Reaching Lapsed Patients: A Practical Win-Back Guide

The Quietest Leak in the Bucket

Patients rarely announce they're leaving — they just stop coming. Six months becomes a year, the file goes cold, and the clinic never notices because no single day looked different. Reactivation starts with just noticing: knowing exactly who's gone quiet, in one place, so following up stops depending on someone remembering to check.

Finding Who's Gone Quiet

The engagement engine (recalculated nightly) flags patients who are disengaged with no visit in 6+ months. Two places surface the same list: a Devy insight card — "Patients ready for reactivation" — with the count, and the Patients page filtered to Overdue for recall (6+ months), which shows every one of them by name.

Reaching Them, One Tap at a Time

There's no automated bulk campaign yet — reactivation today is a manual, one-tap-per-patient flow, same as any other overdue recall:

1. Open Reminders > Follow-ups Due — it groups every overdue and upcoming recall by patient, most-overdue first.
2. Find the patient (or work down the list) and tap the SMS icon on their card.
3. DentalView sends the recall reminder immediately — no compose screen, no template to build.

Every send here goes through the same opt-out and phone-number checks as any other reminder, so patients who've opted out or have no number on file are simply absent from the list.

Making Reactivation Stick

The outreach gets lapsed patients to reply and book — what happens next is yours. Two habits close the loop: give reactivated bookings the full reminder cadence (they are, by definition, forgetting-prone), and record a recall date at their comeback visit so the ordinary recall engine catches them before they lapse again. Reactivation rescues; recalls retain.