The treatment coordinator handover: what marketing must pass on
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A treatment coordinator's conversion rate, the share of patients who accept a treatment plan after consultation, depends partly on what reaches the coordinator before the patient walks in. If the coordinator doesn't know what the advert promised, what the patient asked at enquiry, or which channel they came from, the consultation starts cold. That handover is where marketing's job meets the practice's.
A treatment coordinator, or TCO, is the team member who talks a patient through their plan, costs and finance after the clinical assessment. This page isn't about how a TCO should run a consultation; that is a clinical and team skill I don't teach. It covers the marketing side: what the TCO needs, how the source is recorded, how acceptance is measured, and how the result is fed back to the ad platforms. It's one stage of what happens after the enquiry.
What the TCO needs from marketing
A patient who has seen your advert, read your implant page and asked about finance on the phone arrives with expectations. The TCO should know them before the consultation starts.
| Handover item | Why it matters in the consultation |
|---|---|
| Treatment enquired about | Prepares the right options and costs |
| The advert, page or offer they responded to | The TCO can match what was promised: a price range, a finance example, a free consultation |
| Questions asked at enquiry | Cost, pain, sedation, time off work: the worries to address first |
| Channel and date of first contact | Context for how far into their decision the patient is |
| Previous contact | Earlier enquiries, a missed call, a cancelled consultation |
| Consent status for later contact | Whether the practice may email or text them about treatment |
Most of this can be captured without extra work: the form fields, the call-tracking record and a short note from whoever took the call. The discipline is putting it where the TCO will read it, usually a note on the patient's record in the practice management system (PMS).
For long-consideration treatment the handover matters more, because the patient may have been researching for months. The stages of that decision are mapped in how full-arch patients decide.
Recording the source
Source is the channel and campaign that produced the enquiry. If it isn't recorded at booking, nothing that happens later can be tied back to the spend.
| Method | What it captures | Weakness |
|---|---|---|
| "How did you hear about us?" asked at booking | The patient's memory | Vague and often wrong; "Google" covers ads, maps and organic |
| A fixed source list in the practice system | Consistent categories | Only as good as whoever picks from it |
| Hidden fields on web forms | Channel, campaign and the ad click identifier | Needs the form and the practice system to talk to each other |
| Call tracking | Source of each call | Needs matching to the patient record |
The click identifier is the key piece. With auto-tagging switched on, Google Ads adds a Google Click ID, or GCLID, to ad clicks, and offline conversion import uses it to match a later booking to the click1. Store it with the enquiry, carry it to the patient record, and the rest of the chain becomes possible. If you use Dentally, the practical steps are in tracking Dentally bookings to your ads.
Measuring acceptance
Treatment acceptance is plans accepted divided by consultations attended. Plans accepted divided by plans presented is a separate coordinator measure, not the acceptance rate. Both need clear definitions, agreed with the TCO, before anyone reads the numbers.
| Term | Definition to agree |
|---|---|
| Consultation attended | The patient turned up and the appointment is marked completed |
| Plan presented | A written plan with costs given to the patient |
| Treatment accepted | Signed, or a deposit paid, not "sounds good" |
| Treatment started | First clinical appointment of the accepted plan |
| Time to decision | Days from consultation to acceptance |
Report acceptance by source and by treatment line, not only as one practice figure. If patients from one campaign accept far less often than patients from another, the problem may be what that campaign promised, not what happened in the consultation. That is information marketing can act on.
Feeding it back
Acceptance data is most valuable when the treatment start that follows it goes back to Google Ads, because that teaches automated bidding which clicks become patients. Without it, the platforms optimise for enquiries, cheap or not.
Three constraints shape how this works:
- Time. Google Ads won't import an offline conversion uploaded more than 90 days after the last click, or 63 days for enhanced conversions for leads2. Acceptance that comes later still belongs in your own reporting, but it can't train the platform.
- Delay. Google notes that conversions within a day of the click may not be recordable yet1, so uploads run on a schedule, not instantly.
- Data minimisation. Health data is special category data under UK GDPR3. Send the platform only that a conversion happened and its value, under a generic conversion name. Never send clinical detail.
The same principle applies to the earlier stages. Booked and attended consultations and treatment starts go back to Google Ads within its upload window, each as its own conversion, so the platform sees the whole path. Acceptance itself, and treatment completed later, are measured in the practice's own report.
The TCO owns the consultation and any follow-up with the patient. Marketing's part is making sure the TCO starts with the full picture, and that the outcome finds its way back to the spend. If you want that chain built from your enquiry forms to your ad accounts, email me at Fayez@imfayez.com. How an engagement runs is in how I work.
Sources
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Google Ads Help: Import conversions from ad clicks into Google Ads using files, accessed 1 October 2026. ↩ ↩2
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Google Ads Help: Guidelines for importing offline conversions, accessed 1 October 2026. ↩
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ICO: What is special category data?, accessed 1 October 2026. ↩