Dental practices
What belongs in an unscheduled treatment tracker
Most practices already have a spreadsheet. It usually has patient, treatment and value — and then it stops, which is why it stops getting used.
The columns that make a tracker work are the ones about the follow-up, not the ones about the treatment.
The columns your export already gives you
Patient ID, patient name, phone, email, treatment presented, tooth or quadrant, case value, and date diagnosed. This is what comes out of the report.
Useful, but entirely static. Nothing here tells anyone what to do this morning.
The columns that actually run the system
Status, attempts, last contact, next contact due, days since diagnosed, due now, priority, objection heard, scheduled date, and scheduled dollars.
Next contact due is the one that matters most. Without it, working the list depends on someone remembering, and memory is why the list exists in the first place.
- Status — a fixed dropdown, never free text, or your reporting is worthless
- Attempts — a plain counter that drives the cadence interval
- Last contact — the date, typed by the person who made the call
- Next contact due — a formula: last contact plus an interval that widens with each attempt
- Due now — a formula flagging DUE when next contact due is today or earlier
- Priority — a formula combining case value with expiring insurance benefits
- Objection heard — a dropdown, because these aggregate into the most useful report you will get
The three formulas
Next contact due widens the gap as attempts accumulate: two days, then five, then nine, then sixteen, then thirty. Chasing daily annoys people; chasing monthly loses them.
Due now is a simple comparison against today's date. Filtering that column to DUE is the entire daily workflow — that filtered view is the call list.
Priority marks anything with benefits expiring in the next sixty days as A regardless of value, then falls back to value thresholds you set once on a settings tab.
The one report to run monthly
Count the objections. If half your list says cost, your problem is financing presentation, not follow-up. If half says never reached, your problem is phone numbers and call timing.
Practices that skip the objection column keep solving the wrong problem, energetically, for months.
Common questions
Excel or Google Sheets?
Either. The formulas here work unchanged in both. Use whichever your practice already controls access to.
Is a spreadsheet with patient names a HIPAA problem?
It is PHI, and it needs the same controls as any other PHI: practice-controlled storage, restricted access, and access removed when someone leaves. It is not inherently a problem — an unmanaged copy on someone's personal laptop is.
Why not just use the practice management system?
Because it does not give you next contact due, and that is the column the whole system turns on.