Your Phone System Knows More Than You Think

There is research to suggest that nearly a third of the calls coming into your medical or dental practice right now go unanswered during business hours.

Not after hours. Not during lunch. During the workday, while your team is at the front desk, a third of your incoming calls are ringing out or rolling to voicemail. Industry research puts it between 32 and 38 percent, depending on the study. The number hasn’t moved much in over a decade. And, no, no one is blaming your staff, we know they work hard. The issue, industry wide, is much more complex than just having front desk staff that can answer more calls.

Here’s what makes it worse. Only about 14% of new patients bother to leave a voicemail. The rest hang up and call the next practice on the list. Each one of those callers is worth roughly $850 in first-year treatment value, potentially several thousand over the lifetime of the relationship. And about 80% of them were calling to schedule an appointment. Not a complaint. Not a question. An appointment. Money walking in the door that you never knew about.

Your phone system tracks all of this. Call volume, hold times, missed calls, peak hours, average ring time. The data is there. Your practice management software tracks the other half. Who’s on tomorrow’s schedule. What treatment has been presented but not scheduled. Which patients haven’t been in for 18 months. What everything is worth in dollars.

But in most practices, those two systems don’t talk to each other.

The Morning Huddle Problem

The morning huddle runs off a printout of today’s schedule. Maybe someone pulls up yesterday’s production numbers. Maybe someone remembers that Mrs. Johnson called about a crown consult. Maybe not.

What nobody sees is a dashboard that says: yesterday we missed 11 calls between 10 and 11 AM. Three of those callers are existing patients with unscheduled treatment plans totaling $14,000. Two were new patient inquiries from the Google ad we’re paying $800 a month for. None of them left a voicemail.

That dashboard doesn’t exist in most practices. Not because the data doesn’t exist. Because nobody has wired the phone system to the PMS.

The Two Options (and the Third)

The market offers two choices. Buy an all-in-one platform that replaces your phone system, your scheduling, your patient communication, and everything else, and lock yourself into one vendor. Or figure it out yourself.

We think there’s a third option. Keep the phone system you already have. Keep the PMS you already know. Let us build the bridge between them and give you a dashboard your team can actually use at 7 AM. Real call data tied to real PMS data, for less than what one new patient a month is worth to your bottom line.

The data is already there. You’re just not seeing it yet.