Future Appointments

I know an important statistic that I bet you don't keep and still it's very important, and that is the No Future Appointments statistic.

Do you keep track of how many people leave your office without having another appointment scheduled? It's critical to the growth of your practice. It makes all the difference in the world as far as your practice is concerned. Let's say that you have a real good day and you see nine people today, you have nine people scheduled and all nine show up. At the end of the day, you say, “Well, that was wonderful, I had a great day”. But, you go to the front, let's say you have a staff person and the staff person tells you that not one of the nine made a future appointment. Now you say, “Man, I had a terrible day”, because nobody rescheduled. Well, what was the difference? The difference was that people didn't make an appointment.

So, how do you keep track of that? I suggest, on your appointment book, you keep track of every patient that comes in, in some color, whether it's computerized appointment book or manual appointment book. And then, when that patient comes in and they leave with an appointment, you make a designation by their name, either change the background color if it's on the computer or you make a designation by their name. So, at the end of the day, if you saw eight patients, you scan down, say, “Yes, all eight patients made an appointment” or “Oh, I only had five out of eight patients make an appointment, I have to be more concerned about that, I'll have to firm up my appointment a little easier”.

In other words, all I'm telling you in this; why don't you start tracking the number of people or the percentage of people that leave with an appointment and the percentage that leave without an appointment. I like to get that percentage down to below 10%, so if you see 10 people in a day only one of them would leave without an appointment, and that's a lot as far as I'm concerned. Start tracking your no future appointments statistic and I think as you make it so that more people leave with an appointment, your practice will grow more.

This is Dave Kats, thanks for listening.