Hygiene recall

Hygiene recall is the system a dental office uses to bring patients back for their next preventive hygiene visit, usually a cleaning and exam, at the interval the provider prescribed. Most patients are placed on a recall interval of three, four, or six months, and the recall system exists to make sure that interval actually turns into an appointment. A practice's hygiene schedule, and most of its restorative diagnosis, depends on it.

What is the difference between recall and reactivation?

Recall is the routine process of scheduling patients who are due or nearly due for their next hygiene visit, while reactivation is the harder work of bringing back patients who have already lapsed, typically with no visit in 12 to 18 months or more and no future appointment. Recall keeps active patients active; reactivation tries to recover patients the recall system missed.

The line between the two is a date the practice chooses. A patient who is a month overdue is a recall call. A patient who has not been seen in two years is a reactivation call, with a different script, a lower expected response, and often a different owner. Groups that blur the two usually end up under-investing in plain recall, which is the cheaper and more reliable of the pair.

How is hygiene recall measured?

Hygiene recall is measured most often as recall effectiveness, meaning the percentage of active patients who have a future hygiene appointment scheduled, along with the number of patients currently overdue and how far overdue they are. Some groups also track pre-appointment rate, meaning the share of hygiene patients who leave the office with their next visit already booked.

Worked example (illustrative figures). An office has 2,400 active patients. Of these, 1,560 have a hygiene appointment on the schedule, so its recall effectiveness is 1,560 divided by 2,400, or 65 percent. The remaining 840 patients are the recall pool. If 300 of them are more than 90 days past due, those 300 are the priority calls, and the office knows exactly how many contacts it needs to make to move the number.

The metric only means something when active patient is defined the same way in every office, which is why groups tend to write the definition down and hold to it.

Why does hygiene recall matter for a dental group?

Hygiene recall matters because the hygiene chair is where most restorative treatment is diagnosed, so an office that falls behind on recall diagnoses less, presents less, and eventually produces less, usually a quarter or two after the recall number slipped. It is the leading indicator that shows up before production does.

For a multi-office group, recall is also the simplest daily standard to hold offices to. The list of due patients can be built before the day starts, worked in a set block, and reviewed per office the same day. Recall that gets worked every morning is what keeps a schedule from going soft, and it is the base that patient outreach as an operating discipline is built on.

Related terms

• Patient reactivation: Patient reactivation is the process of bringing back patients who have not visited the practice for an extended period, usually 12 to 18 months or more, and who have no future appointment on the schedule.
• Patient outreach: Patient outreach is the daily operating discipline of contacting patients who are due for hygiene, have unscheduled treatment, have lapsed, or carry an outstanding balance, so that they get scheduled or resolved and the practice's schedule stays full.
• Unscheduled treatment: Unscheduled treatment is dental treatment that a provider has diagnosed and presented to a patient, and that the patient has accepted or has not yet declined, but that has no appointment on the schedule.

This entry is part of the MyDentalForce dental operations glossary, a plain-language reference for office managers, practice owners, and DSO operators. Definitions describe common industry usage; your group may define its own metrics differently, and figures in examples are illustrative.