Which Patients Will Ghost? Predicting Dental No-Shows Without the AI Hype

Empty chairs are pure lost revenue, and 'just text everyone a reminder' is the advice every practice gets. I ran 110,000 real appointments through plain, old-fashioned machine learning — no LLM in sight — and found the reminder advice is half a trap. Here's who actually no-shows, why the obvious reading of the data is wrong, and the dollar value of calling the right 20% instead of everyone.