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. Outreach is not a marketing campaign and not a one-time recall blitz. In a well-run office it is a shift: a ranked list of patients that exists before the day starts, gets worked in a set block, and is finished or not finished by the time the day ends.

What does patient outreach include?

Patient outreach includes four kinds of contact: hygiene recall calls to patients who are due or overdue for a preventive visit, follow-up on unscheduled treatment that was diagnosed and never booked, reactivation of patients who have lapsed, and balance outreach to patients who owe money, ideally combined with scheduling their next visit. All four draw on the same practice management system data and are worked by the same front desk team.

Treating them as one list, rather than four separate projects, is what makes outreach sustainable. A patient who is overdue for hygiene, has an accepted crown unscheduled, and owes $200 is one phone call, not three.

How should a daily call list be prioritized?

A daily call list should be prioritized by the value and urgency of the contact: patients already on the schedule who have unscheduled treatment or a balance come first because the conversation can happen in person, then patients with accepted treatment and expiring insurance benefits, then patients overdue for hygiene, then lapsed patients, with balance-only calls folded into whichever contact is already happening. The list should be short enough to finish and ranked so that the first ten calls are the ten most valuable.

Worked example (illustrative figures). A front desk has 90 minutes for outreach. Its ranked list has 25 names: 6 patients on tomorrow's schedule with $9,800 in unscheduled treatment, 8 patients with accepted treatment and benefits resetting next month, and 11 patients more than 60 days overdue for hygiene. The team reaches 17 people and books 7 appointments worth $6,200 in scheduled production. That is a countable result for a countable amount of effort, and it can be compared to yesterday and to the office next door.

How do multi-office groups measure patient outreach?

Multi-office groups measure patient outreach by tracking, per office and per day, how many patients on the list were contacted, how many appointments were booked, the scheduled value of those appointments, and later the production actually completed from them, then comparing offices on those measures rather than on anecdotes. Booked value and produced value are reported separately, because an appointment is a promise and production is a result.

That measurement is what turns outreach from a task into a standard. When leadership can see whether every office worked its list today without asking, the variance between offices narrows on its own. Read How to read outreach ROI without fooling yourself for the difference between booked and produced, and the FAQ for how this fits alongside your PMS.

Related terms

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

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.