Hello I’m Jeff Palmer, founder of the Case Acceptance Academy.
What I want to go over with you today is the three statistics that you need to track when it comes to new patients.
Just about every doctor that I talk to tracks one statistic. That one statistic is new patients seen or new patients in. There’s two more statistics that you need to track. The first one is new patient calls. New patient calls is when somebody calls into the office, they respond to a web form, or you could even say somebody walks into the office. They’re calling on the office. This is an inquiry of someone that is interested in becoming a new patient. The second statistic you need to track is new patients scheduled. So how many of those people that call the office scheduled? Then the third, which you’re probably already tracking is new patients seen. Now, if you’re only tracking new patients seen, what’s going to happen is you’re going to push out advertising and you’re going to see a certain amount of new patients.
So let’s just say that ten new patients call your office but only five of those end up showing up, which is probably about average from what I see in most dental offices or health care offices. If you’re not tracking new patient calls and new patients seen, you don’t know that only 50% of the people are showing up. And if you are spending money on advertising, and it costs you two hundred ($200) to get that phone to ring, that means you just lost, you just threw away 1,000 dollars. Not to mention the amount of money that you would make if that patient showed up.
There’s an old management saying that goes “that thing which you monitor, you can manage.” You can’t manage your front desk effectively if you’re not monitoring new patient calls, new patients scheduled and new patients seen. Now, there is no fancy software system that is going to count your new patient calls. Even if you have a phone call tracking number, which you should, that counts all the calls that come in from a particular advertising medium. If you listen to those phone calls, you know that maybe 50% plus or minus of those calls are first time new patient callers. There’s only one way to know that a new patient called, and that’s the old technology of a pen and a paper and a tally mark at the front desk.
So track new patient calls, new patients scheduled, new patients seen and see where you’re at, and then you can begin to implement some tactics and strategies to improve the number of people that are showing up.
If you’d like some help on how to improve your new patient arrival percentage, give us a call and we’ll go over exactly how we can help you with that.