Part of our guide to Compliance & Care Gaps
Overdue Wellness Visit Tracking: Closing the 400-Day Gap
By Diego Pittaluga, Founder / Product Lead at VetPulse
A patient who hasn't been seen in well over a year isn't just a scheduling statistic — it's a care gap for the animal and a quiet revenue gap for the practice, and it's one of the easiest categories of client to lose track of entirely.
Why 400 days, not 365
A strict one-year cutoff catches too much noise — a client who's three weeks late on an annual exam isn't a real problem yet. Somewhere past the year mark, a gap stops looking like normal scheduling drift and starts looking like a patient who's fallen off the practice's radar entirely. That's the threshold worth tracking and acting on, not the smaller day-to-day lateness.
Why this slips through manual tracking
Most practices don't have a standing process for this — it's not a report anyone runs on a schedule, because there's no single obvious trigger the way there is for, say, an lapsed client with a missed reminder. A patient with a quiet, gradually aging last-visit date doesn't generate an alert on its own in most PIMS — someone has to think to go looking for it, and that's the exact task that gets deprioritized during a busy month.
What to do about it
The fix isn't complicated once it's visible: a short list of overdue patients, sorted by how overdue they are, handed to whoever owns recall outreach on a recurring basis. The hard part is generating that list consistently without it being one more manual report someone has to remember to run.
Surfaced automatically
VetPulse flags patients that cross the overdue-wellness threshold as part of its weekly briefing — no manual report required. See care gap detection for the full list of gaps it tracks.