You find lapsed patients by exporting your patient list with each person's last visit date, choosing a cut-off by treatment, and filtering the list to people whose last visit is older than that. A spreadsheet is enough to do it, and the result tells you who is due before you spend anything on tools.
This is the first step of patient win-back and it works with Timely, Zenoti, Fresha, Kitomba, Cliniko or any system that can export a CSV. I do not know the exact menus of each system, so I describe the steps in general terms and tell you what to look for.
What do you need from the export?
Four columns are enough to start:
- A patient identifier: name, or better a unique ID
- Contact details: mobile number, and email if you hold it
- Last visit date: the date of the most recent completed appointment
- Last treatment: the service or category of that appointment
Most systems can produce a client list with last visit information, either as a built-in report or as a general export. If yours cannot give you the last visit date directly, export the appointments list and take the latest completed date per patient in a spreadsheet.
How do you pull the export without switching systems?
Export from the system you already use and keep it there. Conduit works the same way: it starts from your system's export or a CSV, and your bookings stay where they are. Updates run from a fresh export, on the schedule you choose.
A direct Timely connection is in progress, but it is not live today, so the export is how it works now. That matters for your own planning too. If you can do the filter in a spreadsheet today, you are not waiting for any integration.
How do you choose the cut-off?
Choose it by treatment, with your practitioners. There is no universal cut-off, and I am not going to invent one. A review that is due after a few weeks for one treatment may be due after many months for another, and your practitioners know the rhythm for each.
For a first look at the whole list, our home page check starts from a simple assumption: no visit in 6 or more months. It is a starting assumption, not a clinical rule, and you can change it. Use it only to size the list, then apply your real intervals when you plan the messages.
How do you filter the list in a spreadsheet?
- 1Open the export and make sure the last visit column is formatted as a date, not text.
- 2Add a column that subtracts the last visit date from today's date.
- 3Sort or filter by that column so the oldest visits come first.
- 4Add a column for your interval by treatment, then flag rows where days since the last visit are larger than the interval.
- 5Count the flagged rows. That is your first lapsed list.
The count is the useful part. It tells you how big the opportunity is before you decide what to do about it, and you can compare it with the assumption we use on the home page: 35% of a patient database with no visit in 6 or more months. If yours is far from that, trust yours.
Who should you leave off the list?
- Patients who asked to stop hearing from you. Anyone who has opted out stays out.
- Patients with a future booking. They are not lapsed.
- Patients whose last visit raised a clinical follow-up. Leave these to your practitioner to handle personally.
- Test records and duplicates. They inflate the count and annoy people.
A message goes to a patient in your clinic's name, with a STOP option, so the people who should not get one need to be clearly marked before anything sends. Clean the list first. I would rather you spend an afternoon on this than send a reminder to someone who asked you not to.
What do you do once you have the list?
Decide the message, test it against the wording rules, send to a small group first and read what comes back. The message itself is covered in what a reminder text can say.
You can do all of this by hand. What Conduit adds is that the list updates from each fresh export, every template is checked and approved, patients hear once, and the report compares patients we messaged with patients we did not. If that is useful, book a 20-minute demo and we will look at your export together. If a spreadsheet and a calendar reminder are enough for your clinic, that is a perfectly honest answer.
How often should you refresh the list?
Whenever you plan to send, and at least once per review cycle. A list from three months ago contains patients who have since booked, moved away or opted out. Sending to them is the quickest way to make a reminder feel careless.
If you do this by hand, put the export in your calendar. If you use a service, check how it updates. In Conduit, updates run from a fresh export on the schedule you choose, so the list is only as current as your last export.
What mistakes should you watch for?
- Using the date of the first booking instead of the last completed visit
- Counting cancelled or no-show appointments as visits
- Mixing treatments with very different review rhythms under one cut-off
- Forgetting that mobile numbers are often the most useful contact and the least complete
The first two are the most common. A cancelled appointment is not a visit, and counting it makes patients look more recent than they are. Check a handful of rows against your calendar before you trust the whole list.