Pulling a lapsed-patient list out of your practice software

Menu labels move between versions and every practice has its own report set, so this is written as what to ask for rather than a click path that will be wrong for half the people reading it. If your software can produce a patient list filtered by last visit date, it can produce this.

1. Decide what counts as lapsed before you touch the software

   Pick a window and be specific, because the report needs a date. Twelve months or more since the last completed visit is the usual starting point for a general practice on six-month recall: long enough that they have clearly drifted, recent enough that they still recognise the name. Shorter windows pull people who were simply going to rebook anyway; much longer ones pull people who have moved away.

2. Ask for a patient list filtered on last visit date

   The report you want is whichever one lists patients with a date filter on last visit or last completed appointment — often found under reports, lists, or queries depending on the system. What matters is the filter, not the name of the report. Set it to patients whose last visit falls before your cut-off date.

3. Exclude the people you should not be mailing

   Before exporting, take out anyone marked inactive, deceased, moved, or flagged as no-contact, and anyone with an active treatment plan or a future appointment already booked — mailing a reactivation offer to someone who is coming in on Tuesday reads as carelessness. Most systems can filter these out in the same report; if yours cannot, they are quick to remove in the spreadsheet afterwards.

4. Include the address columns, not just the name

   Recall reports often default to name and phone, because they were designed for calling. You need the mailing address: street, city, state and ZIP, all four. Add the address fields to the report's column list before you run it, or you will get a clean list of people you cannot mail.

5. Keep the patient id column

   Whatever your system calls its internal id — PatNum in Open Dental, the chart number in Dentrix, the patient id in Eaglesoft — leave it in the export. CardCadence stores it alongside the contact, so when you run the same report in six months you can tell who is genuinely new rather than matching on names that are spelled differently in the two files.

6. Export to CSV and check the row count

   Export as CSV, then look at the number of rows before you upload anything. A list far larger than you expected usually means the date filter did not apply; a list far smaller usually means an extra filter is still set from the last time someone ran that report. It is a five-second check that catches most bad exports.

If your software will not filter on last visit

Some older or lighter systems will not filter the way you need. Export the full active patient list with addresses and last-visit dates, open it in a spreadsheet, sort by the date column and delete everyone above your cut-off. It is not elegant and it works.

One thing worth not putting on a postcard

Whatever the export contains, keep clinical detail off the card itself. A postcard is readable by anyone who handles it, so treatment, diagnosis and procedure notes belong in an envelope if they are going out at all. Names and addresses are what a reactivation card needs; the reason for the visit is not.