Okay so this is probably super specific but maybe some of you in healthcare admin are dealing with the same thing

We run a small dental practice and no-shows were genuinely killing us. Like not just annoying, we’re talking lost revenue, wasted chair time, staff standing around. Our front desk would call patients to confirm appointments and just… get voicemail every time. People don’t answer numbers they don’t recognize, which is basically every clinic’s number to them.

So they’d miss the appointment, we’d call again to reschedule, voicemail again. The whole cycle was maddening.

Tried doubling down on calls for a while. Didn’t help. Tried email reminders, open rates were tragic. At some point our receptionist was spending half her morning just leaving voicemails that nobody was listening to.

Eventually just switched to texting patients instead of calling. Sounds obvious in hindsight but we were so used to the old way that nobody questioned it.

The difference was kind of embarrassing honestly. People TEXT BACK like immediately. “yes I’ll be there” or “actually can we move to thursday” done. no phone tag, no voicemails, no follow-up calls. Our confirmation rate went from whatever it was before (bad) to actually usable.

We set it up so the whole front desk team texts from one shared number so patients aren’t getting messages from random staff personal phones. Whoever’s available can pick up the conversation and respond. No chaos, no “wait who texted this patient already.”

I’ve been doing it for about 4 months. No-shows are noticeably down, front desk is way less frazzled, and patients seem to appreciate that they can just shoot a quick text instead of having to call during office hours when they’re at work anyway.

Does anyone else deal with this? Curious how other small practices handle confirmations because “call everyone and pray someone picks up” really can’t be the industry standard still