The five numbers an intake report should show

A note on what the numbers are: each one below is measured at your practice by the system, not quoted by us from a study. We have no South Florida averages to give you and the report is more useful because it does not need them.

1. Time to first response, by hour

Not the average. The distribution, by hour of the day and day of the week, so the practice can see that inquiries between 9 AM and 5 PM get answered in twenty minutes and inquiries after 7 PM get answered the next afternoon. That is the chart that makes the case for automation without anyone having to argue it. It is invisible today because nobody timestamps the inquiry and the reply in the same place.

2. Conversion by stage, by language

Of the people who inquired, how many booked; of those, how many showed; of those, how many became active. Then the same three numbers for English-tagged and Spanish-tagged inquiries side by side. The earlier post on the EN/ES gap argues why that split is the one number most bilingual practices have never seen. This is where it lives, and it exists only because the language was tagged at the form.

3. Inquiries by source

Referral, search, directory listing, missed call, walk-in, each with its count and its conversion. A practice discovers that the directory listing it pays for produces inquiries that rarely book, and that missed calls, once texted back, book at a rate nobody expected. Source is on every card, so the report is a filter rather than a research project.

4. Stalls by owner

Cards past their aging threshold, grouped by the clinician or coordinator who holds them. Not as a disciplinary tool; as a load report. When one coordinator holds nine red cards and another holds one, the problem is usually distribution, and the report shows it before the month ends rather than after.

5. The referral loop

For each referring provider or source: sent, scheduled, median days to first visit, never reached. For a medical practice this is the report that keeps referral relationships, because it is the report the referrer never gets from anyone else. Counts and dates only; nothing clinical.

The medical example

A specialty practice with four referring clinics and a Spanish-speaking patient panel. The report shows that referrals from one clinic wait a median of eleven days for a first visit while the others wait six, that Spanish-tagged inquiries book at a lower rate than English ones, and that both of those are the same problem: the records-request stage for that clinic is slow and the follow-up about it goes out in English. That is a finding a practice manager can act on in an afternoon. It was not available before because the pieces were in four systems.

Who sees what

The owner sees all five. A coordinator sees stalls and sources for their own cards. A clinician sees their own pipeline. Access is by role, on a minimum-necessary basis, and the report itself carries no clinical content, so the question of who may see it is a question about operations rather than about privacy.

What a practice does differently

It stops arguing about whether after-hours inquiries matter and looks at the first chart. It stops assuming Spanish-speaking patients are harder to convert and looks at the second. It renegotiates or cancels a directory listing on the third. It rebalances the front desk on the fourth. And it sends each referrer a short note each quarter on the fifth. None of those decisions needs an outside benchmark. They need the practice’s own numbers, which is what the report is.

Questions we get asked about this

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