September is when the fourth quarter is won, not November
Unused dental benefits expire December 31 and most practices start working that list too late. What to pull, call and schedule in the next three weeks.
Right now, sitting in your practice management software, is a report of every patient who was diagnosed with treatment they never scheduled. Crowns recommended in March. A quadrant of scaling and root planing from May. An implant consult from last year that went quiet.
Every one of those patients has an annual insurance maximum that resets to zero on January 1, and most of them have no idea how much of it is still sitting there.
Practices work this list in November. By then the fourth quarter schedule is already tight, the good appointment times are gone, and the patient who needed two visits can only fit one. The work happens in September.
Pull three lists this week
Unscheduled diagnosed treatment. Every practice management system produces this. Sort it by treatment value, not by date. This is the highest-value call list your practice will touch all year and it costs nothing.
Overdue hygiene. Patients past due by three months or more. These are also the patients most likely to have full remaining benefits, because they have not been in.
Patients with remaining benefit above a threshold. If your software or your insurance verification tool can produce remaining annual maximum, pull everyone above $700. If it cannot, use the first two lists and check benefits at the call.
Then make the calls, in September
The temptation is to send an email blast instead. Send the email too, but the calls are where the schedule fills.
The script is short and it is not a sales call:
"Hi Sandra, this is Marcy at Ridgeline Dental. Dr. Alvarez recommended a crown on your lower right when you were in back in April. I was looking at your benefits and you have about $1,100 left this year that does not carry over. I have Thursday the eighteenth at 2:10 or Tuesday the twenty-third at 8:40, would either of those work?"
Name, specific treatment, specific dollar figure, specific deadline, two specific times. Nothing vague, no pressure, no discussion of anything clinical beyond what the patient already knows.
Assign it to one person, give them two hours a day, and track how many calls produce a scheduled appointment. A single-doctor practice with 1,200 active patients typically has 150 to 300 names on that unscheduled list. Even a 20% conversion is a fourth quarter.
Why September and not October
Three reasons.
Your good appointment slots are still open. By late October the fourth quarter of a healthy practice is already crowded, and patients who need a crown prep plus a seat, or a scaling and root planing across two visits, need room that no longer exists.
Sequencing is still possible. A $9,000 treatment plan split across two benefit years needs the first half done before December 31 and the second half booked into January. That plan needs to be presented with time to think, not on December 12.
And new patient acquisition still works in September. Patients are back in routine, the holidays are far off, and anyone you bring in this month is a patient who can use their remaining benefits before the year closes. It is the best month of the year to spend on acquisition, and most practices spend the same amount in September that they spend in July.
What the ads should be doing
Split the budget in two directions.
Through September: new patient acquisition at full strength. Implants and clear aligners, where the Google Ads guide covers the campaign structure. The patient who books an implant consult in September has time for the surgical appointment before the year ends.
From mid-October: shift budget toward your existing patients. Email, SMS and a retargeting audience of your own website visitors. Nothing acquires production more cheaply than a patient who already trusts you and has $1,400 expiring in ten weeks.
One caution that comes up every fourth quarter: do not upload your patient list to Meta or Google to target them. That is a disclosure of protected health information. Use your own email and SMS system, which is where those patients already consented to hear from you.
The DSO down the road is doing this
If a corporate office opened in your market in the last two years, assume this list gets worked there on a schedule, by someone whose job is only that, with a script and a dashboard. That is genuinely what large groups are good at.
What they are not good at is the part where the patient recognizes the voice on the phone and the dentist who recommended the crown is the same dentist who will place it. Use that. "Dr. Alvarez recommended" is a sentence a rotating-associate office cannot say honestly.
Three weeks of work
Week one: pull the three lists, clean them, and assign the calling.
Week two: start calling, top of the treatment value list down. Send the first email and text to the whole active list stating the December 31 deadline plainly.
Week three: keep calling, open extra hygiene blocks for November, and set up the confirmation sequence so the appointments you just booked actually show. Text at booking, three days out, and the morning of, which is covered in the front desk guide.
Then in November you are working overflow rather than starting from zero.
The part nobody does
Write down what this produced. Number of names on the list, calls made, appointments scheduled, production completed by December 31. Put it in a document with today's date.
Next August you will open that document and know exactly what to do and what it is worth, instead of relitigating the whole thing from memory. The full year is mapped in the seasonality guide.
If you want the recall sequences, the confirmation texts and the fourth quarter ad shift built for your practice, email and SMS campaigns are one of the services in the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.