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By December 31, your practice should know who’s covering intake, how new inquiries are handled, which services have room for new patients, whether lead grading is actually happening, and where leadership will go to review January performance.
At this point, you shouldn’t need another planning meeting about what January might look like. The more useful question is whether the decisions you’ve already made are showing up in the day-to-day process.
That’s what this checklist is for. Go through it with your intake, marketing, and leadership teams before the end of December. Anywhere you can’t confidently check the box is probably worth addressing before January gets busy.
Work with Beacon Media + Marketing to spot the weak points in your lead process before they become January problems.
Can Everyone Explain the January Intake Plan?
Before January, the people handling new inquiries should know exactly what happens when a lead comes in and what they’re responsible for. You’re checking whether the process is clear enough to work on a busy Tuesday without someone having to stop and ask what happens next.
This doesn’t require a giant intake manual. You should be able to answer:
- Who receives a new phone, form, or email inquiry?
- What’s the expected response time?
- Who takes over if the first person is unavailable?
- What happens after the first missed connection?
- Where are follow-up attempts recorded?
- When is a lead considered closed or unresponsive?
We’ve already talked about the mechanics of [setting a follow-up standard your team can actually use]. December is when you find out whether that standard has made it into the actual workflow.
Pull five or 10 recent inquiries and follow them through the process. You’ll get a much better answer than you will by asking everyone whether the system is working.
December check: Choose 10 recent leads at random. Can you see who responded, when they responded, what happened next, and how the lead ultimately ended?
Is Holiday Coverage Actually Assigned?
Holiday coverage should have names and dates attached to it before people start leaving the office. Knowing that “the intake team is covering” isn’t enough if nobody knows who’s watching forms on December 28.
Make the coverage plan specific. Who’s monitoring new website inquiries each day? Who has the phone? Who handles follow-up when the first call isn’t answered? Is there backup coverage if that person is out sick? What happens to an inquiry that comes in after normal hours?
Pay particular attention to the days between Christmas and New Year’s. Normal staffing patterns can change quickly during that week, while your website and paid advertising can continue generating inquiries.
There’s also a practical reason to check the experience yourself. CMS’s 2024 Medicaid and CHIP managed care final rule requires states to use independent entities to conduct annual secret-shopper surveys to evaluate appointment wait times and provider-directory accuracy. CMS also established a maximum appointment wait-time standard of 10 business days for outpatient mental health and substance use disorder services in Medicaid managed care.
Your practice isn’t running a CMS audit on itself, but the basic idea is useful: don’t assume access works because the schedule says someone is covering it. Test it.
December check: Look at every day your normal staffing changes and put one person’s name next to intake coverage, plus a backup.
Holiday coverage is only clear when everyone knows who owns the next inquiry.
Does Marketing Know Where You Actually Have Capacity?
Before January, marketing should know which services, locations, clinicians, or programs can realistically accept new patients. That information should be current enough to guide where you’re putting attention and budget.
This is one of the easiest places for marketing and operations to get out of sync.
A campaign may be performing well for a service that has very little availability. Another program may have room but isn’t receiving the same marketing support. A location could have plenty of capacity on December 15 and be nearly full three weeks later.
Have the capacity conversation before January and decide how changes will be communicated once the month begins.
You don’t have to know exactly how much room you’ll have in January. Just make sure marketing and operations are looking at the same picture and know what happens when availability starts to change.
For example, if an IOP is approaching capacity, who tells the marketing team? Does budget shift somewhere else? Does intake know what alternatives are available? Does leadership want to keep generating inquiries and build a waitlist?
Those decisions are much easier to make before the situation is urgent.
December check: Put your active campaigns next to the services or programs they support. Does current availability still match where you’re spending?
Is Lead Grading Already Happening?
Lead grading should be part of the normal intake process before January begins. A busier month isn’t the time to introduce a system the team hasn’t been using consistently. This is where you can keep the audit very simple.
Pull 20 recent inquiries. Look at whether each one has a lead grade and whether two people looking at the same record would understand why it received that grade.
If your practice uses A, B, and C leads, everyone should be working from the same definitions. If you use qualified and unqualified, the criteria should be just as clear.
Beacon’s 2026 Signal Report found that 79% of practices surveyed tracked where leads came from in some way, but only 32% used a CRM or dedicated system. That leaves plenty of room for important information to live in spreadsheets, inboxes, or someone’s memory instead of following the lead through the process.
December check: Audit 20 recent leads. How many have a source, lead grade, first-contact timestamp, and final outcome recorded? If the answer is 11 out of 20, you’ve found the December project.
Can You Trace One Lead From Source to Outcome?
Pick one test lead and see whether you can follow it through every system your practice depends on. Start with the first marketing interaction and keep going until you reach the final outcome recorded by intake.
Submit a website form yourself. Did the confirmation work? Where did the inquiry go? Did it enter the CRM? Was the source captured correctly? Did the right person get notified? Could they add a lead grade? If you update the outcome, does that information appear where your marketing team expects it?
Then try the phone number. This is especially important if you’ve recently changed your website, CRM, phone system, forms, campaigns, or tracking setup. Small changes can create gaps that aren’t obvious until someone tests the entire path.
This is really a check on the handoff between systems. You want to make sure the form, CRM, tracking, and reporting are still passing the right information from one step to the next.
December check: Send one test inquiry through each major lead source and trace it all the way to the final record.
If you have to ask three different people where the test lead went, write that down too. You should be able to follow a lead through your own systems without reconstructing the story afterward.
Will Your Tracking Hold Up When Volume Increases?
Before January, confirm that the events and outcomes you rely on for marketing decisions are being recorded correctly. Higher volume won’t necessarily break your tracking, but it can make an existing problem much more expensive and much harder to untangle.
Check the basics first. Are website forms firing the correct conversion events? Are tracked calls appearing where they should? Is source information making it into your CRM? Are qualified leads and final outcomes being recorded consistently?
If your practice sends offline conversion data back to ad platforms, check that workflow too.
This isn’t the place to rebuild your entire tracking setup. The December job is simply to make sure what you intend to use in January is working now.
December check: Compare a handful of real leads across your website, CRM, call tracking, and advertising reports. Do the records line up?
Fix unexplained gaps before you’re looking at three times as many records.
Does Leadership Have One View They’ll Actually Open?
Before January starts, decide what leadership will want to know once the month is over and build the reporting around those questions. That keeps the dashboard focused on the numbers they’ll actually use instead of filling it with every metric you have available.
At a minimum, you’ll probably want to see:
- Total inquiries
- Lead source
- Lead quality
- Response time
- Scheduled appointments
- Final outcomes
- Capacity by service or program
Depending on the practice, you may also want payer mix, location, campaign, or service line.
The important part is agreeing on the view before the month begins. Otherwise, February turns into a reporting scavenger hunt where marketing has one set of numbers, intake has another, and leadership is trying to figure out why they don’t match.
This is also where marketing strategy should connect back to what the practice actually cares about. Clicks and form fills can help explain performance, but leadership is usually trying to understand what happened after those inquiries came in.
December check: Open the report leadership will use in February. Is January performance already set up to populate there? If nobody knows which report that is, decide now.
Can You Check Yes to These Before December 31?
By the final week of December, most of the work should already be done. This is the last pass.
Intake
☐ We have a written response-time standard.
☐ Every new inquiry has a clear owner.
☐ Follow-up expectations are documented.
☐ We know where every contact attempt should be recorded.
Holiday Coverage
☐ Every day with reduced staffing has assigned intake coverage.
☐ Backup coverage is identified.
☐ After-hours inquiries have a defined next step.
☐ Forms, voicemail, email, and other lead channels are being monitored.
Capacity
☐ Marketing knows which services currently have availability.
☐ We know who communicates capacity changes.
☐ We have a plan for campaigns supporting services that fill up.
Lead Quality
☐ Intake is actively grading leads.
☐ Everyone is using the same grading criteria.
☐ Recent leads have a final outcome recorded.
Tracking
☐ Website forms have been tested.
☐ Tracked phone numbers work.
☐ Lead sources are being captured correctly.
☐ Conversion events are recording as expected.
☐ We can trace a lead through the full process.
Reporting
☐ Leadership knows which report it will review after January.
☐ The metrics in that report have already been defined.
☐ Marketing and intake are working from the same underlying lead data.
By the end of December, you should have a pretty clear sense of what’s working and what still needs attention. That might be something small, like a form notification going to the wrong inbox, or something bigger, like inconsistent lead grading or unclear holiday coverage. Either way, finding it now gives your team time to fix it before January makes the problem harder to sort through.
Once you’ve worked through the checklist, circle back to anything that’s still open and make sure someone owns the next step. Then run one more test before the month ends.
If you want another set of eyes on your January readiness, contact Beacon Media + Marketing to review how your marketing, tracking, and intake process are working together before the new year.
Frequently Asked Questions
When should a practice complete its January readiness check?
Ideally, most of the work should be finished before the final week of December. That leaves time to test forms, confirm holiday coverage, review recent lead records, and fix smaller issues without trying to make major process changes right before January begins.
Who should be involved in the year-end readiness check?
Include the people responsible for marketing, intake, scheduling, operations, and leadership reporting. You don’t necessarily need everyone in one meeting, but each part of the lead process should have an owner who can confirm that their piece is ready.
What should a practice prioritize if everything isn’t ready?
Start with anything that could prevent a new inquiry from reaching your team or receiving a response. After that, focus on ownership, capacity communication, lead-quality tracking, and the data leadership will need to understand January performance.
How should a practice test its intake process?
Submit a test website form and call the same phone numbers prospective patients use. Track where the inquiry goes, how quickly someone responds, what happens after a missed connection, and whether the activity and final outcome are recorded correctly.
Should January reporting be set up before January begins?
Yes. Decide which metrics leadership will review and where they’ll find them before the month starts. That gives your team time to confirm that the necessary data is being captured instead of discovering missing information when the January report is already due.
