AADOM QUICKcast – How to Keep Your Chairs Full
QUICKcasts are not eligible for CE
Every office manager starts the day the same way: scanning the schedule to see who’s confirmed and who hasn’t. In this QUICKcast, Intiveo Co-Founder and CEO Josh DeVries breaks down data from 2,500+ dental and oral surgery practices to show what’s actually keeping schedules full in 2026, and where revenue slips away.
You’ll walk away with real benchmarks on confirmations, recalls, referrals, and reviews, plus a clear view of where to focus first.
Course Learning Objectives
By the end of this session, attendees will be able to:
- Pinpoint which channels and send times drive the strongest confirmation rates, and apply that timing to their own scheduling workflows.
- Compare their practice’s recall and referral conversion rates against solo, multi-location, and enterprise benchmarks to find the biggest opportunity for improvement.
- Turn missed opportunities into recovered revenue using the same tactics top-performing practices already rely on.
Sponsored by: Intiveo
How Dental Office Managers Keep Their Chairs Full, According to the Data
A packed schedule and a leaky one can look identical on Monday morning.
Both start with the same number of appointments on the books, but the difference shows up later in which confirmations land, which recalls turn into rebooked visits, and which cancellations get filled instead of forgotten. Intiveo’s benchmark data, pulled from more than 2,500 dental and oral surgery practices, maps exactly where that difference comes from. Here’s what the numbers say about closing the gap, and you can dig into every benchmark yourself in the full 2026 Dental Patient Engagement Report.
Time Your Confirmations Right
This is the easiest change you can make, and it costs nothing. Our data shows that text confirmations sent Tuesday around 6 p.m. outperform other windows. Email does best Monday morning. Voice confirmations land best Sunday evening. Patients are simply more available outside of work hours, so evening and weekend sends beat the traditional 9-to-5 window.
One oral surgery practice restructured its confirmation sequence by appointment type and saw an 83% jump in confirmation rates, saving two hours of staff time a day. That is a result of an automated process and strategic improvements on patient engagement.
Make Recalls Intentional
Data from the report shows that multi-location practices convert recall messages into completed appointments at roughly twice the rate of solo practices (19.6% versus 9.7%). Practices with dedicated recall coordinators and standardized follow-up protocols tend to do better here, but any practice can borrow the underlying habit, which is that recalls that are tied to a patient’s actual treatment plan beat a generic “time for your cleaning” blast every time.
Turn on Your Waitlist
Every cancelled appointment is a revenue event. Practices actively using waitlist automation recovered thousands of appointments from cancellations in an average month. If you recover just 10 a month at $500 each, and that’s $5,000 you’d otherwise have lost. Solo practices lead here, averaging 28.4 recovered appointments a month; more per practice than multi-location or enterprise groups.
Convert the Referrals You Already Have
The biggest lever in the referral funnel isn’t generating more referrals; it’s converting the ones a practice already has. Across the sample, only about 22.5% of submitted referrals turn into a completed appointment, and that overall figure hides a wide gap by segment: Solo practices complete 16.1% of submitted referrals, Multi-location practices complete 23.7%, and Enterprise practices complete 25.5%. Structured tracking, systematic follow-up, and a dedicated referral coordinator explain most of that gap, and any practice can leverage technology like Intiveo’s Referral Management solution without adding headcount.
The math makes the case for fixing the funnel before chasing more referrals. A practice that improves its submit-to-complete rate from 16% to 24% generates 50% more revenue from the same referral volume…no new referrals needed!
Let Your Reviews Do the Talking
Review volume is one of the clearest signals of new patient acquisition, and it feeds referral trust too. A practice with 40 Google reviews and a 4.8-star rating gets more referrals than an equally skilled practice with eight reviews and no rating, since general practitioners refer to specialists they trust, and that trust is increasingly built online.
Across all segments, practices averaged about 108 new reviews per year per location in 2026, largely by automating the review request process and folding it into the patient engagement workflow. Enterprise practices lead in per-location generation, at 120 a year, reflecting centralized workflows that prompt for reviews at the right moment. Solo practices show the widest range: some generate 80-plus reviews a month, others barely register in the single digits. The gap comes down to habit, not how happy patients actually are. Practices that consistently ask are pulling far ahead of those that don’t.
The Pattern Underneath It All
Growth isn’t always about doing more; it’s about being intentional. The right channel, the right moment, and follow-through on what you already have. If any of these numbers made you want to check your own, get the full 2026 Dental Patient Engagement Report for the complete set of benchmarks.
About Our Sponsor
Josh DeVries, CEO & Co-Founder
Josh DeVries is the Co-Founder and CEO of Intiveo, a patient engagement software company that helps dental practices increase production and create trusted patient experiences.
Josh has more than 20 years of experience working with private practices, DSOs, and academic institutions to streamline their processes and recover revenue. He brings a breadth of experience and unique perspective on how practices can achieve success.
