The issue here almost always relates to a lack of communication. As noted in the bullet point above, if you had some information on what the patient was looking for beforehand, the practice can avoid wasting everyone’s time. In the case of the patient looking for a cleaning, the staff person has the opportunity to immediately refer that person to a dentist and build some goodwill with the doctor receiving the referral.
With regard to the doctor’s treatment recommendations, one can always evaluate trends and outliers. Here’s an example. In a group of orthodontic offices we had in Philadelphia, 8% of new patients were referred out to a dentist, periodontist, etc. for further evaluation before starting treatment. In the Pittsburgh area, the doctor referred out closer to 20% of new patients. Are the profiles of patients in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh so different that 3x the number of patients in Pittsburgh would have to be referred out. Eagles and Steelers fans would have their opinions on this, but in general the answer is no. We should see no significant difference between the two groups. Smaller practices can compare themselves against their peers. In any case, further investigation is warranted here to determine exactly why treatment recommendations may differ so wildly
Patients are scheduling, showing up, need treatment, but elect not to start with the practice
This falls completely into the realm of selling and value. Any search will produce courses upon courses preaching on this subject, but the primarily question remains this: does the practice offer something of value, and can the practice effectively communicate that?
Having trouble with acquiring new patients? We can help. Some services charge as much as $10,000 for an introductory definition. We charge $0. To get started, e-mail us at marshmallow@adbmgmt.com