The Problem
While serving as interim CMO at a portfolio company, we knew that our local teams should be “forward booking” – which means trying to book a patient’s next visit before leaving their current visit. Dentists do it very well and it is important when trying to drive repeat business from existing patients for things like annual wellness exams. However, getting our local physicians and support teams to convincingly suggest to patients that they should schedule their next appointment (even if it was 6 or 12 months away), was proving to be tough. To make things more tricky, the practice management system that the practice was using did not have a way of tracking forward bookings.