How to reduce no-shows in your dental clinic with WhatsApp reminders

When a patient does not come for an appointment, the time is lost for another patient who could have been seen. The treatment is also delayed. An RCT may be pushed by a week, and a temporary crown stays in the mouth longer than it should.

Most clinics try to prevent this by calling patients to remind them. Calls take your receptionist away from the patients at the front desk, and many patients do not answer a call during working hours. Almost all of your patients use WhatsApp every day, so a message there is more likely to be read.

The messages that are worth sending

You do not need to send many messages. These five, each sent at the right time, are enough for most clinics:

• Booking confirmation. Send it as soon as the appointment is fixed, with the date, time, dentist’s name and clinic address. The patient can reply to the same message if the appointment has to be changed.
• Reminder on the day before. Keep it short and specific, for example “Your appointment with Dr. Rao is tomorrow at 11:30 AM.”
• Payment receipt. Send it after the patient pays, so that the patient does not have to look for a paper bill later.
• Treatment plan. Send the estimate after you have explained the plan. The patient can show it to the family before deciding on an implant or a crown.
• Recall. Send it when the six-month check-up or scaling is due, or when a treatment plan was started and left unfinished.

A patient who gets a few useful messages at the right time feels that the clinic is taking care of them. A patient who gets too many messages starts to ignore them, so it is better to keep to this short list.

Why these messages are often not sent

Most clinics already know that these messages help. The difficulty is in sending them every day. Typing each message on the clinic phone takes time, and on a busy day your receptionist has no time for it. The busy days are also the days when a missed appointment costs the clinic the most.

The messages are sent regularly only when each one takes very little effort, and when your receptionist is reminded at the moment the message is needed.

How DentXOS helps your staff send these messages

DentXOS does not send WhatsApp messages by itself. Your staff send each message from the clinic’s own WhatsApp, and DentXOS prepares the message so that sending it takes one tap. It works in this way:

• The message is already written. When your receptionist taps the button, WhatsApp opens on the patient’s chat with the text filled in, and she presses send.
• DentXOS asks your receptionist to send the message at the time it is needed, which is after an appointment is booked, after a payment is recorded, and after a treatment plan is presented to the patient.
• Messages that are due are kept in a list called “To send”. This list includes recall reminders and follow-ups for unfinished treatment plans, so your receptionist can open it once or twice a day and send what is pending.

For the reminder on the day before, your receptionist can open the next day’s appointment list and message each patient from it.

Because a person presses send for every message, your patients receive it from the clinic’s WhatsApp number, which they already know.

You can read more about how appointments work and how recalls work.

Automatic sending is planned for the Pro plan

We are working on automatic WhatsApp sending from your clinic’s own number, and it will be part of the Pro plan. It is not available yet. When it is ready, reminders and receipts will go out without anyone pressing send.

WhatsApp charges businesses for these automatic messages, and the charges are set by Meta, the company that owns WhatsApp. Meta will bill these charges to your clinic directly, and we will not add anything on top of them. See the plans.

Until then, sending with one tap from the “To send” list is available on every plan.

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If you would like to see the “To send” list with your own appointments, book a demo on WhatsApp.