Dental Practice Management Rules on How to Handle Cancellations and No Shows
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 1 September 2025
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of shared practices, hosts Richard and Caitlin dive into the critical world of dental practice management to help listeners navigate dental practice ownership by tackling the persistent operational pain point of patient cancellations.
Caitlin shares her proven dental business strategies for minimizing schedule holes, detailing a framework that leverages a $50 hourly broken appointment fee for no-shows or requiring upfront prepayments for large production cases to ensure patients have skin in the game.
The hosts engage in a strategic debate regarding whether strict financial penalties risk damaging patient goodwill and triggering negative reviews, or if failing to implement firm boundaries under modern dental practice management ultimately leaves the practice owner to suffer.
To optimize your dental practice management protocols and retrain your patient base to respect provider time, this is a must-listen for clinicians managing an associate to owner transition or vetting acquisitions in dentistry.
In this episode:
- Emphasizing the mindset that last-minute schedule changes are completely abnormal.
- Scripting strategies to confront cancellations and uncover the patient's true objection.
- The operational debate surrounding a $50 hourly broken appointment fee versus preserving patient goodwill.
- Requiring upfront case deposits and prepayments to protect high-production blocks.
- Transitioning chronic offenders to a short-call or same-day scheduling list via a three-strike rule.
Whether navigating an associate to owner transition or vetting acquisitions in dentistry, this is your survival guide. Ready to scale your dental practice ownership?
Visit https://sharedpractices.com/ for our "Free Look" service and follow our social channels for roadmap updates. Join the community and turn your clinical skills into a thriving business.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Shared Practices podcast. I am joined back again by Caitlin. You are, it's been four or five months. I know people, people were asking at the event about some exciting things in your life. So welcome back and tell us, tell us about your life now. Thank you. It's so good to be back. Yes, |
| 0:22.4 | I had my baby, Caden, about four and a half months ago. And so I've been back into coaching |
| 0:28.5 | calls and in the swing of things for over two months now. But it's my first time back on the podcast. |
| 0:35.2 | And I've kind of been itching to get back and talk with you all, so this is fun. |
| 0:39.1 | This is awesome. This is perfect. Well, sleep in the night at all or not really? As a matter of fact, he slept eight hours last night. So you're catching me on a really good day, but you know, every night's an adventure, right? Which ironically, you're catching me on a bad day. |
| 0:52.9 | My two-year-old woke up at 2 a.m. last night, |
| 0:55.9 | and we had a party from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m. as I tried to get her back to sleep. And then I couldn't |
| 1:01.2 | fall back to sleep after that. Yeah. It's 2 a.m. Oh, I'm sorry. You don't look like it for whatever |
| 1:06.3 | that's worth. Yeah, we'll see how this goes. If I'm in clear and in this episode, that's to blame. |
| 1:13.0 | Well, with that, you suggested the topic for this one. I thought it was really exciting. |
| 1:17.6 | Tell us what we're going to be talking about. This is a theme of my coaching calls recently. |
| 1:23.1 | And so I usually take inspiration from those, right? Because clearly it's a relevant pain point. |
| 1:28.9 | It's a relevant topic in offices that I'm working in every day. |
| 1:32.3 | And so I figure for our audience, why not expand the conversation? |
| 1:36.3 | You know, it sounds simple at first, which is essentially handling those last-minute changes to your schedule, |
| 1:42.9 | handling patients wanting to cancel at the last |
| 1:45.2 | minute without much notice. You know, we've talked about cancellation verbiage back in the archives and |
| 1:50.4 | everything, but I just want to talk about it as a whole, you know, and really the concept of |
| 1:55.3 | what we're doing big picture is trying to train our patients to respect our time. Respect our provider time, respect our |
| 2:03.0 | schedule. And so I want to talk about it kind of philosophically and then maybe get into some |
| 2:08.1 | various strategies because I think it's more than just do we do the broken appointment fee? Yes or no, right? |
| 2:14.8 | Well, and I love actually even the frame of this of training our patients, because |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.