The patients who already trust you, and haven't heard from you.
Your answers suggest you don't have a reliable way to spot patients who are overdue, and once treatment is done, outreach is a general email or nothing. Here's what that usually costs, a better routine, and how to check it this week.
The two questions behind this score
- 1. How consistently do you identify patients who are past the expected return cadence for their last service?
- 2. How do you re-engage patients who completed their treatment plan?
Why a full schedule hides it
Lapsed patients don’t cancel. They just stop appearing, and new patients fill the gap, so the calendar never looks short. Meanwhile the list of people who used to come in keeps growing in your booking system, untouched.
These are some of the cheapest bookings you can get. They already know you, they’ve already paid out of pocket, and the trust is already there.
What your answers usually mean
If you use a general “time since last visit” list, or nothing, you’re treating a monthly GLP-1 patient and a patient who comes in twice a year the same way. At 90 days, one is badly overdue and the other isn’t due yet.
If re-engagement means a promotional email to the whole list, or waiting for patients to come back on their own, most of them won’t. As I cover in The Reactivation Playbook, the most common reason patients go inactive is that they forgot about you. They didn’t leave angry. They left unattended.
What most practices do, and a better routine
Most practices run a reactivation push once a year, when someone remembers, as a single blast.
A better routine:
- Define “lapsed” by treatment cycle. Around 90 days for monthly programs like GLP-1 or hormones, around six months for quarterly aesthetics.
- Flag patients as they cross that line, continuously, instead of letting them drift for a year.
- Run a short sequence rather than one message: a warm text and email, a follow-up two weeks later, a friendly last note, then a personal call from the provider.
- Make the call. It’s the step most practices skip, and it converts best.
One number to check this week
In your booking system, pull patients whose last visit was 6 to 14 months ago. Group them by their last service. You only need counts.
Then ask one question: when did anyone last contact the people on that list, one to one?
Don’t wait on it. In The 2,000 Names You’re Sitting On I note that patients gone 6 to 12 months reactivate at 15% to 20%, and patients gone 18 months or more drop to 5% to 8%.
Napkin math
Lapsed patients × average annual value of a patient when they were active × 10%
The playbook’s four-step sequence typically recovers 10% to 15% of lapsed patients, so 10% is the low end. Practices that send one message and skip the call often see 3% to 5%, so if you won’t make the calls, use that instead. Either way, it’s an estimate from your own list, not a result.
Want the real number for your practice?
The math above is a napkin estimate. The Found Money Audit works it out from your own numbers, across all six categories, and ranks what to fix first. If you'd rather talk first, grab 15 minutes and we'll look at whether it's worth doing.
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