Eleven stages, each with an objective, an owner, a risk and a number that tells you whether it is working.
Most international dental operations are described as “inquiry to treatment”. In practice there are eleven distinct operational stages between the first message and a referral, and each one has its own failure mode. This page defines them so the operation can be run deliberately rather than reactively.
Read each stage as an operating contract: what it is for, what the patient is doing, what the clinic owes, and how you know it worked.
The first contact from an international patient, on any channel.
Collect the case information required for clinical evaluation.
Route the patient case to the correct clinical decision-maker.
Turn the clinical decision into a structured patient proposal.
Deliver pricing, scope and staging in a comparable form.
Keep the decision process visible until the patient books, declines or postpones.
Convert an agreed plan into confirmed dates and a confirmed commitment.
Coordinate flights, transfer, accommodation and arrival windows.
Keep the clinical schedule, the coordinator and the patient aligned on site.
Stay present after departure, when remote patients are easiest to lose.
Bring completed patients back for second stages, recalls and referrals.
The conversation stays where the patient already is. Stage, ownership and due dates live in PFI.
Imaging, clinical decision, plan, quote, booking and travel attach to the same patient case.
Because every stage has a state, the reporting layer is a by-product of operating, not a separate exercise.
Median time to the first meaningful reply.
Share of qualified inquiries with usable imaging.
Cases returned with a clinical decision.
Reviewed cases converted into a documented plan.
Plans that become confirmed bookings.
Bookings that physically arrive.
Sample Data
No. A single-visit case may compress travel and multi-stage treatment into one block, but the operational states still exist and still need an owner.
Ownership is explicit at every stage. When a case moves to clinical review, the reviewer owns it; when the decision returns, the coordinator owns it again.
No. Clinical evaluation and treatment planning are performed by your clinicians. PFI structures how cases reach them and what happens to the decision afterwards.
The industry page introduces the market. This page defines the operating model behind it.
Model your current flow with your own numbers, then review the result with us.