About two in five. As of September 2026, 42.9% of appointments at the oral surgery practices Kaylie measured were the patient's first visit at that location in nine months — 4,670 of 10,891 appointments from 13 June to 11 September 2026, across five practices and eight locations. For a referral practice that means a large part of the verification work is on patients nobody in the office has verified before, with no earlier breakdown on file to start from.
What we measured
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Appointments measured | 10,891 |
| First visits in nine months | 4,670 (42.9%) |
| Returning patients | 6,221 (57.1%) |
| Practices / locations | 5 / 8 |
Every appointment from 13 June to 11 September 2026 at the oral surgery practices on the DSN and WinOMS practice management systems that Kaylie serves. A first visit is an appointment with no earlier appointment for the same patient at the same location in the 270 days before it. Figures for one practice management system or one location rest on fewer practices than our five-practice reporting bar, so only the combined figure is published.
Nine months is the longest look-back every location supports, so some of these first visits are patients returning after a longer gap. We have not measured how many. Read 42.9% as an upper bound on first-ever visits, not as the figure itself.
What the rest of the schedule is
The other 57.1% are returning patients. Kaylie did not classify them by appointment type, so we will not tell you how many are post-operative checks, second-stage implant visits or staged extractions.
Why it may differ at your practice
Kaylie has not measured how the share differs between practices, and a single practice's figure would fall below our reporting bar. The likeliest driver is the mix of work: a referral for a single procedure, such as third molar extraction, is a first visit followed by a check-up, while an implant placed and restored over months brings the same patient back several times. Treat that as a hypothesis, and count your own schedule before planning on the average.
What it means for verification
- There is nothing to copy forward. A first visit has no last-year breakdown in your records, so every field is looked up fresh — the sedation qualifier, the frequency history, the remaining maximum, the missing-tooth clause for an implant.
- The deadline is set by someone else. A referring dentist books the patient, and the consult can be days away. Verification that runs on a fixed day before the appointment can come too late for a referral booked for the next morning.
- The insurance on file may be thin. A referral can arrive with a card image or a typed carrier name, and a portal lookup needs the subscriber's details — including their date of birth when the subscriber is a parent or spouse rather than the patient.
- The medical plan is in play. Oral surgery is where dental anesthesia and some surgery move to the medical claim — see dental plan vs medical plan for dental anesthesia.
What to do
- Verify at the moment the referral is booked, not on a fixed day before the appointment.
- Ask the referring office for the front and back of every insurance card, medical and dental, and the subscriber's date of birth when the subscriber is not the patient.
- Treat a returning patient's verification as a check that the plan has not changed, and a first visit's as a full breakdown.
- If you are choosing a verification service, test it on first visits, not on your returning patients: see what a WinOMS practice and what a DSN practice should ask.
Numbers last refreshed September 2026.