How to Get Old Dental Patients Back: A Recall Guide for Philippine Clinics
Pick a week from two years ago and read down your appointment book. You will recognise most of the names. Now work out which of those people you have seen since.
The ones who never came back mostly did not leave angry. They moved, or six months turned into a year, or they meant to book after the holidays and then it was March. Nobody made a decision. The appointment just never got made, and the clinic never noticed, because a patient who stops coming doesn't generate a single piece of paper.
That's the whole opportunity. These people already know where you are, already trust you enough to have opened their mouth in your chair, and cost almost nothing to reach. Compared with buying attention from strangers on Facebook, it is not close.
The problem is that almost every guide you will find on this is written for the United States, and the standard American advice is to text your lapsed list a comeback offer. For a Philippine dentist that single sentence breaks two separate rules. So the useful version of this article has to start with what you are allowed to send.
The short version
Seven steps, in the order I would do them:
- Pull every patient with no visit in the last 12 months, and sort them by how long it has been.
- Read Section 19.3 of the Code of Ethics before you write anything. It rules out the discount.
- Understand that your patient list is health data under the Data Privacy Act, which is a stricter category than an ordinary customer list.
- Write the message as a recall, not a promo. You are telling somebody they are due, not selling them something.
- Three touches over about three weeks, then stop.
- Offer two specific times instead of asking when they are free.
- Make sure somebody can actually answer the replies, because the replies all arrive at once.
Steps 4 and 7 are where clinics lose this. Everything else is admin.
Who counts as an old patient
There is no legal definition, so pick one and be consistent. The American Dental Association defines an inactive patient of record as somebody who has not received any dental service from the dentist in the past 24 months. That is a records-management line rather than a marketing one, and 24 months is late to start caring.
For a working list, I would cut it three ways:
| Time since last visit | What is probably going on | What to send |
|---|---|---|
| 6 to 12 months | Meant to rebook, life happened | A normal recall. Most of your recoveries are here |
| 12 to 24 months | Drifted. May have gone somewhere else once | A recall that acknowledges the gap without making a thing of it |
| Over 24 months | Moved, changed jobs, or found another clinic | One message. Do not build a sequence around this group |
Work the 6 to 12 month group first. They are the easiest to bring back and there are usually more of them than the owner expects, because nobody has been counting.
One thing worth saying out loud before you write the message: the six-month check-up is a convention rather than a proven optimum. A Cochrane review of recall intervals found little to no difference in adults between risk-based and six-monthly recall over four years. That doesn't make recall pointless. It means you should not build your message on urgency you cannot support. Write "you are due for a check-up", not "your teeth are at risk".
Two rules decide what you are allowed to send
The imported advice skips this, and it's what changes the message.
The Code of Ethics rules out the discount
Philippine dentists work under a Code of Ethics adopted by the Board of Dentistry through PRC Board Resolution No. 14, series of 2008, published by the Philippine Dental Association. Section 19.3, on soliciting patients, is short and blunt:
A dentist shall not solicit patients personally or employ his/her patients, agents, or agencies to solicit patients for him/her. He/she shall not accept/offer rebates or receive commissions for referrals; nor engage in any promotional activity which will be degrading the dignity of the profession. Piracy of patients shall be avoided at all times. Offering "Promotional Rates" shall not be allowed in the practice of the dental profession.
Section 20.3.4 then extends the same standard to everything you send electronically, so your SMS blast and your Messenger broadcast are held to the same line as your signage.
That takes the entire American reactivation playbook off the table. No "we miss you, here is 20 percent off". No ₱499 comeback cleaning. No limited-time offer for patients who have not visited since 2024. Those are the three most common templates you will find online and all three are out.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Read the code yourself, and if something sits near the line, ask the PDA before you send it rather than after.
The Data Privacy Act treats your patient list as health data
The second rule is the one almost nobody checks, and it is the more serious of the two.
Under the Data Privacy Act of 2012, Section 3 defines sensitive personal information to include information about an individual's health. Your patient list is exactly that. It isn't a customer list. It is a list of people whose health information you hold, and the law treats those two things very differently.
Ordinary personal information can be processed under Section 12, which includes a legitimate-interest ground at 12(f). That is the ground most businesses lean on for direct marketing. Sensitive personal information is governed by Section 13 instead, which begins by prohibiting processing and then lists the exceptions. There is no legitimate-interest exception in that list.
What Section 13 does include, at 13(e), is processing that "is necessary for purposes of medical treatment, is carried out by a medical practitioner or a medical treatment institution, and an adequate level of protection of personal information is ensured".
I want to be careful here, because the boundary has not been tested in a way I can point you to. But the shape of it is clear enough to act on. A message telling a patient of yours that they are due for a check-up is a message about their care, sent by their clinic. A blast advertising this month's whitening price to the same list is marketing, and it has to find its footing somewhere in Section 13 without the legitimate-interest ground an ordinary retailer would use. Those are not the same message, and it is a mistake to send them under the same assumption.
What that means in practice:
- Send recalls, not offers. The Code of Ethics reaches the same conclusion by a completely different route, which is a good sign you are on the right side of it.
- Start collecting consent now, separately. If you want to send genuine marketing later, ask for it at the front desk as its own tick box, worded for that purpose, and keep the record. Consent bundled into a general form is weak consent.
- Honour a stop immediately. If somebody replies STOP or asks not to be contacted, take them off the list that day and make sure whoever does the sending knows they came off.
- Say who you are in the first line. A recall from an unidentified number reads as spam, and it is a worse privacy posture besides.
- Publish a privacy notice. Ours is at otterflow.ph/privacy if you want to see the shape of one.
What that leaves you
A recall. Which is what works anyway.
The reason has nothing to do with the law. "We miss you, here is a discount" tells the patient you want their money. "You are due for a cleaning, and I have Tuesday at 10 or Thursday at 2" tells them you are doing your job. The second one is easier to say yes to, easier for your front desk to say without cringing, and it does not train your patients to wait for the next promo before booking.
Build the list before you write a single message
Most small clinics don't have a clean list, which is why this never gets done. Give it one evening.
If you are on clinic software, export patients with a last-visit date older than 12 months. If you are on paper, or on a mix of paper and Excel, work backwards through the appointment book month by month, starting 12 months ago and going back 24. Write down name, mobile number, last visit date, and what they came in for.
Then clean it, because sending to a bad list is how you end up looking careless:
- Remove anyone you have seen recently under a different spelling of their name. Duplicates are the most common problem in a hand-built list.
- Remove anyone who has told you they moved, or who you know has passed away. Somebody at the clinic usually knows.
- Remove anyone who asked not to be contacted, and keep that removal list permanently.
- Flag anyone with unfinished treatment. Those are a different and more urgent conversation than a routine recall.
The unfinished-treatment group deserves its own note. A patient who started braces and stopped, or who was told they needed two fillings and only had one done, is not a marketing target. They are a clinical loose end, and following that up is straightforwardly your job.
The sequence
Three touches over about three weeks, then stop.
| Touch | When | Channel | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Day 1 | SMS | Says who you are, that they are due, and offers two times |
| 2 | Day 8 | Messenger, if you have the thread | Short and friendly, no new information |
| 3 | Day 21 | SMS | Last one. Says you will leave it there |
Then you stop for a year. Not because a fourth message would fail, but because a clinic that keeps texting somebody who has ignored three messages is doing the thing Section 19.3 is worried about. There's also the plain reading of it: three ignored messages is an answer.
Two operational notes. Do not send the whole list on one afternoon, because every reply then lands on the same person at the same time, and anyone who waits more than a few hours for an answer will drift off again. Fifteen or twenty a day is a sensible pace for a clinic doing this by hand.
And if you are sending from an ordinary front desk mobile rather than a registered sender, the deliverability rules are not intuitive in the Philippines and messages fail silently. We wrote up what actually gets delivered here, including why some perfectly normal-looking texts never arrive.
What to actually say
Keep it short, name the clinic in the first line, and finish with two specific times. "When are you free po?" hands the work back to the patient and the conversation dies there.
Touch 1, six to twelve months since the last visit:
Hi Ms. Reyes, this is Sundial Dental in Mandaue. Our records show your last cleaning was March last year, so you are due for a check-up. We have Tuesday 10:00 AM or Thursday 2:30 PM open this week. Reply with whichever suits you, or reply STOP if you would rather we did not text.
The same message in Taglish, if that is how you already speak to your patients:
Hi Ms. Reyes, from Sundial Dental po sa Mandaue. Last cleaning niyo po was March last year, so due na po kayo for check-up. May slot po kami Tuesday 10:00 AM or Thursday 2:30 PM. Reply lang po kung alin ang okay, or reply STOP po kung ayaw niyo nang matext.
Touch 2, on Messenger:
Hi Ms. Reyes, just following up on the check-up. Still happy to hold Tuesday or Thursday for you if either works.
Touch 3:
Hi Ms. Reyes, last message from us about your check-up. If you would like to come in, message us anytime and we will find you a slot. Otherwise we will leave you to it.
Unfinished treatment, which is a different message:
Hi Mr. Cruz, this is Sundial Dental. You had one of two fillings done last August and the second one was never scheduled. Worth getting it looked at before it gets uncomfortable. We have Wednesday 3:00 PM or Saturday 9:00 AM if you would like to come in.
Notice what is not in any of them. No discount, no "we miss you", no countdown, no claim about what will happen to their teeth. Just the fact that they are due, and two times.
The part nobody plans for
You send forty messages on Monday morning. By lunchtime you have nine replies. Four of them ask a price question first, two want a different day than the two you offered, one asks whether you accept their HMO, one says "ok po" and nothing else, and one asks if the same dentist is still there.
Your receptionist is also running the front desk. By the time she gets to them it's closing time, and the two who needed a different day have gone quiet again.
This is where reactivation attempts die, and it isn't a motivation problem. Every one of those nine replies needs somebody to check availability, answer honestly, and hold a slot. That is five minutes of attention each, on a day that did not have forty-five spare minutes in it. The clinics that get results from a recall list are the ones that decided in advance who was answering and cleared the time to do it.
If that person does not exist at your clinic, either send in much smaller batches, or automate the answering rather than the sending. Automating the sending on its own makes the problem worse, because you have now generated demand you cannot catch.
Common mistakes
Leading with the discount. Banned, as above, and it also teaches patients to wait for the next one.
Sending to everybody at once. The replies are the constraint, not the sends.
Asking "when are you free?" It sounds accommodating and it kills the conversation. Two named slots turn a question into a decision.
Making the patient feel caught out. "We noticed you have not visited in a long time" reads as a reprimand. They know. Say they are due and move on.
Sending from a number nobody recognises. If the reply goes to a phone that sits in a drawer, you have wasted the whole exercise.
Treating it as a one-off. The reason your list got this big is that nothing catches a patient in the month after they were due. Run the sequence once to clear the backlog, then set up a rolling recall so the backlog never rebuilds. The rolling version is much less work than the cleanup you are doing now.
Reusing the list for marketing later. The recall is defensible because it is about their care. That does not extend to next year's summer promo.
How to tell whether it worked
Count four numbers, and write them down before you start so you have something to compare against:
- How many patients you contacted
- How many replied
- How many booked
- How many actually turned up
The fourth one matters most, and it's the one people forget. A recall list will no-show more than a normal booking, because the patient is agreeing to something they had already let slide once. Confirm in writing, remind the day before, and read our guide on no-shows if that number comes back ugly.
You will find plenty of vendor pages quoting figures for this. Four or five in ten will book. Reactivating a patient costs five to seven times less than acquiring one. I have not found a primary source for any of them, so I would not plan around them. Your own four numbers, from your own list, are worth more than somebody else's benchmark.
The cost side needs no benchmark. The list is already yours, the messages cost pesos, and the patients already know how to get to you.
Where OtterFlow fits
The bottleneck in this whole exercise is the replies, and that is the part we built for.
Bringing patients back is one of the things OtterFlow runs for a clinic. The recall goes out on the schedule you set. When a patient replies, Flo answers the price and schedule questions from information you approved, checks what is genuinely open rather than guessing, offers real times, and writes the booking. The confirmation SMS goes out immediately, the reminder follows before the appointment, and somebody who does not turn up gets a rebooking link instead of disappearing back onto the list you just worked through. It answers in English, Taglish or Bisaya, matching however the patient writes. Anything it does not know goes to your team rather than being guessed at, and your staff can take over any conversation completely.
It will not write you a promo, because the Code of Ethics does not allow one. What it does is make sure the forty messages you send on Monday do not produce nine replies nobody has time to answer.
If you would like to see it running against your own services and hours, that is what the fifteen-minute call is for.
Questions clinic owners ask
Can I text a patient who has not been to my clinic in three years?
Texting your own former patient is not the same as buying a list. It's a clinic contacting its own patient of record, which is ordinary practice. Keep it to the fact that they are due, honour any request to stop, and identify yourself clearly. After three years I would send one message rather than a sequence, because by then most people have found another dentist and repeated contact starts to look like solicitation.
Is it against the rules to offer a free consultation to bring someone back?
A free consultation is not a "Promotional Rate" in the plain sense, but it is a price inducement aimed at recruiting a visit, and Section 19.3 is written broadly about promotional activity. I would not build a recall around one, and I would ask the PDA before running it as a campaign.
Should I use SMS, Messenger, or a phone call?
SMS for the first touch, because it reaches everyone and does not depend on them opening an app. Messenger for the second, and only if you already have a conversation with that person. A phone call is the most effective of the three and the least scalable, so save it for the unfinished-treatment list where it is worth the time.
How often should I run this?
Once to clear the backlog, then never again as a project. Set up a rolling recall that catches patients in the month they become due, and the backlog stops forming.
What if they reply asking about a price?
Answer it. Refusing to quote and asking the patient to come in is the most expensive habit in Philippine clinics, and it is doubly costly here, because this patient already stopped coming once. If the price genuinely varies, give the range and say what decides it.