You know, it's interesting when you ask dentists, why do you lose patients? They list things like, patients got a change in their insurance, or patient notice money, or a patient was upset about something, or patients move, or unfortunately patients –some patients pass away. Those are all reasons why a practice has attrition.

But when we look at those reasons and we add them up and we look at the statistical significance of each one of those reasons, none of them are nearly as significant as the main reason. The main reason why we lose patients and don't practice is because we did not reappoint them for a future hygiene visit.

Reappointments – it's not an exciting number. It's not a number we think about all day long. As a dentist, but it's actually one of the most important numbers and the backbone of our practice. Are we reappointing patients? Once we understand that, then we have to ask ourselves, okay, are we? And when you ask hygienists, you know what percent of your patients will be appointed? They may say something like 98-99% of my patients are being reappointed. National average is 59%. That's a gap of the most important number maybe in the practice. 

And so now we say, okay, if we recognize that this really important number, which is defining in a way of how big my patient base is, we recognize that that number is probably weak. How do we make it strong?

We can make that number strong by doing it the old way, by like white knuckling it and trying to force and micromanage our people, to reappoint better, and to audit yesterday's numbers, and call every single patient, and not let anyone walk out, and just constantly just harp on it on the morning huddle and track it through kind of third-party dashboards.

That's the old way, technology has changed this. So this is an example in dentistry where technology's actually gotten us to spend less work doing something and doing it better. And the new way, for example, Curve, Curve will flag every patient in the schedule that has not been reappointed. And if our people still didn't do it, Curve will sweep them into a reappointing protocol, a whole process to get them scheduled.

And if those patients still didn't schedule, which many will, a lot of that works already done automatically – they schedule. But for the few that didn't schedule, those patients will be triaged and handed to my team to say reach out to just them. 

So, if I compare the old way to the new way, the old way, we're probably even doing. The old way says we're losing a lot of patients. The old way says we have to spend a lot of time micromanaging, and working the old way might mean we have more staff. The new way says I've got technology doing almost all the work for me without worrying about it, without managing it. And only those small amounts of patients that I do need to reach out are handed to my team on a silver platter. And that makes a lot more sense.