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How Many Front Desk Hours Is Recall Costing You
Enter your overdue list size and how your front desk works it today, and see the weekly hours and the weeks to clear it by phone versus by texted batches.
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What Is Your Overdue Hygiene List Actually Worth
Put your own overdue patient count, reply rate, and fee schedule into the fields below and see what a single worked pass through the list is worth in production.
Every practice has a number of patients who are past their hygiene recall date and are not on the schedule. In a two chair office that number is usually larger than the owner guesses, because it grows quietly every month that nobody works it. This calculator turns that count into a production figure using your own average hygiene visit and the restorative work that tends to follow a returning patient into the chair.
The reply and book rate is the field to think hardest about. Patients who left six months ago respond very differently from patients who have been gone three years, and a first pass through a list that has never been worked usually performs better than the fourth pass through the same names. Start conservative, run your own batch, then come back and enter what actually happened.
Your result
Hygiene visits recovered
36
Overdue patients who book from one worked pass through the list.
Production recovered
$9,900
Hygiene production plus the restorative work that follows those patients.
Net after chair cost and software
$7,229
Assumes about one hygiene chair hour per recovered visit.
Return per software dollar
125.3
Production recovered divided by one month of software cost.
These figures describe one pass through the current overdue list, not a repeatable monthly total, since the list refills only as fast as patients fall past due.
Where each number should come from
Pull the overdue count from your practice management system with a date filter rather than from memory. Set the window to patients whose recall date has passed and who have no future appointment, and decide up front whether you are including patients who moved away or transferred, because leaving them in inflates every figure below.
Production per hygiene visit should be the fee you actually collect for a routine adult recall visit at your own schedule, including radiographs when they fall due and an exam when the doctor sees the patient. The restorative field is the one owners underestimate. A patient who has not been seen in two years frequently leaves with something diagnosed, and that work belongs in the value of the reactivation.
Reading the result honestly
The net figure subtracts a chair hour for every recovered visit, which is the right way to think about it when your hygienist is salaried and the hour would otherwise sit empty. If you are paying by the hour and would have sent the hygienist home, the true cost is lower and the net is better than the calculator shows.
The return multiple looks dramatic because the software cost is small next to a single recovered visit. The useful version of that number is not how large it is, it is how few visits you need. Divide your monthly software cost by production per hygiene visit and you will usually find that one seated patient covers the month.
Questions about this calculator
What reply rate should a small practice expect?
It varies too much by how long the list has gone unworked to promise a figure. Offices working a stale list for the first time generally do better than they expect, and repeat passes over the same names do worse. Run one batch of fifty and use your own result.
Should I count patients who moved away?
No. Filter them out before you count, along with transfers and anyone you have marked inactive. A clean overdue list is smaller and far more useful than a large one full of people who will never sit in your chair again.
Does this include patients who book and then cancel?
It does not, so treat the result as a ceiling. Reactivated patients break appointments at least as often as regular patients, which is one more reason to confirm the seat the same day it is booked.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The Overdue Hygiene Recall Reset Checklist
Four stages and twenty steps for taking a neglected hygiene recall list and turning it into seated patients without breaking a rule or annoying a patient.
The calculator gives you the number. ChairGap keeps it current.
Fill tomorrow's empty hygiene chairs by texting the patients who are already overdue for a cleaning. Ask for a walkthrough and we will run it against a real week of your own.