How Many New Patients Do Missed Calls Cost Your Clinic?

If you searched for this hoping for a clean industry-wide dollar figure, we would be lying if we gave you one. Every clinic's call volume, new-patient mix and average appointment value are different, so a number quoted at you without reference to your own numbers is marketing, not measurement. What follows is the actual published data, the caveats that go with it, and a worked example you can adapt with your own figures.

What the published research actually says

The most-cited dataset comes from TrueLark, which analysed 8 million patient conversations across dental practices. It found that 33% of business-hours calls go unanswered, and of those missed calls, 65% come from potential new patients rather than existing ones. That is vendor data specific to dental practices, not a government or peer-reviewed study, so treat it as directional rather than gospel.

A more independent data point comes from a 2021 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, which used trained callers posing as patients to ring 800 US practices. It found the callers could not get through at all to 44% of practices. The catch: the fieldwork ran in September 2020, mid-pandemic, when staffing and call volumes at medical practices were unusually disrupted, so treat that figure as a snapshot of an abnormal period rather than a permanent baseline.

Put the two together and the honest summary is: unanswered calls at clinics are common enough to be a real, recurring pattern, not a rare edge case, but the exact rate varies by practice type, staffing model and, in the 2021 study's case, the state of the world at the time.

A missed call is not automatically lost revenue

This is the part vendors selling call-answering software tend to skip. If an existing patient rings and misses you, they usually ring back, or your team calls them back, and the appointment still happens. The revenue risk concentrates almost entirely in new patients: someone comparison -shopping clinics who gets no answer typically does not wait for a callback. They ring the next name on their list. That is exactly what the TrueLark figure above is measuring: not all missed calls, but the new-patient share of them.

So the real question is not “how many calls did we miss”, it is “how many of the calls we missed were people who had never been to us before, and how many of those actually called somewhere else instead of calling back”. Most clinics do not track either number, which is why the honest starting point is measurement, not a guess.

The arithmetic: work out your own number

Here is the calculation, in plain terms:

Missed calls per week × new-patient share × (1 − callback recapture rate) × average appointment value × 52 weeks

To show how it works, here is a purely illustrative example, not a market figure. Suppose a clinic misses 40 calls a week, and suppose 60% of those missed calls are from new patients (in line with the general shape of the TrueLark finding above, not a guarantee for any specific clinic). Suppose further that only 20% of those missed new-patient calls result in a genuine callback and booking, meaning 80% are recaptured nowhere. If the average new-patient appointment is worth $150 in first-visit revenue, the arithmetic would look like:

40 × 0.6 × 0.8 × $150 × 52 = $149,760 a year

We want to be direct about what that number is: a hypothetical worked example built on assumed inputs, designed to show you the shape of the calculation. It is not a claim about what missed calls cost clinics in general, and it is not a number we are asserting about your clinic. Swap in your own missed -call count, your own new-patient share and your own average appointment value, and the answer will likely look very different. The point of the exercise is the method, not the dollar figure.

Where misses tend to cluster

We are not going to invent percentages here, because we have not seen a robust published breakdown by time of day for the Australian clinic market. What is commonly reported anecdotally, and worth checking against your own call logs rather than assuming, is that misses tend to bunch around a few predictable windows:

• The lunch window, when reception steps away and calls roll to voicemail or ring out.
• After hours, when the clinic is closed but people are calling anyway, often to book for the next available day.
• Monday mornings, when the weekend's enquiries and cancellations all land at once and volume outpaces the desk.
• Friday afternoons, when staff are wrapping up the week and calls compete with end-of-day admin.

None of these are statistics, they are patterns worth testing against your own carrier or practice management system logs. Your clinic's actual weak points may be entirely different.

Measure first, then fix, and don't blame the front desk

Before changing anything, measure. Pull your own answer rate, your own callback recapture rate and your own new-patient share from your call logs. Our free front-desk phone audit checklist walks through exactly how to do that yourself, no purchase required.

Once you know your own numbers, the fix is almost always a systems problem, not a people problem. Reception staff answering calls between patients, walk-ins and admin is a coverage design issue: no overflow path when the line is busy, no after-hours capture, no visibility into which calls go unanswered and when. Treat it as a design gap to close, not a performance issue to manage. Blaming the person at the desk for a structural gap in the phone system rarely fixes the underlying problem, and it is not a conclusion the data above supports.

Sources

• TrueLark, “What We've Learned From 8 Million Patient Conversations”: vendor dataset, dental practices, 33% of business-hours calls unanswered, 65% of missed calls from potential new patients.
• Journal of General Internal Medicine (2021), simulated-patient calling study: trained callers could not reach 44% of 800 US practices, fieldwork September 2020.