Four numbers worth watching every Monday
Practice dashboards tend to grow until nobody reads them. Twenty tiles, six charts, and no decision gets made differently because of any of it.
The test for a number worth tracking is simple. If it moves, do you know what to do? If not, stop tracking it.
Here are four that pass.
1. Lapsed patients contacted
Not “patients in the database.” Not “emails sent.” How many people who have not been in for twelve months or more did someone actually reach out to last week.
This is an effort number, and effort numbers are the ones that stop happening quietly. Nobody decides to abandon recall. It just slides down the list behind today’s schedule, and three months later the list has not moved.
If this number is zero two weeks running, that is the finding. Everything downstream depends on it.
2. Visits booked from those contacts
The conversion number. Contacts without bookings means the message or the channel is wrong. Bookings without contacts means you got lucky.
Watch the ratio rather than the absolute. A campaign that reaches 120 people and books 9 is doing roughly what a well-run reactivation campaign does. One that reaches 400 and books 3 has a problem worth diagnosing: wrong list, wrong message, or a phone nobody answers when people call back.
Context for whether the effort is worth it at all: the ADA’s Health Policy Institute found that in 2022 only 40% of working-age adults had a dental visit in the past year. There is no shortage of people who have drifted.
3. After-hours calls answered
Most practices do not know this number, which is itself the point.
Unanswered calls outside opening hours are the cheapest revenue to lose, because losing them leaves no evidence. I have written separately about how to measure it and the short version is that your phone system can export it.
Track it weekly and it stops being invisible.
4. New Google reviews
Reviews are a slow number, which is exactly why a weekly count is useful. Monthly is too coarse to notice that the process stopped.
The honest version of this metric is total new reviews, not average rating. Rating moves slowly and tempts people into gaming it. Volume and recency are what actually affect how you appear, and they are the things a consistent process produces.
Just be careful how you get them. Several common tactics, including staff review targets and asking patients to name a team member, became explicit policy violations in April 2026. The rules are here.
What to do with them
Put the four on one page. Print it if that helps. The format matters less than the fact that somebody looks at it on the same day every week and asks one question about each: did this move, and if not, why not?
That is the entire discipline. It is not sophisticated and it is why it works.
We send ours as a printed Monday scorecard with these four lines on it, because a page that arrives is read and a dashboard you have to log into is not.
If you want the starting numbers for your own practice before you set any of this up, the free report will give you the lapsed-patient count to begin from.