The Fully Booked Practice

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Blog By:
Divine Michael

The $47,000 We Didn't Know We Lost | StoryTime

Dr. Reyes found out by accident.

His office manager, Priya, was out with the flu for four days. The temp covering the phones didn't know the "system" — which, it turned out, was mostly in Priya's head. So she wrote everything down instead: every call, whether it booked, and why not, on a legal pad by the phone.

When Priya came back, she skimmed the pad, laughed, and almost threw it out. Dr. Reyes asked to see it first.

Nineteen calls in four days. Eight booked. Eleven didn't — and next to each one, the temp had scribbled a reason, because nobody told her not to: "asked about Saturday hours, we don't have any." "wanted to know price of whitening, I didn't know, said I'd call back — didn't." "insurance question, put on hold 6 min, hung up."

Dr. Reyes did the annoying kind of math, the kind you do at 11pm with a calculator app. If that four-day pad was even roughly typical — and Priya, wincing, admitted it probably was — his practice was losing more than half of its inbound calls before they ever became appointments. Not because the front desk was bad. Because nobody was ever asked to watch it, so nobody did.

He'd been telling himself for two years that the practice was "steady." Steady, it turned out, was doing a lot of work to hide how much was leaking out the sides.

Here's what got him, though — not the money. It was that Priya wasn't hiding anything. She wasn't a bad manager. She'd just never had a reason to write any of it down, because nothing in the software ever asked her to. The information existed for four days purely because a temp didn't know she wasn't supposed to write it.

That's the part that should unsettle you if you run a practice: the problem isn't a bad employee filtering the truth from you. It's that the truth was never being recorded by anyone, ever, until a fluke put a pen in the right hand for four days.

Dr. Reyes didn't fire Priya. He installed a call-tracking dashboard that week, and had her look at it with him every Monday for ten minutes. Three months later, the same call volume was converting at nearly double the rate — not because the front desk got better at their job, but because for the first time, someone could actually see it.