Ep. 99: The New Patient Management Action Checklist
Marketing can be expensive, and the costs only rise over time, so it’s always a good idea to focus on maximizing the results of your marketing as much as possible. That means both having the right strategy for external marketing and streamlining your internal processes. So in this episode, Jeff outlines the step-by-step checklist we give our clients to ensure they are getting the most out of the new patient acquisition and retention efforts.
Links:
Download the checklist here - https://www.mgeonline.com/new-patient-management-checklist-download
The MGE New Patient Workshop - https://www.newpatients.net
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Questions From This Episode
Why does new patient acquisition need one person clearly responsible for it, rather than being everyone's job?
Because when everyone is told they're responsible for new patients, effectively nobody is. Asking a doctor or office manager directly who owns new patients often gets a vague I guess me, which isn't real accountability. Depending on practice size that might be a dedicated PR director, an office manager, or even a part time assistant, but one specific person needs to own the number.
What are the three numbers you need to track for each marketing channel to know if it's actually working?
Cost per call (how much you spent divided by how many calls came in), acquisition cost per new patient (how much you spent divided by how many patients actually scheduled), and return on investment, which factors in the realized revenue those new patients actually brought the practice over the following month to three months. Without all three, there's no reliable way to know which channels deserve more budget and which are quietly losing money.
Why is tracking ROI different from tracking acquisition cost, and why does it matter?
Acquisition cost tells you what a new patient cost to bring in, but not what that patient was actually worth. Ten thousand dollars spent on general marketing that only brings in cleaning patients can be a poor investment, while the same ten thousand spent on an implant-specific campaign that lands five large cases can return twenty times what was spent. Without measuring realized revenue against spend, a channel that looks expensive on paper might actually be the most profitable one running.
Why should reception areas avoid playing 24-hour news channels?
Because patients waiting to hear about a large treatment plan shouldn't be primed with anxiety-inducing headlines right beforehand. One client struggling to collect on treatment plans was found to have a 24-hour news channel running in the waiting room during a period of heavy economic anxiety, patients would sit through that, then get called back and told they needed eleven or twelve thousand dollars of work. Something neutral or genuinely educational serves the practice far better.
Why does every emergency patient need to be scheduled for a full new patient exam after their emergency treatment?
Because an emergency patient is a real, human new patient, not a throwaway visit, and treating them that way means losing most of the value in acquiring them in the first place. Once palliative care is complete, the doctor should tell the patient directly that a full exam is needed so a problem like this doesn't happen again, and get them scheduled before they leave, the same as with any consult or second opinion patient.
Episode Transcript
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Those are the basic requirements. Let's move on to the next section, external marketing. The idea behind this whole checklist is that if every point were genuinely in place and functioning, you'd be operating at an optimal level for new patients, getting as many as you want, efficiently, cost effectively, and retaining them for the long term.
Point one: you have multiple external marketing channels for the practice. You don't want to be a one-trick pony. This isn't about running multiple channels purely for the sake of it, it's about genuine redundancy. Say you're I don't think I'd get any pushback saying new patients are extremely important to your practice, I'd expect close to universal agreement on that. And since new patients matter so much, and marketing efforts to get them can be genuinely costly, some more than others, it pays to make sure whatever you're doing is being done at maximum efficiency.
The problem is that the whole new patient acquisition process touches a lot of areas, external marketing, internal marketing, phone skills, the new patient experience once they walk in, and how your team retains them afterward. There are a lot of moving parts, which makes it easy to lose track of all of them. You might have some pieces working well in your office while others quietly aren't. For example, your marketing might be generating plenty of phone calls, but whoever's answering the phone doesn't have the skill set to actually schedule those callers and get them in quickly.
So a few years back, we built something for our clients called the New Patient Management Action Checklist. It lays out every point you want functioning in your practice, and you use it the same way you'd compare your car against a dealership's ten-point service checklist, the specific things they check to confirm everything's running the way it should. We built the equivalent for a dental practice, something you can hold up against your own office to see what's working and what isn't, so you can genuinely maximize your marketing and new patient efforts.
That's what I want to cover this week. My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host. Rather than just handing you the checklist as a download, which we are doing, you can grab it and follow along with me through this episode if you'd like, I wanted to spend real time walking through different parts of it. When we first introduced this checklist to our client base, Sabri and I did it as a live stream, specifically because we wanted to explain how the different points are actually used, since a few of them may involve tools you don't currently have in place. It's worth understanding the reasoning, not just checking boxes.
The link to the checklist is on the episode webpage. If you're driving right now, don't try to read along, just download it later and use it in your office when you have a moment. I'll walk through it section by section and flag a few of the more nuanced points as we go.
So what is this checklist actually for? It's designed to bring real structure to your new patient acquisition efforts. It breaks down into six sections: basic requirements, external marketing, internal marketing, phone skills, the new patient experience, and team drilling. You go through it and see how each point shows up, or doesn't, in your own practice.
Let's start with the first section, basic requirements. There are three points here. Point one: you need someone specifically responsible for new patients. I've talked in other episodes about the importance of dividing labor so someone is genuinely accountable for each important function in a practice, and this is no different. When I meet with a new client and ask who's responsible for new patients, especially talking to the doctor and office manager together, the answer is very often, I guess me. Think about that for a second, if you're responsible for something, I guess me doesn't really hold up.
And telling the whole team everyone is responsible has the same effect, once everyone's responsible, nobody actually is. Depending on your practice size, this might be a dedicated PR director in a larger office, focused entirely on new patient acquisition, or in a smaller office, the office manager, or a particular enterprising dental assistant who wants to take this on part time. Whatever the structure, one person needs to own the new patient statistic.
Point two: you need to set an actual target for your new patient numbers every month. Most offices are used to setting a production goal already, and that's good, though I'd also always pair it with a collections goal, since producing treatment you never collect on is genuinely worse than not producing it at all. But you should also be setting a specific new patient number, seven a week, ten a week, fifty for the month, whatever your target is.
Point three: your entire team needs to be aware of what you're actually doing for new patient acquisition. That means being aware of the goal itself, we want fifty new patients this month, so if your receptionist happens to be chatting with a patient who mentions their spouse has been thinking about finding a dentist, and it's the 26th of the month with an opening still available, everyone's thinking toward that same number.
It also means every team member needs to genuinely understand what marketing is currently running and what the offers actually are. Say you launch a campaign for full arch implant dentures, running ads on Google and maybe in a local newspaper. If your receptionist has no idea this campaign exists, and someone calls in asking about the free cone beam scan and evaluation from your ad, your receptionist has no idea what they're talking about, and even if they recover gracefully, that's a rough first impression.
So make sure the whole team knows what's running. I do this at our own staff meetings here at MGE, and our clients do the same, so that whenever a patient calls off a specific piece of marketing, staff know exactly what they're calling about and what to actually do with it, including which days or time slots might be reserved for that specific type of patient, if, say, only one doctor in a multi-doctor practice places implants.
running a Facebook ad campaign, a Google pay-per-click campaign, and a postcard mailing as your three primary channels. If the pay-per-click campaign suddenly loses effectiveness and that's your only real source of new patients, you're in real trouble. But if your postcard and Facebook campaigns are still working fine while you fix the third, you're covered.
Point two: you know the monthly cost for each of these channels. You know how much it costs to run a Facebook campaign, including any service fee if an outside company is managing it for you, plus your actual ad spend. If you're paying someone a flat monthly fee plus authorizing a set ad budget, that total cost should be fully predictable and controllable each month.
Most business owners, not just dentists, genuinely have no idea what they're actually spending across their marketing channels, and that's a real mistake, since without knowing your spend, you can't know whether a given effort is actually working, and I'll get into exactly how you measure that shortly.
Point three: you regularly track the number of calls and reaches from each channel. A reach is simply a response, when you promote something, a new patient doesn't just materialize, you generate a response, a phone call, or a form fill from a QR code. If those responses aren't converting into scheduled patients, that's an internal problem, a receptionist or scheduling issue, not a marketing problem. Marketing's job is simply to generate the response.
This is genuinely one of those areas where something urgently important gets ignored while less important things get all the attention. I've pushed this with newer clients for years, and eventually it clicks, but if you're not tracking what response you're actually getting from what marketing, you're operating blind. Say you're running Facebook, Google, and postcards, and getting fifty new patients a month total. If you don't know which channel each patient actually came from, you don't know where to put more money if you want more new patients. Forty of those fifty could be coming from referrals for all you know, in which case you'd want to invest more in referral activity specifically, not paid ads.
We have a download for this called a New Patient Call Log, something you'll need to keep reinforcing with your receptionist until it becomes second nature, since receptionists get busy and things get missed. It doesn't need to be complicated: what made you call us today, how did you hear about us. If a patient mentions getting something in the mail, ask what it looked like, or use a simple code printed on each piece so your team can identify the exact campaign, for example NPW-0723 for a New Patient Workshop postcard from July 2023. You could just as easily ask what image was on the piece if you're not using a code system. The point is knowing exactly which specific version of a campaign is actually pulling, since if you're running three different postcard designs and only one is genuinely working, that tells you exactly where to focus.
Marketing isn't purely about creative inspiration, a large share of it is simply administrative work, tracking what's working, what isn't, and what things cost. Anyone can become a decent marketer by doing this consistently.
Point four: you know your acquisition cost for each marketing channel. That means two numbers, cost per phone call and cost per new patient. If you spend a thousand dollars on Facebook ads and get a hundred phone calls, that's ten dollars per call. If ten of those hundred callers actually schedule, your acquisition cost per new patient is a hundred dollars.
From just those three numbers, spend, calls, and patients scheduled, you learn a lot. A thousand dollars for a hundred calls is genuinely a strong response rate, meaning the ad itself is working well, but if only ten of those hundred actually scheduled, that's a real conversion problem worth addressing. Compare that against, say, Google, where the same thousand dollars produces two hundred calls and thirty scheduled patients, a lower acquisition cost overall. Knowing this tells you where to put more of your budget, and whether a given channel, running you a thousand dollars per new patient against others running you a hundred and fifty, is worth continuing at all.
Point five: your new patient offer is consistent across your external marketing. You can offer multiple things, a discounted cleaning, a second opinion, a free scan and evaluation for missing teeth, appealing to different segments of your audience. That's fine. But whatever specific offer you're running needs to match exactly across every platform. If your postcard says ninety-four dollars for a cleaning, exam, and X-rays, and your website says a hundred and ten for the same thing, that inconsistency makes the practice look disorganized. One caution here: different states and Canadian provinces have specific requirements on what needs to accompany an advertised fee, some require the actual CDT procedure codes listed, so make sure you're following your own local regulations.
Point six: you track return on investment for each external marketing channel using realized revenue. This is a step further than acquisition cost. Say you spend ten thousand dollars on an implant-specific campaign and only get five patients scheduled, if those five just came in for a discounted cleaning, that's a poor return, roughly two thousand dollars spent per patient against maybe fifteen hundred dollars in average lifetime value, a net loss. But if those same five patients came in specifically for implant evaluations and you close five cases averaging forty thousand dollars each, you've made two hundred thousand dollars on a ten thousand dollar spend, a twenty-to-one return.
The tricky part with ROI is deciding what time window to measure. I'd recommend giving yourself at least one to three months after a patient's first visit to actually see the treatment through and capture realized revenue, since that's a more accurate reflection of the campaign's real value than looking only at the first visit. To recap the three numbers you want: cost per call, acquisition cost per new patient, and return on investment, which has a natural delay built into it since it depends on patients actually completing treatment.
Point seven: you regularly pilot different marketing methods and offers to see which perform best. Marketing genuinely goes stale over time, I've seen practices running the exact same postcard for four years wondering why it's stopped pulling, people simply become numb to repeated exposure, the same way anything sitting on your desk for six months eventually becomes invisible furniture. Channels themselves can also become saturated as more competitors adopt them. Some of our clients were early adopters of Instagram and got tremendous results, and once that platform became saturated, some of those same clients moved on to TikTok successfully. You want to be constantly testing new channels, not just running the same thing indefinitely.
Point eight: your external marketing is planned well in advance. This matters because most channels take real time to actually get running, an implant funnel needs at least a month or so to set up properly, a landing page for pay-per-click needs time to build, postcards take time to print. I'd recommend having your next quarter of marketing planned and scheduled out in advance, including your ROI tracking, so you're never scrambling to get something out at the last minute.
That covers external marketing. Let's move to internal marketing. Point one: you have an established internal marketing program in the practice, real structure, not just occasionally asking for referrals when it crosses your mind. This is where our Care Enough to Share program comes in, a business-card-sized referral tool with a specific system for how patients use it to refer friends and family. I'll likely do a dedicated episode on maximizing this program soon, but it's available now as a download, roughly seven to ten pages walking through exactly how to use it.
Point two: your staff have been trained on this program, and you regularly reinforce the importance of using it. This is a big reason things you've tried to implement in the past didn't stick, you introduce something new once, get everyone excited, hand out the cards, and then don't mention it again for two weeks, assuming it's happening on its own. It has to become part of someone's everyday routine through real, repeated reinforcement, brought up at every staff meeting, tracked, and talked about constantly until it becomes second nature. This applies to anything new you introduce in a practice, a new morning huddle, whatever it is, it needs consistent repetition to actually stick.
Point three: you regularly drill and practice how to execute the steps of this program with your team. If you hand a hygienist a stack of referral cards without ever walking them through exactly what to say, the average person simply won't use them, even with good intentions. Role play it directly: have the office manager play the patient, walk through the actual conversation, then have the hygienist practice it themselves, repeatedly, until it feels natural. The first attempt won't be as smooth as the tenth, but repetition gets them there. Anything genuinely important to your business process deserves regular drilling, even for staff who already know how to do it, since it keeps everyone sharp.
Point four: you do regular quality control surveys on your patient base to confirm customer service is genuinely excellent. This can be a third-party service or something as simple as a quick email survey sent to patients seen in the last month or two. This matters because if someone on your team is doing a poor job at something, scheduling, collecting payment, or even just being a bit rough chairside, and it goes unaddressed, that mistake repeats with every single patient going forward. Most upset patients won't leave a bad review, they'll simply stop coming back silently. Address even small complaints before they quietly compound.
Point five: you take corrective action immediately, both internally and externally, when a customer service problem arises. This connects directly to the previous point, don't sit on a known issue, since an uncorrected mistake keeps repeating with every patient that staff member interacts with.
Point six: at some point during every visit, you check with new patients and patients of record about bringing in other household members as new patients. Some MGE clients are genuinely excellent at this, turning even a wrong number into a new patient. I heard recently about a client whose plumber, called in for a home repair, was missing several teeth and ended up getting scheduled as a new patient on the spot.
The average US household has about three people in it, and we've had clients run their own numbers and discover a thousand patient names against only eight hundred addresses, meaning they're capturing barely more than one patient per household. In many cases, this is simply a matter of asking directly: is there anyone else in your household who might be looking for a dentist? That new patient costs you nothing to acquire, and directly offsets your overall marketing cost. If you spent three hundred dollars acquiring one patient and she brings in her husband, your effective acquisition cost just dropped to a hundred and fifty. Add a child too, and it drops to a hundred. This is something you can start using literally today, drill your team on it and go.
Point seven: you send out regular correspondence, including a patient newsletter, to your patients of record, actively promoting that you're accepting new patients and encouraging referrals, potentially with a family-and-friends special tied to your Care Enough to Share program. I'd send this quarterly at minimum, and I'd genuinely recommend making it yourself rather than buying a canned, templated newsletter, which tends to get tossed immediately. It doesn't need to be elaborate, even with a large patient list, the cost is genuinely modest. Include seasonal content, back-to-school reminders, year-end insurance benefit reminders, and keep your patient base actively engaged.
That's our internal marketing section. Let's move to phone skills. We've covered this in real depth in other episodes, so I won't dwell here, but a few points are worth checking against your own practice, since some of this ties directly into scheduling.
Point one: your schedule has available or blocked time to get a new patient initial exam within 24 to 48 hours. If someone calls saying they just moved to the area and needs a dentist, and you can't see them within that window, that's a real problem, especially if you're actively marketing. That caller has no existing connection to your practice, if you tell them three and a half weeks, there's a strong chance they simply call the next office instead, even if they initially agree to your appointment. We're all conditioned to expect things quickly now, and new patients are no exception. If the patient themselves pushes the appointment out further, that's on them, but you should always have real availability to offer.
Point two: second opinions and consults can be seen within 24 to 48 hours, and emergencies, new patients and patients of record alike, can be seen the same day.
Point three: new patient inquiries coming through email, social media, or a website form, not a phone call, are handled the same day, or within ten minutes if it's during open office hours. If someone messages your Facebook page asking about crown pricing, you want to be responding to them within ten minutes.
Point four: anyone who answers your phone has been thoroughly trained on handling new patient calls, and is regularly drilled two to four times a month on it, to keep those skills genuinely sharp.
Point five: you regularly listen to a random sampling of incoming new patient calls, assuming call recording is legal in your area, even for staff who are already well trained. This should happen several times a week, not just when a problem becomes obvious.
Point six: if someone is newer to handling these calls, you're listening to every single one of their calls to ensure real competence, correcting errors immediately, since an uncorrected mistake repeats with the very next new patient call otherwise.
Point seven: you have a New Patient Call Log at the front desk, filled out properly every time, reinforced the same way as any other new habit until it becomes second nature.
Point eight: you track conversion rate for all new patient calls and can break that down by specific marketing channel, not just overall, but specifically how many of your Facebook-sourced calls converted versus your Google-sourced calls, so you know exactly where to focus.
Point nine, and this one won't apply to every practice: your phones are answered after hours by someone who can actually schedule patients. We have a client in New York who does exactly this, since patients there are used to being able to reach a dentist at unusual hours. His staff rotated covering the phones until eleven at night, and he saw fifty to sixty additional new patients a month as a result, since plenty of after-hours callers weren't emergencies at all, just people looking for a dentist who happened to be calling in the evening.
We actually discovered this ourselves somewhat by accident years ago. Our main office is in Florida, Eastern time, and when we started marketing to the West Coast, seminar promotions reaching California meant calls coming in around five o'clock their time, eight o'clock ours, well after our phones stopped being answered. Before we had a dedicated West Coast office, we hired someone part time in California specifically to catch those after-hours calls, and it meaningfully increased our numbers. Worth checking how many calls you might be missing outside your own hours, you may find it's more than you'd expect.
Next is arrival in the practice, which covers the new patient experience once they're actually in your office.
Point one: the public areas of your practice are always extremely clean, neat, and tidy. Nothing repels a prospective patient faster than walking into a messy healthcare office. Not everything needs to be fancy, older furniture or a paint job that needs updating is fine, but cleanliness is non-negotiable.
Point two: any shared or general-use areas, a shared restroom in a multi-tenant building, for instance, are held to that same standard of cleanliness.
Point three: new patients are always immediately acknowledged and handled in a friendly, polite, caring manner. There are really two key first impressions, the phone call, and then the moment someone actually walks in and lays eyes on your practice for the first time. I was recently at a business where the receptionist was clearly upset, distracted, and short with me, because her coworkers were visibly socializing in the back instead of helping her. She had every right to be frustrated, but as a customer, I had no way of knowing that or fixing it, I just experienced a poor interaction. Whatever's happening internally, staff dealing directly with patients need to stay fully professional, the same way a performer stays in character on stage regardless of what's happening backstage.
Point four: if you have a TV or monitor in your reception area, it's playing educational content or something genuinely non-upsetting, not distressing news programming. Years ago, Sabri and I visited a client's office who was struggling to collect on treatment plans, and the very first thing we noticed in their waiting room was a 24-hour news channel running, during a period of real economic anxiety, with a headline asking whether the dollar itself was doomed. Patients would sit through that before being called back and told they needed eleven or twelve thousand dollars of treatment. We had them switch to something neutral immediately, even something like a home or nature channel is a meaningful improvement. Ideally, genuinely educational content, procedural explanations or patient testimonials specifically, works even better, and it's something worth a full episode of its own.
Point five: patients don't wait longer than ten minutes past their appointment time to be seated, if they wait at all.
Point six: providers and assistants maintain a friendly, polite, professional chairside manner consistently, the same standard expected at the front desk. Whatever's happening internally in the practice that day, a broken autoclave, a scheduling mess, patients should never be able to tell.
Point seven: you immediately handle any upsets among your team so they don't bleed into patient-facing hours. Even if a real conflict exists, it can't visibly play out in front of patients.
Point eight: patients would genuinely describe the overall atmosphere of your practice as friendly, polite, and helpful, calm and comfortable throughout.
Point nine: every emergency new patient is scheduled for a full new patient initial exam once their emergency treatment is complete. Some practices treat emergency patients almost as disposable, I've had people proudly report their new patient numbers while explicitly excluding emergency patients from that count, which misses the point entirely, that's a real person who simply needs to be properly converted into an ongoing patient. Once palliative care is done, the doctor should tell that patient directly they need a full exam so a problem like this doesn't happen again, and get them scheduled before they leave. This attitude, turning every emergency into a full patient, should be uniform across your entire practice.
Point ten: new patient consults and second opinions are handled the same way, scheduled for a full new patient initial once any needed treatment is complete, since the goal throughout is genuinely retaining that person as an ongoing patient, not just completing a single transaction.
Point eleven: patients coming in for a new patient initial are scheduled for their next recall visit before they leave, after their cleaning or any needed treatment is finished. This number should realistically sit at ninety-eight to a hundred percent. Pull your last fifty completed new patients and check how many actually have a recall appointment on the books, if that number comes back at thirty or fifty percent, that's a real problem, since you're spending real money acquiring these patients only to lose them right afterward, and you can't help someone long term if you never see them again.
Point twelve: you acknowledge every new patient with a follow-up welcome letter, and acknowledge referral sources with a thank-you letter each time they refer someone. Simple, but easy to let slip, and genuinely worth keeping consistent.
The final section is team drilling, covering a concept we call the dummy run, regularly practicing full patient management processes as a team, even without a real patient involved. Say you're working out how your new patient process should flow end to end, from the initial phone call through hygiene, X-rays, the doctor's exam, presenting and closing treatment, and finally landing on recall. You'd trial run this with your whole team present, one staff member playing the patient, walking through each actual step. You might discover a step is taking far longer than it should, or that a step doesn't need to exist at all. It's far better to catch that during a practice run than to discover it mid-visit with a real patient sitting there.
The second point here is simply correcting anything that surfaces during these dummy runs immediately, the same principle we've covered throughout this whole episode.
This ran considerably longer than our usual thirty minutes, but this is genuinely important material if you want to maximize these efforts. I'd strongly recommend holding this checklist up against your own practice. If you find that half the points aren't currently in place, don't panic, work through it in sequence, starting with your basic requirements before worrying about something further down the list like welcome letters. I'd revisit this checklist against your practice on a routine basis, quarterly, or at minimum once or twice a year, to make sure nothing's slipping and you're genuinely maximizing your new patient growth.
Thank you for sticking with me through this longer episode. If you have questions about MGE, find us online at mgeonline.com or call 800-640-1140. Have a great week, and I'll see you at the next episode.