Every clinic is a bucket. New patients pour in, some patients drift away, and some lapsed patients can be brought back. The balance decides where your patient base ends up. Your chairs and providers decide how big the bucket is.
Four of these come straight from your practice software. The defaults are starting points, not your clinic.
These set how many patients the clinic can fully serve. Most owners know these numbers better than their capacity, so the model works it out.
Three different problems need three different fixes. Marketing does not fix a supply problem, and hiring does not fix a demand problem.
Demand problem. Your patients cannot fill the time you have. Win and keep more patients.
Booking problem. Your patients need the time, but it is not getting booked. Fix recall and scheduling first.
Supply problem. Your patients need more time than your chairs and providers have. Add providers, chairs or hours.
Set a target for each lever. The chart shows today's path against the path with your changes.
Revenue follows the patient base. A buyer pays for the trend, not just this year.
The model runs month by month. Each month, active patients lose a share of themselves to the lapsed pool. New patients and patients brought back from the lapsed pool join, as long as there is room. The lapsed pool is recalculated every month: it grows with patients lost, shrinks with patients brought back, and loses about a third of the remainder each year as they move out of reach.
Capacity is the number of patients your chairs and providers can fully serve at your visit pattern: hygiene hours for hygiene recall, chair and dentist time for dentistry (a dentist running two chairs uses two operatories each day worked), and chair and denturist time for dentures (lab time counts against the denturist when they do their own lab work). Weeks open a year: 48. When the base reaches capacity, new and returning patients cannot be booked and are counted as turned away.
Demand is what your active patients need as a share of full capacity. Compared with your schedule estimate, it separates a demand problem, a booking problem and a supply problem.
An active patient is counted as one seen in the last 18 months; use the same definition when you pull numbers from your software. The defaults are starting points, not benchmarks: no objective public data on patient loss or reactivation rates was found for Canadian clinics, so replace them with your own numbers. Visit times, lab times and visits per chair are the clinic model's placeholders.
Get the numbers you entered and a link that reopens this tool exactly as you left it.