Treatment plan
The document in which the doctor sets out the stages, timing and cost of treatment after a consultation. For the clinic, it is the offer the patient has to accept and pay for.
≈ treatment plans · patient treatment plan · treatment proposal · treatment estimate
What a treatment plan means for a clinic
For the doctor, a treatment plan is a clinical document. For the clinic, it is also a commercial offer. The patient leaves the consultation with the plan in hand and enters the quietest part of the funnel: thinking it over, comparing, talking to family. If nobody from the clinic gets back in touch during that time, the decision gets made without you.
In dentistry and aesthetic medicine, plans are often multi-stage and expensive. They are rarely paid for on the same day, so handing one over is not enough. Someone has to take the patient through to a decision.
How to measure it at the front desk
The key figure is the plan acceptance rate: the number of plans where the patient booked the first stage or paid a deposit, divided by the number of plans issued in the same period. Track it by doctor and by treatment area. The second figure is how many issued plans are sitting with no answer and no next step.
Common mistakes.
- The plan is handed over on paper and never logged in the CRM, so soon nobody remembers who was offered what.
- The patient only hears the total, not the stages, and the figure scares them more than it should.
- Nobody owns the follow-up: the doctor assumes reception will call, reception assumes the doctor will.
- The first call after the consultation happens too late, or not at all.
What to do: explain the plan stage by stage, agree the date of the next contact before the patient leaves the consultation room, name one person responsible, and keep every open plan in a single list with clear statuses: issued, thinking it over, accepted, declined. You can estimate what unaccepted plans cost your clinic with the loss calculator.