The recall you never sent is the cheapest appointment you will ever lose
Every practice has two patient lists. The one in the appointment book, and the one nobody has looked at in two years.
The second list is where the money is.
The failure is silent, which is why it persists
When a piece of equipment breaks, somebody rings a technician that morning. When a recall does not go out, nothing happens at all. The patient does not complain. No report flags it. Reception does not notice, because there is nothing to notice — the absence of an appointment looks exactly like an ordinary Tuesday.
Six months later that patient has a problem, rings the practice that came up first when they searched, and becomes somebody else's patient. Nobody in your practice ever learns that this happened.
This is the shape of nearly every expensive failure in a small business: not a loud breakage, but a quiet non-event that no system reports.
Work out what yours are worth
Do not take an industry figure for this. Take your own numbers, which you already have.
- How many patients have attended in the last two years? Your software will tell you.
- How many of them are past their recall interval? Most principals guess low, then check and are unhappy.
- What do you charge for an examination and a scale and clean? An 011 and a 111, together.
- How often should each of those patients appear? Usually twice a year.
Multiply them.
That number is not a marketing opportunity. It is work you have already earned, from people who have already chosen you once, sitting in a list you own. It costs a message to ask for.
It is also the number your practice-management report will never show you, because a report can only count the patients who came. The ones who did not are invisible by construction.
Why recall systems fail
In our experience the failure is almost never that somebody decided recalls were unimportant. It is one of four things:
It depends on a person remembering. If recalls go out because Sharon does them on Thursdays, they stop when Sharon is on leave, and they stop permanently when Sharon leaves.
It depends on a list somebody exports. Any process with a manual export in the middle has a step that can be skipped, and it will be skipped during the fortnight everyone is busiest — which is exactly the fortnight the chair most needs filling.
The message goes nowhere useful. "You are due for a check-up, please call the practice" asks a busy person to make a phone call during business hours. A link that books the appointment converts a different order of magnitude better, because it lets them do it at 9pm on the couch.
Nobody honours the opt-out. A patient who replied STOP and kept receiving reminders does not simply ignore them. They decide the practice does not listen, and that judgement extends to everything else you send. It is also unlawful — more on that below.
What a working system looks like
- The recall generates from the appointment, not from a person's memory.
- It sends on a schedule, whether or not anyone is in the building.
- It contains a link that books, not an instruction to ring.
- Reminders respect quiet hours, because a 6am SMS annoys more patients than it books.
- An opt-out is honoured immediately and permanently, without anybody having to action it.
That last point is not optional. Under the Spam Act 2003, a commercial electronic message must carry a functional unsubscribe facility and it must be honoured — and "functional" means something actually processes the reply. A message that says "Reply STOP to opt out" when nothing on the receiving end reads replies is worse than not offering it: you have made a promise the system cannot keep.
What this is not
It is not a reason to message people more often. A practice that responds to this by tripling its send volume will train its patients to ignore everything it sends, and will annoy the ones it most wants back.
The point is not volume. It is that the patients who are genuinely due should hear from you once, reliably, in a way that lets them book — and the ones who asked you to stop should never hear from you again.
This article describes general practice administration and the obligations that attach to it. It is not legal advice. Where it cites legislation, read the section.