What Do Empty Chairs Cost Your Practice?

It varies substantially by setting, so the honest answer is that your own figure is the only one worth using. Published Australian and international studies of outpatient and general practice settings report rates commonly falling somewhere between roughly five and twenty per cent, with public and hospital outpatient clinics generally at the higher end and private practices with established patient relationships at the lower end. Rather than benchmarking against a range that wide, pull your own DNA rate from your practice management system, most report it directly, and track whether it is moving.

Use your actual average revenue per appointment, calculated from your own billing data across your real mix of consultation types, item numbers and any private fees. Practices that use a single standard consultation fee typically understate the figure, because the mix includes longer consultations, procedures and allied health items that bill considerably higher. Divide total appointment revenue for a recent month by the number of attended appointments in that month for the most defensible input.

No, and any system promising it should be treated with scepticism. Illness, emergencies, transport failures and genuine emergencies will always produce some non-attendance, and a proportion of patients will forget regardless of how many times they are contacted. A realistic improvement for a practice moving from ad-hoc reminders to systematic confirmation with waitlist filling is a meaningful reduction rather than elimination, which is why the calculator asks for a target rate rather than assuming zero.

The channel matters less than whether the patient is asked to respond and whether the practice acts on non-responses. SMS achieves high open rates and is cheap at volume, which makes it the practical default for most practices, but a two-way SMS that asks for confirmation substantially outperforms a one-way SMS that simply informs. Email suits longer lead times and appointments needing preparation instructions. Phone calls remain valuable for repeat non-attenders and for patients with accessibility needs. Most practices end up using a mix, matched to appointment type and patient cohort.

Many Australian practices do, though the effectiveness is mixed and it carries reputational and access considerations that go beyond the financial. If you choose to, the policy must be communicated clearly at the time of booking, applied consistently, and exercised with judgement in genuine hardship cases. Bear in mind that a fee recovers some revenue but does not fill the clinical slot, so it addresses the symptom rather than the underlying loss. Most practices find that improving confirmation and waitlist filling produces a better result than a fee, and several use both. Check any applicable professional guidance and your own patient agreements before introducing one.

No. Everything is calculated in your browser and nothing is transmitted to us or anyone else. Your inputs are saved only in your own browser storage so the sliders remain set if you return to the page, and you can clear them with the reset button at any time. No patient information should be entered here in any case. The tool only asks for aggregate operational figures such as appointment volumes and average values.