How Sunrise Family Dental Cut Recall Gaps by 40% With DentalFlux

Practice Profile: Sunrise Family Dental, Phoenix, AZ

Sunrise Family Dental operates three locations across the Phoenix metro area, employing six dentists, nine hygienists, and a front-desk team of twelve. With roughly 4,200 active patients across all sites, they had the patient base to grow — but their hygiene schedules told a different story.

Practice administrator Linda Cho noticed the same pattern every quarter: hygiene chairs sitting empty at two of the three locations while the front-desk team scrambled to fill last-minute cancellations by hand.

The Challenge: A Recall System Running on Sticky Notes and Spreadsheets

Sunrise Family Dental had been running its dental recall system the same way for six years — a combination of generic postcards mailed every six months, occasional phone calls from whoever had a free moment at the front desk, and a shared spreadsheet tracking which patients were "overdue."

The problems were compounding. By mid-2023, over 900 patients were 90 or more days past their recommended hygiene visit date with no active follow-up in progress. Front-desk staff were spending an estimated 22 hours per week on outreach calls, most of which went to voicemail with no structured follow-up afterward.

Specific Pain Points the Team Identified

• No consistent multi-channel outreach — calls only, no text or email sequences
• Staff had no visibility into which patients had been contacted or how many times
• Lapsed patient lists were rebuilt manually every month from the practice management software
• Hygiene schedule gaps averaged 14% across the three locations, rising to 19% at the Tempe site
• Front-desk turnover meant institutional knowledge about recall workflows walked out the door twice in 18 months

"We knew the patients were there. We just had no reliable way to reach them before they ended up going somewhere else," said Linda Cho. "Every time we hired someone new, we were basically starting from scratch on how we managed recall."

The Solution: Automating Recall Across All Three Locations With DentalFlux

Sunrise Family Dental onboarded DentalFlux in September 2023. Implementation took nine business days, including data sync with their existing practice management software and configuration of location-specific scheduling rules for each site.

Recall Sequences Tailored to Patient Behavior

DentalFlux's dental recall system automatically identifies patients approaching or past their recommended hygiene interval and enrolls them in a six-touch outreach sequence spanning text, email, and voicemail. The sequence spaces contacts over 21 days and stops the moment a patient books — no over-messaging, no manual list management.

For Sunrise, the team configured separate sequences for patients 30 days overdue, 90 days overdue, and those inactive for more than 12 months. Each segment received messaging calibrated to their specific situation, with direct booking links tied to real-time operatory availability at their nearest location.

24/7 Online Scheduling Tied to Hygiene Availability

One friction point the team hadn't fully accounted for: patients who received recall messages and wanted to book were often doing so outside office hours. Without an online scheduling option, those patients either called the next morning and forgot, or booked elsewhere.

DentalFlux's online scheduling module gave patients a direct path from recall message to confirmed appointment — any time of day, routed by provider preference and procedure type. During the first 90 days, 34% of appointments booked through recall sequences were scheduled between 6pm and 9am.

Insurance Verification Before Appointments

A secondary problem emerged as recall volume increased: front-desk staff were getting blindsided by insurance issues at check-in for patients who hadn't been seen in over a year. Benefits had changed, deductibles had reset, and in several cases patients had switched carriers entirely.

DentalFlux's automated insurance verification runs 48 hours before each appointment, flagging coverage gaps, updated deductibles, and authorization requirements before the patient arrives. This gave Sunrise's team time to contact patients proactively rather than delivering unwelcome surprises at the front desk. If your practice also handles complex claims workflows, ClaimRelay can automate the insurance claims submission and follow-up process that sits downstream of verification.

The Results: Six Months After Going Live

By March 2024 — six months into using DentalFlux — Sunrise Family Dental had measurable results across every metric Linda Cho had flagged at the start of the engagement.

Recall and Schedule Performance

• Hygiene schedule gaps reduced by 40% across all three locations (from 14% average to 8.4%)
• 612 lapsed patients reactivated within the first six months through automated recall sequences
• The Tempe location, previously the weakest performer, saw its gap rate drop from 19% to 11%
• Average time from recall message sent to appointment booked dropped from 9 days (when staff followed up manually) to 3.2 days

Staff Time and Operational Impact

• 18 hours per week recovered from manual recall calling and list management — redistributed to in-office patient experience and treatment coordination
• Front-desk onboarding time for new hires shortened significantly; the recall workflow no longer depends on individual staff knowledge
• Insurance-related check-in delays dropped by 67% after automated pre-verification went live

Revenue Impact

Sunrise Family Dental estimated the 612 reactivated patients at an average hygiene visit value of $157, generating approximately $96,084 in recovered hygiene revenue over six months. That figure does not include downstream restorative and treatment revenue from patients who had also accumulated unscheduled treatment during their lapse.

"The ROI conversation was over pretty quickly," Linda Cho noted. "But the bigger win for us was that our front-desk team stopped dreading Mondays. They're not starting every week trying to patch holes in the schedule by hand."

Key Takeaways for Dental Practices Evaluating Recall Automation

1. Volume alone isn't the problem — Sunrise had enough patients. The gap was in systematic, multi-channel follow-up that didn't depend on staff bandwidth.
2. Pair recall with online scheduling — A recall message without a frictionless booking path loses a significant share of conversions, especially from patients acting on the message outside business hours.
3. Automate verification before volume increases — Reactivating lapsed patients surfaces insurance surprises at scale. Solving verification before expanding recall protects both revenue and patient experience.
4. Segment your lapsed patients — A 35-day overdue patient and a 14-month inactive patient need different messaging. Treating them identically reduces conversion and increases opt-outs.

For practices managing billing alongside patient reactivation, BillingBeam automates the medical billing workflows that often bottleneck when patient volume increases quickly.