Ask a practice owner how many calls they miss and you will usually hear “not many”. Ask the front desk and you will hear something different. The truth is in your phone data, and most clinics never look at it. This guide shows you how to measure missed calls in a week, and how to put a dollar figure on them.
Why are missed calls so easy to overlook?
A missed call leaves no gap in your schedule. The patient who could not get through does not appear as a no-show or a cancellation. They just book somewhere else. The schedule still looks full enough, so the problem stays invisible.
Missed calls also bunch up at predictable times that owners rarely see: the first half hour after opening, lunch, the end-of-day check-out rush, and after hours. Clinic staff tell us calls go to voicemail at lunch, after hours and at weekends, often because the one person on the desk is helping a patient in front of them.
How do you measure missed calls in one week?
You do not need new software. You need three sources of information.
1. Your phone system’s reports. Most business phone systems and VoIP providers can show total inbound calls, answered calls, unanswered calls and calls abandoned on hold. Export a week, or better, a month. If you cannot find it, ask your phone provider for “inbound call detail records”.
2. Test calls. Ask someone outside the clinic to call at these times over a week and note what happens:
- 10 minutes after opening
- 12:15 pm and 1:00 pm
- 10 minutes before closing
- 30 minutes after closing
- Saturday mid-morning
Did someone answer? How long did it ring? Did voicemail say when you would call back?
3. Voicemail and callback logs. Count voicemails left in the same week and how many were returned the same day.
Put it together and you will have a rough unanswered rate: unanswered plus abandoned calls, divided by total inbound calls.
What does a missed call cost?
Here is the formula we use in our calculator and in free audits:
Monthly lost revenue = calls per month × % unanswered × % new patients × % who would book × new-patient value
Each part matters:
- Calls per month. From your phone reports.
- % unanswered. From the step above.
- % new patients. Of all callers, how many are new? Your front desk can estimate this, or you can sample a few days.
- % who would book. Not every new caller would have become a patient. Using 50% is a reasonable starting point, but adjust it to your experience.
- New-patient value. The total revenue from a typical new patient over their care, not one visit.
A worked example
Take a clinic with these numbers (the defaults in our calculator, which you should replace with your own):
| Input | Value |
|---|---|
| Calls per month | 300 |
| Unanswered | 25% |
| New patients among callers | 15% |
| Would have booked | 50% |
| New-patient value | $650 |
300 × 0.25 = 75 unanswered calls. 75 × 0.15 = about 11 new patients. 11.25 × 0.5 = about 5.6 lost bookings. 5.6 × $650 = about $3,656 a month, or roughly $43,875 a year.
That is an illustrative estimate. It does not count existing patients who could not reschedule, which leads to empty slots, or the cost of staff time spent returning voicemails.
For context on visit value: Chiropractic Economics puts the average chiropractic visit fee at about $60.30. A new patient on a care plan is worth many visits, which is why new-patient value is much higher than one visit fee.
Why do callers not just leave a voicemail?
Some do. Many do not. In CallRail’s 2025 research, 82% of callers said they would call a competitor if they could not get through. A new patient searching on their phone has a list of clinics in front of them. Calling the next one is easier than waiting for a callback.
Existing patients are more forgiving, but a patient who cannot reach you to reschedule often becomes a no-show, and a patient who misses a couple of visits is at risk of dropping off altogether. We cover that in how to stop losing patients who drop off mid-treatment.
What can you do about it?
Once you know your numbers, the fixes are straightforward. Pick the one that matches where your calls are lost.
- Stagger lunch breaks so the phone is always covered. Free, but hard with a small team.
- Add a part-time receptionist for peak hours. The median US receptionist earns about $22 an hour (Bureau of Labor Statistics).
- Use an answering service for after hours. Good for messages, but many cannot book.
- Use an AI receptionist for overflow and after hours, which answers, books by your rules and hands anything sensitive to a person. See how our AI receptionist works.
Most clinics combine these. The point is to stop guessing.
What should you measure after you fix it?
Track the same numbers monthly: total calls, unanswered rate, new patients booked by phone, and voicemails left. If the unanswered rate drops and new-patient bookings rise, it is working. If not, look at when calls are still being lost.
If you would rather not do the legwork, our free audit does it for you. We make the test calls, review your data and give you the number, with every assumption written down. It works the same for chiropractic clinics, dental practices and rehab clinics.