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RECALL AND REACTIVATION

How do you reactivate overdue hygiene patients?

Someone has to call them, consistently, and the front desk rarely gets an uninterrupted hour for it. A Reach VA works recall and unscheduled treatment follow-up as their actual job, from $11 per hour.

56% of dental patients are overdue for a cleaning.

THE PROBLEM

The growth is already in your chart.

56% of dental patients are overdue for their cleaning, and the average practice carries $2.4M in unscheduled treatment. Those are people who already chose you, already sat in the chair, and already heard a recommendation. Reaching them costs a phone call. Reaching a new patient costs marketing spend.

Recall still gets skipped, because it is never urgent. Nobody notices the call that did not happen, and the list quietly grows.

Working it takes someone with an uninterrupted block of time and a reason to open the list every week, which is exactly what a front desk covering phones and patients does not have.

HOW IT WORKS

Working the list, not just printing it.

Reactivation is a sequence, not a single call.

Overdue hygiene

The recare list worked weekly, contacted by phone with follow-up, until the hygiene schedule is full rather than hopeful.

Unscheduled treatment

Patients who heard a recommendation and never booked, called back with the specific treatment the doctor recommended.

Post-op and check-ins

Follow-up after procedures, which catches problems early and is where referrals tend to come from.

THE SHIFT

Recall was the task that never made it to the top of the list.

New patients grew by 440, up 38%, at Dawson Modern Dentistry in Matthews, North Carolina, with one team member focused on calls and scheduling and a second on recall and reactivation.

Collections grew about 30%, an increase of roughly $290,000, with consistent follow-up doing most of the work. Exams rose 20.7% and overall patient growth reached 15.3% across the same period.

None of that came from new marketing spend. It came from calling people who were already patients.

COMMON QUESTIONS

What practices ask us

How many calls do dental offices miss? A1: About 32% of inbound calls to dental practices go unanswered during business hours, and 97% of patients who reach voicemail never call back.

The team member’s time, dental-specific training through Reach Academy, a dedicated Success Manager for the full relationship, and the Performance Tracker with a weekly email summary.

Yes, at 20 hours a week. The hourly rate is higher than full time, because the fixed cost of training and support does not scale down.

That depends on your schedule and your volume, and it is one of the things a discovery call establishes. The point of a dedicated specialist is that verification stops happening at the last minute.

A full-time Reach VA is $1,995 per month, which is about $11 per hour across 174 working hours. Reach Academy training, a dedicated Success Manager, and the Performance Tracker are included, and there is no long-term contract. A 20 hour per week option is available.

Virtual assistants can be HIPAA compliant when the structure, training, and systems are in place. Reach uses controlled role-based access to patient information, encryption in transit and at rest, and audit logging, and handles international employment compliance through an Employer of Record model. Reach Academy includes explicit HIPAA and PHI modules.

Book a discovery call

A quick chat to understand your practice’s needs and explore how we can help.