How many new patients does a dental practice need?

Many dental practices set goals like “30 new patients per month” without a clear understanding of where that number comes from, whether it aligns with the practice’s actual needs, or how it will affect its team’s day to day operations. But to set a smart, data-driven target, you first need to answer two key questions: How many patients are you losing? And how many new ones do you need to not just replace them, but grow?

To help break it down, we spoke with Jody Arrowsmith—a former practice manager and the founder of Dynamic Dental Scheduling—who now advises dental teams on how to optimize their schedule, increase production, and enable smoother workdays in the process.

Step 1: Understand Your Patient Attrition

The first step in figuring out how many new patients your dental practice needs is understanding how many you’re losing. Regardless of the quality of your care, every practice loses patients. People move, insurance benefits change and some patients may neglect care or fall off-track with treatment plans due to expense or other life demands.

Patient attrition silently robs from your practice’s bottom line, and while you might feel busy or have a full day to day schedule, understanding your attrition rate will help you understand if your practice numbers balance out to support that level of production into the future — in essence, whether you’re growing,  shrinking or staying the same. This helps you to establish a baseline of how many new patients you need to replace those leaving and to continue growing.

There are a couple of methods you could pursue to get this number depending on how accurate you want it to be:

Least Effort: Pull a report of your net patient increase or decrease

To get a high-level overview of your net patient growth or shrink, the simplest way to estimate this is to pull a report from your practice management software of the number of patients who were actively seen in the last 12 months. (Don’t account for patients who are in your system but didn’t come in for treatment, which can skew your numbers) Then, pull the same report from the 12 months prior. The difference between the two reports will reveal the net growth, or loss, of patients your practice experiences.

More Fine-Tuned: Look Specifically At Attrition

While the simpler method mentioned in the step above will tell you about net increase or decrease, it won’t separate out attrition vs acquisition, which can be helpful to know if you’re considering changes to your marketing mix. For a more accurate look at attrition specifically, you may want to pull a list of patients who were seen 12–24 months ago but not in the past 12 months. Many software systems (like Dentrix, Eaglesoft, or Open Dental) allow for these filters.

For the sake of this example, let’s say your attrition calculations have revealed that your practice is losing an average 120 patients per year through regular attrition, or 10 per month. Now you know how many patients you have to replace each year to maintain a practice of the same size.

What’s a healthy rate of attrition?

Seeing your attrition numbers can be both scary and empowering– you’re likely not often confronted with the hard numbers of patients who are silently slipping out of your practice. Knowing how many patients you need to replace to stay the same size– and to grow– is knowledge that can help create a sense of urgency to get your marketing and recare systems in order to ensure you’re hitting your targets.

According to Dynamic Dental Scheduling, an attrition rate of around 10% is normal, so if your attrition numbers are near this, there’s no cause to panic or to drastically change how you’re doing things. However, if you find that your attrition rate far exceeds 10%, it could be an indicator of deeper patient unhappiness and warrant some investigation.

Higher rates of attrition are sometimes predictable. Attrition often grows around events that are disruptive to your patient base or change their costs or care, such as shifting insurance networks, transitioning to a fee for service model or changes in practice ownership that result in patients seeing a new doctor. If any of these changes are on the horizon, it may make sense to start setting more ambitious goals for how many new patients your dental practice needs in advance of the change in order to insulate your business from the shifts.

Your attrition rate can also cause problems in the opposite direction too. If you have a very low rate of attrition and begin adding new patients at a rate which exceeds your attrition rate, you could grow unexpectedly fast and quickly overburden your team or push your availability for new patient appointments out more than a couple of weeks– something which consequently causes a higher rate of new appointment no-shows and may raise patient dissatisfaction and attrition overall.

When you consider all of these factors, it really highlights what an important metric attrition is and how it can inform a whole range of other decisions you might make about your care experience, marketing strategy or more!

Step 2: Replace What You Lose—Then Aim Higher

If your practice is losing, for example, 20 patients per month, then by its definition, growth requires  21+ new patients. Once you have a handle on your attrition, you know the number of new patients needed just to maintain your current active patient count. But if your goal is growth, you’ll need to bring in more than that baseline in order to add to your patient base.

But how much growth is the right amount? An industry benchmark currently used for general dentistry practices is to aim for $1.5 million in production for each full time doctor at the office. So for example, a 2 doctor office should be doing roughly $3 million in annual treatment. A 3-doctor office should be doing roughly $4.5 million and so on. If you’re falling below these benchmarks, or if there’s open time in your schedule that could be filled in order to exceed them, then you’ll need to figure out how many new patients are needed to reach your goals.

How much revenue do you need to make up? And what net patient increase would be required to do so?

For the sake of simple math, let’s say your practice has a $100,000 shortfall from hitting its production goals. What sort of net patient increase would close this gap? To understand, let’s first calculate the value of a patient.

There are a few ways to calculate this depending on how accurate you’d like your numbers to be:

Least work: Calculate Average Annual Patient Value

Divide your total production over the last 12 months by your number of active patients. This number will show you how much, on average, a single patient is worth to your practice. This method is quick, but the problem with averages is that they don’t tell the whole story. In calculating this way, we’re not separating new and established patients, so your number might be muddied by the value of a $40,000 complex restoration for an established patient being averaged out with a patient who just comes in for their bi-annual cleaning and nothing else.

More accurate: Calculate Average Annual New Patient Value

Since new patients often present with more immediate treatment needs, they often represent higher production in the short term. Pull a report of new patients over the past year, total up the completed and scheduled treatment tied to those patients, and divide by the number of new patients to get a more targeted average.

More conservative: Calculate Hygiene-Only Value of New Patients

If you’d like to take a more conservative approach and avoid assuming that new patients will result in lots of expensive treatment, you could assign each new patient the value of a new patient exam and 2 cleanings. If you assume each appointment results in $500 of revenue, the value of a new patient under this method would be $1000 annually.

Regardless of which method you use to assign a dollar value  to a new patient, now you’ll have a number you can use to understand how many new patients you’ll need to achieve your goal of $100,000 increased production.

If you used the hygiene only value for a new patient of $1,000, you’d now know you need a net increase of 100 patients, or about 8-9 per month to close this gap. If you used another method that showed a higher per patient value of, say, $2,500, you’d know you need 40 new patients, or 3-4 per month.

But first, let’s not forget about attrition. The true number of new patients your practice needs to hit its growth goal is the number needed for your increased production plus the number needed to cover your attrition. If we’ve determined we’re losing 120 patients annually and we need a net increase of 100 patients to reach our financial goals, our actual new patient target would need to be 120+100 or 220 new patients.

Step 3: Plan for Future Needs

Calculating attrition and patient value will help you understand how to set goals for a practice of your current size, but if you have growth or investment plans on the horizon, you might want to spend a bit more time planning. That’s why we recommend using the new patient goal you created in the previous step as a “floor” or bottom range for your new patient goals and adjusting upward based on future plans. Here are a few common things to consider:

Are you expanding your team?

If you plan to add associates or expand hygiene capacity, you’ll need more new patients to support that growth. To understand how this changes your new patient goals, just divide the amount of new annual production needed to fill that capacity by your assigned patient value.

Are you preparing for capital or technology investments?

Growth isn’t just about people—it’s also about infrastructure. If you’re investing in expensive technology or equipment, factor in those revenue needs when determining your new patient goals. The math may reveal a need to change your pricing structure, aim for a higher utilization capacity for your team by expanding your hours, or increase your new patient goals.

Step 4: Once You Know the Goal, Make a Plan to Hit It

Knowing your new patient target is just the beginning. The next step is to build a marketing plan designed to help you reach that number consistently and sustainably. That means executing across multiple channels to improve visibility, build trust, and support the patient decision-making process.

Here are a few tactics every growth-oriented practice should consider:

• Update your website. Your website should be fast, beautifully-branded, mobile-friendly, and clearly communicate the services you offer and the problems you solve. Think of it as your digital front door—it needs to reflect the quality of care you provide and provide information to potential patients around the clock, not just during office hours. 61% of patients compare at least 2 practice websites before reaching out or booking an appointment, so it’s important that your website makes an excellent first impression.
• Appear in search results. Search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search advertising helps your practice show up when potential patients search for things like “dentist near me,” “invisalign,” or “dental implants.” Without a presence in organic search, even the best website can go unseen. Search is the most important growth channel for practices, as patients seeking a provider intend to make a provider choice imminently. 77+% of patients use search as the primary channel for finding a provider, so practices who embrace this powerful channel have a strong opportunity to grow.
• Collect and respond to reviews. Online reviews shape patient decisions. A consistent flow of positive reviews builds credibility and helps you stand out. Equally important is actively managing your reputation by responding to both praise and feedback. 94% of patients use reviews in their decision making process.
• Maintain a social presence. Social media can help you stay top of mind, educate patients, and build a personal connection with your providers and team. It can also reinforce your brand personality and help patients feel more familiar before they walk in.
• Provide helpful, educational content. Blog posts, social posts, and treatment guides help patients understand their symptoms, know what to expect from procedures, and make informed decisions about their care. That trust-building is a key part of converting interest into appointments.

Make A Plan to Hit Your Goals Today

Whether your goals are modest or ambitious, understanding your numbers and taking strategic action can help ensure you’re steadily growing and filling your schedule with the right patients.

Each of these tactics works best when part of a coordinated strategy. That’s why it’s important to find a marketing partner who can help you put the right plan in place—one that aligns with your growth goals and patient needs.

That’s where we come in. Patientli helps practices attract and convert the right patients through thoughtful branding, search-optimized websites, content marketing, social media, and more. Learn more about our services and view pricing at www.patient.li