It is Monday morning and hygiene has two open hours on Wednesday. Somewhere in Open Dental there are patients who were due in April and never came back. The Recall List is where you find them.
Where is the recall report in Open Dental?
Open Dental calls it the Recall List. It is not a printed report in the usual sense. It is a live window that reads every patient’s recall record and shows who is due between two dates.
Open it from the Reports menu. The window opens with today’s date range already filled in. Before you change anything, look at the bottom of the window: it shows the count of patients in the list. That number is your starting point for the day.
How do I set up the list so it is useful?
The default view shows everyone due in the next few weeks. That is the wrong list for a Monday. Change three things.
- Dates. Set the start date back six to twelve months. Set the end date to the end of this month. Now you are looking at everyone who was due and has not come in, not just the people due this week.
- Recall type. Leave it on Prophy for a hygiene push. Switch to Perio if you are filling a perio maintenance column. Child Prophy is its own type.
- Status and contacts. Each patient on the list has a recall status (for example “Call back later” or “Left message”) and a count of reminders sent. Sort by the Status column so the ones nobody has touched sit at the top.
One more filter matters more than people realise. Tick the option to exclude patients who already have a scheduled appointment. A patient who is overdue but booked for next Tuesday does not need a call.
What do the columns mean?
| Column | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Due Date | The date Open Dental calculated from the last completed prophy or perio code plus the recall interval |
| Sched | Blank if nothing is booked; otherwise the date of the next appointment |
| # Reminders | How many recall reminders have been sent (postcard, email or text) |
| Status | The note your team set the last time they tried to reach the patient |
| Phone | Home and wireless, so you do not have to open the chart to call |
Due Date is the one to trust. It comes from the recall table, which Open Dental updates every time a prophy or perio maintenance procedure is set complete in procedurelog. If a patient’s due date looks wrong, open the chart and check that the last cleaning was actually marked complete rather than left as treatment planned.
A worked example
A practice with 1,800 active patients runs the list with the start date set twelve months back and the end date set to the end of the month. The window shows 412 patients. After excluding patients who already have an appointment, 127 remain with nothing booked.
Hygiene visits at this practice average $210 in production (prophy, exam and bitewings when due). That is 127 times $210, or $26,670 of visits that exist on paper and not on the schedule.
That figure is found, not recovered. It becomes recovered only when those patients are booked, seen and paid. If the team books 30 of them this month, the recovered number is 30 times $210, or $6,300, and only once the visits are complete.
Who should you call first?
Open Dental lets you sort the list by any column. Three sorts work well.
- Due Date, oldest first. These patients are the most overdue and the most at risk of drifting to another practice.
- # Reminders, zero first. Nobody has reached out yet. A first call usually gets a better answer than a fifth postcard.
- Insurance remaining. This is not a column on the Recall List itself, but the Treatment Finder report under the same Reports menu can list patients with benefits remaining. Cross-check it in the last quarter of the year.
Write what happened in the recall Status field after each call. Next Monday’s list is only as good as the notes you leave today.
What Calibic adds
Calibic’s Smart Recall list is LIVE for Open Dental. It reads the same recall, appointment and procedurelog tables, read-only, and never writes a status or a note back. What it adds is the ordering: patients overdue with nothing booked are ranked by how likely they are to say yes, using their past appointment history, so the first ten calls of the morning are the ones most likely to land. The count sits on the Daily Huddle so the whole team sees it before the first patient.
Calibic does not text or call patients. That part is coming and is marked ROADMAP.
See what the recall list looks like on your own data on the Smart Recall product page, or read the matching guide for finding unscheduled treatment in Open Dental. Everything Calibic reads from Open Dental is listed on the Open Dental integration page.