Is your dental office seeing too many cancelled appointments? It’s not something you can let get out of hand. Appointment cancellations are one of the biggest challenges dental office managers face.

• Every cancellation hurts your bottom line
• Cancellations mean your reception staff are scrambling to try to fill it last minute, diverting their priorities away from providing those in the office excellent patient care
• Anticipating and dealing with cancellations can seem like a battle you never win

But while you might not be able to completely eliminate no-shows, there are steps you can take to reduce them. Before we get to that, let’s discuss the reasons why people cancel.

Why people cancel dental appointments

A lot can happen to push a person to cancel their dental appointment with little notice. They could fall ill and not be physically well enough to attend. Their insurance may have changed since their last appointment, and it might be a matter of what they’re willing to pay. They may simply have nerves and decided they’d rather stay home. Or one of so many other things could have them picking up that phone to cancel. 

Or worse, not saying anything at all. 

What you likely already do about it

Dental cancellations are no modern phenomenon. You’ve probably already got a strategy to deal with them. The question is, is your strategy good enough?

One key way to reduce your cancellation rate is to obtain confirmation that the person plans to attend. Appointments are often made months before the actual date, and with all that time is plenty of opportunity for a person to see it as less of a commitment and more of something they can simply reschedule at their convenience.

And of course, you want to be an accommodating clinic to keep them happy, but you’ve probably found that checking in with them a week or two before the date provides a big boost in attendance.

The problem here is that reaching out to all those people, leaving messages, and continuing to call back until you get that confirmation that someone will be there, is a massive investment of time. The benefit is that you get more people through the door—but the drawback is that your receptionists have less time to deliver a pleasant patient experience once they do arrive.

Which is only going to feed back into the cancellation cycle. If people don’t expect an excellent experience, they’ll be less likely to show. They may even look elsewhere.

How automated reminders free up time without compromising results

Ideally, you want your receptionists able to greet every patient with a friendly smile and a swift check-in procedure as soon as they reach the desk. While it’s also important that you get the person there in the first place, it’s hard to get an appointment off on the right foot when the receptionist is on the phone.

What automated reminders do is take the tedium out of the task. Rather than waste your receptionists time trying to get in contact with people, these messages can be sent in the patient’s preferred communication medium to respond to at their leisure.

The confirmation process need not involve multiple attempts to contact someone on the phone. It can be a quick, simply, no-fuss message and response, with additional messages if you don’t hear anything. You’ll only have to escalate to a manual phone call in rare cases, rather than every case.

Want to know how to get started with automated reminders? EasyMarkit is an automated patient reminder system built to allow receptions to provide a better standard of patient experience. It includes all these features and more—such as smooth integration with your existing Patient Management System. To find out more and book a demo, click here.