Patient Reactivation in Your Dental Practice

Reactivating inactive patients either because of follow-up care or unscheduled treatment tends to get pushed to the back-burner by your front desk staff. This is because the day-to-day issues in the office seem more pressing. However, in a solo dental practice, we recommend that two to four hours a week be set aside for working on reactivation.

Setting aside time to contact and reactive patients who are either overdue for checkups and follow-ups or who have not completed treatment plans will make a dramatic improvement. It’s also important to realize that around two-thirds of all restorative dental work originates in hygiene.

Patient Reactivation Tips

Below are a few tips to consider when implementing a reactivation plan in your dental office:

• Contact the patients in the late afternoons or early evenings, unless the patient has specified a better time frame. Stagger these calls with postcards and consider offering a reactivation special.
• Send birthday, anniversary, or special offer cards to patients. This will boost loyalty and keep your practice in the back of their minds.
• Avoid trying to reach out to patients who are known to no-show chronically and unapologetically. They will end up costing your practice money in the long run.
• Appoint a single staff member to be in charge of reactivation attempts. Otherwise, there will be no accountability and it will never get done.
• Monitor your reactivation attempts with statistics. Once you know which strategies work and which don’t, you’ll become much better at patient reactivation.

Reactivating inactive patients is an important part of keeping your dental practice running smoothly and profitably. For help with reactivation attempts, please don’t hesitate to contact Pro Dental Designs. We’re experts in the field of dental practice management - moreover dental marketing!