Drafts overnight recall, queues no-show recovery, ingests inbound forms, and monitors tomorrow's chair density before you walk in the door. Daily chair-density monitoring, lapsed-patient recall segmented by payer mix, and no-show recovery via reliable-patient substitutions. All from Open Dental, without overbooking, without blasting SMS volume your patients will complain about. Your team handles live calls; the Patient Coordinator handles everything else that does not sleep.
Recorded against real Open Dental schedule data from a live practice. Patient names and phone numbers suppressed. No Wizard-of-Oz; every action you see is live agent output.
The coordinator pulls the next 7 days from Open Dental, calculates chair utilization by hygienist and operatory, identifies weak slots, and pre-queues a fill candidate list from your lapsed patient pool filtered by payer mix (Delta in-network, Medicaid, or self-pay as applicable). You see tomorrow's picture before the day starts.
Generic recall blasts do not work because not every lapsed patient is a good candidate today. The coordinator segments your lapsed list by payer (Delta patients who are active, Medicaid patients with active eligibility, self-pay patients who paid previously), then prioritizes by time-since-last-visit and appointment history. Outreach drafts are queued for your front desk to send, via email by default, not SMS volume that increases complaints.
When a no-show is confirmed (day-of cancellation or no-call-no-show), the coordinator immediately surfaces a substitute candidate from a pre-filtered list of reliable patients (prior show rate above threshold) who are due for a visit and match the slot length. The substitute is offered the slot; if they decline, the next candidate is queued. The original slot is never doubled up.
Inbound appointment requests (web form, email, or forwarded voicemail) are ingested 24/7, confirmed against your Open Dental schedule, collected into your intake form, and confirmed back to the patient by email. The coordinator responds in your practice name; the patient never sees a Praktend logo. Insurance verification is flagged to the Credentialing specialist for pre-visit eligibility. Your team handles live calls; the coordinator handles the written and digital queue so nothing piles up overnight.
No. The coordinator handles the queue of tasks that pile up on your human staff: recall outreach drafts, schedule density monitoring, no-show substitution candidates, and inbound scheduling confirmation from web forms and emails. Your human front desk handles the live calls, the judgment calls, relationship moments, and anything requiring on-site presence. Praktend handles the volume so your staff is not buried in follow-up tasks.
By default, no. A live practice had patient complaints about text volume from prior recall systems, so the Patient Coordinator defaults to email outreach only. SMS can be enabled per campaign on a per-practice basis; it is not on by default, and any promotional SMS (outside healthcare-treatment-exempt reminders) requires explicit opt-in from the patient on file. The coordinator drafts outreach for your front desk to review and send; it does not autonomously send bulk messages.
The coordinator filters your lapsed patient list from Open Dental (q0107.DateFirstVisit plus appointment history) by: payer type and active eligibility, prior show rate, and time since last visit relative to their prescribed recall interval. Critically, patients your practice has flagged in the Open Dental ASAP list are excluded from automated outreach entirely. If your team has marked a patient as someone to leave alone, we leave them alone. No automated message, no call, no blast. We know which patients not to contact.
The coordinator checks Open Dental for that hygienist's schedule, offers available slots, and confirms the booking. Hygienist-patient relationships are tracked in the patient preference log; the coordinator tries to match the preferred hygienist first and only offers alternatives if no slots are available within the requested window.
Yes. The coordinator sends your existing intake form link (or a Praktend-hosted version if you do not have one) to new patients at confirmation. Completed forms route to your inbox and are flagged for the front desk before the appointment. The coordinator does not write to Open Dental directly; form data is presented to your staff to enter.
For v1 it operates on hygiene schedule data only. Practices that are hygiene-only see their complete clinical picture. If your practice has a dentist chair alongside hygiene, the coordinator manages the hygiene schedule in full; dentist-column scheduling is not in scope for v1.
If you are on Open Dental and your recall response rate is under 40%, or your chair density drops more than one slot per hygienist per week, the coordinator will pay for itself in the first month.
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