Most practice owners know their phones get busy. Very few know how many patients they lose because of it.
It doesn’t show up anywhere. A missed call doesn’t send an invoice or leave a complaint. The patient simply books somewhere else, and you never find out they existed.
Here’s what the data says, what it likely costs your practice, and what you can do about it this month.That’s why we built an AI receptionist for dental practices that answers the calls your team can’t.
How many calls actually go unanswered?
In 2026, Patient Prism analyzed more than 11.5 million phone calls to over 8,000 dental locations in the US. For every 100 people who called:
- 31 hung up before speaking to anyone
- 21 booked an appointment
- fewer than 5 received a follow-up call
- fewer than 1 came back and booked later
That last number matters most. When a caller hangs up, the practice almost never wins them back. Across the full data set, more than 890,000 callers who hung up never received a callback.
This isn’t a problem caused by careless front desk teams. Front desks are busy. They’re checking patients in, handling insurance questions, taking payments and answering the patient standing in front of them. The phone loses that competition many times a day.
Many patients call when you’re closed
Patients don’t only look for care during office hours. They search in the evening after work, on lunch breaks and on weekends.
When Zocdoc studied its own bookings, 48% were made at times when doctors’ offices are usually closed. An earlier Zocdoc analysis found 37% of appointments were booked between 5 p.m. and 9 a.m., and 17% on weekends.
If your phone goes to voicemail at 5 p.m., you’re closed for a big share of the hours when people are actually trying to book.
Why voicemail doesn’t solve it
Voicemail feels like a safety net, but most new patients don’t use it. A first-time caller has no relationship with your practice yet. If nobody answers, the easiest next step is to tap the next result on Google, not to leave a message and wait.
Existing patients will often leave a message or call again. New patients, the ones you’re spending money on marketing to reach, are the most likely to move on.
What a missed call might be worth
Every practice is different, so here’s a simple way to estimate it for yours.
- Count the calls you miss each month. Most phone systems show missed and abandoned calls. If yours doesn’t, ask your provider.
- Estimate how many were new patients. Your front desk’s best guess is fine to start with.
- Estimate how many would have booked. Not every caller books, so be conservative.
- Multiply by what a new patient is worth to you.
For dental practices, older industry data from Sikka Software (based on more than 12,500 practices) put the average first-year value of a new patient at around $4,000. Your number will depend on your services and fees, so use your own if you know it.
A quick example: A practice misses 60 calls a month. Around 15 are new patients, and perhaps 5 of those would have booked. At even $1,000 of first-year value each, that’s $5,000 a month, or around $60,000 a year, walking out the door without anyone noticing.
Change the numbers to match your practice. Most owners are surprised by the result.
Five ways to stop losing patients to missed calls
You don’t have to fix everything at once. Start with whichever of these is easiest for your team.
1. Measure it first
You can’t fix what you can’t see. Pull your missed-call report for the last 30 days and look at when calls are missed. Most practices find clear patterns: Monday mornings, lunchtime, the first hour after opening and after closing.
2. Call back fast, every time
If a call is missed during the day, make returning it a set task, not something that happens if there’s time. The Patient Prism data shows how rarely this happens. A same-hour callback alone can win back patients who would otherwise be gone.
3. Offer a text option
In a 2026 Tebra survey, 75% of patients said they prefer an office number they can text. A text-back message when a call is missed (“Sorry we missed you, how can we help?”) gives a caller an easy way to stay with you instead of calling someone else.
4. Let patients book online
In Tebra’s 2025 survey, 43% of patients preferred booking online, about the same as the 41% who preferred calling. If you only take bookings by phone, you’re asking almost half of new patients to use the method they like least. Online booking also covers the evenings and weekends when your phones are off.
5. Make sure every call gets answered
For calls you can’t take yourselves, there are three main options:
- Extra front desk cover during your busiest hours
- A live answering service that takes messages after hours
- An AI phone assistant that can answer common questions, take messages and, in some setups, book appointments into your calendar
Each has trade-offs in cost, quality and how much it can do. Whichever you choose, check that it gives patients a clear next step, and that any provider handling patient information will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA), as required under HIPAA.
The bottom line
Your marketing, your website and your Google profile all exist to make the phone ring. If a third of those calls go unanswered, a large part of that effort is wasted.
The good news is that missed calls are one of the easiest growth problems to fix. Measure them, call back quickly, give patients more ways to reach you and make sure someone, or something, always picks up.
Never miss a new patient call again Ava answers your missed and after-hours calls and books patients straight into your calendar.
FAQ
In Patient Prism’s 2026 analysis of more than 11.5 million calls to US dental practices, 31 out of every 100 callers hung up before reaching anyone.
Rarely. In the same data, fewer than 1 in 100 callers who hung up came back and booked later, and fewer than 5 in 100 received a follow-up call from the practice.
Often outside office hours. In Zocdoc’s data, 48% of bookings were made when doctors’ offices are usually closed.
Common options are online booking, a text-back message, a live answering service or an AI phone assistant. Any provider that handles patient information should sign a Business Associate Agreement under HIPAA.
