I am considering a practice acquisition and am scheduled to meet with the owner. I have already toured the office and have some information.

At this appointment I am going to be counting the charts and verifying the information given to me.

So I was looking for suggestions on counting charts. What is a good technique? What would you consider an active patient- seen in the last year? What types of things would you recommend looking for?

Thanks for the help

What I want to know is the number of patients that are coming to the office on a regular basis.

The baseline number is those patients that are seen twice per year in your hygiene program. Therefore, even looking at the hygiene schedule for the past six months or the last 12 months and dividing by 2 will give you a good baseline. You could even count the number of hygiene appointments in the last 18 months and divide by 3, you’d still get approximately the same result.

I usually add 10-15 % to that figure to arrive at the “active” number. Let’s face it, the patients going through the hygiene schedule will almost always drive the production of the office, they are the backbone.

There are always many more charts, I just don’t consider them “active”.

Are they important? Probably, I just wouldn’t rely on them in terms of assessing what I’m buying.

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