How much revenue is my dental practice losing from patients who miss their hygiene recall?
Count it from your own book: active patients on a six-month recall should produce two hygiene visits each a year. A practice with 2,000 active patients should see 4,000 visits; at 2,800, the 1,200-visit gap at an assumed $150 each is $180,000 a year, before the restorative work those visits would have found. Pre-booking the next visit before the patient leaves is the main fix.
Closing a third of the gap is worth about $92,000 a year, from patients already on the books.
Recall losses are invisible for the same reason as in any appointment business: nobody leaves. Patients drift from six months to nine to fourteen, and each missed recall removes a visit and whatever treatment it would have identified.
The treatment effect is often larger than the hygiene fee. If one in five hygiene visits leads to restorative work averaging $400 — use your own ratio — the 1,200 missing visits represent about $96,000 of treatment that was never diagnosed.
Pre-appointment is the most reliable fix. Booking the next hygiene visit before the patient leaves the chair, then confirming it by text a week out, keeps far more patients on schedule than sending reminders once they are already overdue.
Work the overdue list as a separate task, oldest first, with a named person responsible. A recall list that is everyone’s job is usually no one’s job.
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Figures are typical ranges for small businesses in the UK, US and Canada, given so you can check them against your own books rather than take them on trust. They are arithmetic on stated assumptions, not a forecast, and not financial advice.