The Focus is on Your Patient and a Smooth Process to Minimize NO-SHOWS
The biggest complaint we hear from patients is about Patient Appointment Management, and the complex communications process surrounding it.
Waiting on hold. No answer. Leave a message. Confusing texts. No callback.  These are all frustration points for your patients, and ones that will cause them to leave if they go unaddressed.
Imagine waiting on hold for 30 minutes just to CANCEL an appointment? You wouldn’t do that, so why expect your patients to.
Average No-Show Rate 18%
THIS IS BAD
What's Your No-Show Rate ?
Your No-Show rate tells us a lot about how you run your business. At an average of 18%, this means more than 18% of your revenue is not being captured and your providers are showing way more unproductive white space than they should. This also means that your patients are being underserved and puts pressure on your re-appointment staff, not to mention patients who miss important appointments and may show up in the Emergency Room.
While the cost of the appointment may only be around $120 on average, the true cost of a missed appointment is more like $427 when you consider the downflow costs.
If the average provider sees 15 patients a day, this represents 540 appointments per year or nearly $220k in lost revenue (per provider).
It doesn’t take much to lose revenue or lose a patient. It also doesn’t take much to reverse the problem.
Patient Appointment Reminders
Getting It Right
There are a lot of reminder systems out there that just don’t do a very good job. Communicating with your patients is a vital skill. The more personalized you can make your system the better response rates you will have; and not just for appointment reminders.
It is vital that your reminder is not an annoyance to your patients. There’s nothing worse than getting a reminder on Sunday morning, or every day for a week before the appointment and then nothing on the day of.
Reminders should also provide a valuable service and helpful options. Do you send a link to a map for directions? How about wayfinding instructions, or where to park? What to bring or what not to eat or drink? Being ill prepared for an appointment is worse than not showing up in some cases.
The cost of some visits is vastly different from others, so your appointment reminders must be capable of adjusting based on appointment type.
Â
Set & Forget
The biggest part of setting up an appointment reminder system is understanding all of your appointment needs and messaging on a per department and a per appointment type.
Some appointments might need special instructions and some might be able to be canceled and reset in the system, while others need to be handled by a human.
Times, dates, locations, and frequency all matter, as do the level of details contained in your messages. Too little and they are not effective; too much and you might have a problem on your hands.
The ultimate objective is to get to a point where everything runs like clockwork, so you can take your hands off the wheel, sit back and relax.
We believe that once your system is set up, you should just manage exceptions and changes
Add Automation & AI
Typically, an appointment reminder system doesn’t interact with the patient very much, and any changes or cancelations often end up in a phone queue, which is what you were probably trying to avoid in the first place.
Adding automation can help manage the call, and can also be extended to include Conversational Intelligence (or CI).
CI allows a patient to talk to the system like a helpful guide, who can take the information from the patient and take action.
Need to make an appointment, no problem, the guide handles new appointments with ease, as well as canceling and moving appointments around.
The system is even smart enough to understand individual doctor’s protocols and select the right doctor for the task.
Of course, connected to your EHR, the calendar is updated and managed, with appointment reminders, of course.
Â
When to Run Your Campaign
Timing of Campaigns
It is important to understand the effect of timing your campaigns for the maximum result. The table below shows how campaigns do not necessarily run through and then repeat immediately. Specific times are chosen to start the campaign and the re-run such as 8:00am on the day prior and 5:00am for email to go out, Noon for Run 2 because of lunch breaks and 7pm – 9pm for dinner and late night do-not-call times.
You may consider changing these times on a per campaign basis or looking at dynamic allocation which
can group or individually select profile data from historic responses.
The example below shows 3 campaigns with the first being email only and the following 2 as voice/SMS.
Note that there are a couple of things to consider. The campaign list will reduce in size when patients respond and you typically remove them from the list. Some circumstances may require you to call anyway, which can be added to the campaign flow.
Days To Run
Typically there are no appointments on Sundays and no reminders, so the campaign days are staggered so as not to include Sunday.
This means that a patient with an appointment on Monday will belong to an email campaign on Thursday, then a call/SMS on Friday and another on Saturday, if they do not respond to any of the attempts. Anyone who does respond will be removed from any follow-up calls and will no longer be on the daily output file from your EHRÂ (Due to confirmation or cancellation being received) for the next day.
In this way, someone who responds to the email will not get a phone call if that’s what you choose.
It is important to note that some religious and other holidays may have special requirements and may not follow a regular pattern
