# Getting hygiene patients back in the chair — build checklist

Work the recall list continuously instead of in a panic when the hygiene schedule looks thin.

Roughly two weeks if your system has an API, much longer if it does not.

## Before you start, read this

Do NOT build this if any of the following is true of you:

- [ ] Your hygiene schedule is already full. Then this fills slots you would have filled anyway and annoys patients doing it.
- [ ] Your practice management system cannot be read without a screen scraper. Building on a scraper means rebuilding it after every update.
- [ ] You are in a jurisdiction where unsolicited health-related texts need consent you have not collected. Fix consent first.

If none of those apply, carry on.

## 1. Prove you can hear the trigger

- [ ] Your practice management system: A hygiene visit is completed with no next appointment booked
      Find what your vendor actually calls this event before you write any code.
      We have not verified the name, and guessing it wastes an afternoon.
- [ ] Your practice management system: A recall due date arrives
      Find what your vendor actually calls this event before you write any code.
      We have not verified the name, and guessing it wastes an afternoon.
- [ ] Log one real event end to end before building anything on top of it.

## 2. Build the steps, in this order

- [ ] 1. Left without booking
      Picked up the same day, not at month end.
- [ ] 2. Wait two days
      Nobody wants a text about their next cleaning on the drive home.
- [ ] 3. Offer two real slots
      Two actual open hygiene slots, six months out, that the patient can accept by reply.
- [ ] 4. Book or hand over
      An accepted slot is booked. Anything else goes to the front desk with the reply attached.
- [ ] 5. Front desk works the rest  (A PERSON DOES THIS — build the queue, not the decision)
      A person calls the patients who did not answer or who asked something.
- [ ] 6. Stop at three
      Three attempts and the patient moves to a call list. Nobody gets a fourth text.

## 3. Keep these jobs with a person

If your build quietly takes any of these over, you have built something else:

- [ ] Calls everyone the texts did not reach.
- [ ] Handles any patient who replies about pain, cost, or anxiety — none of that belongs in an automated thread.
- [ ] Decides which slots may be offered. The automation never opens a slot the practice wanted to protect.

## 4. Before you turn it on

- [ ] Run it in report-only mode for a week and read every message it WOULD have sent.
- [ ] Decide who gets paged when it stops firing, and prove the page works.
- [ ] Write down what "it is working" means as a number you can check next month.
- [ ] Confirm you have consent for any message this sends to a customer.

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Generated from the recipe at https://ustechautomations.com/recipes/dental-recall-reappointment
by seo/scripts/v1-gen-recipe-checklists.js — do not edit this file by hand.