Appointment Confirmation Process

Back in June 2011, the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) released the results of its member survey. Members indicated that the top challenges they faced were:

• Changing reimbursement models that place a greater share of financial risk on practices 
• EHR issues - selecting and implementing the EHR system and participating in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' EHR Meaningful Use incentive program
• Rising operating costs
• Implementing and/or optimizing an accountable care organization

Financial, technological and compliance issues were clearly the main challenges. At the same time that practices plan on dealing with adopting a complex new system (EHR) that will require major changes in workflow, they also need to deal with managing potentially lower reimbursements and rising costs.

Ideally, the EHR will reduce administrative complexity, increase efficiency and lower operating costs but that takes time. Adopting an EHR has many other benefits for patient practice communication. Once patient records are digitized, they can be more easily shared with other systems, including a host of inexpensive, on demand web-based services. These services include automated appointment reminders, appointment scheduling, automated account balance notifications, patient surveys, and more. Such services can easily improve patient-practice communication and they also (1) save staff a considerable amount of time, (2) improve documentation and possibly reduce potential for legal action against the practice, (3) increase patient satisfaction.

Automating appointment reminders is a step that benefits the majority of practices. These types of calls typically are routine and the essential information can easily be conveyed by a quality appointment reminder service. Typically the practice only needs to generate a file with patients to be called and transmit that file to the telephone reminder service. This process can take just a few minutes. Appointment confirmations can be automatically tracked. 

For additional information, please visit Webley.

Missed appointments are a significant problem for most medical practices.  The average no show rate is 20% according to MGMA and that's a percentage that's far too high for most practices to live with.

Initiating an effective two-way communication system between your office and patients is the number one way to battle no-shows.

The first step to improving communication with patients is to consider what's convenient for them and realistic for your practice to provide.  An automated communication system can provide multiple channels of communication to accommodate your patients communication preferences. Whatever is most convenient for them, whether it is the standard telephone call reminder or an email, or both, the system can handle it.  If you have your patient's email address and phone number(s) and an automated multi-channel electronic communication system, you'll have more chances to connect with your patient.

Automation is important because it allows your practice to quickly send messages to patients using multiple channels of communication.  If you had your staff make phone calls, it could hours a day and tie up at least one phone line.  

The next step is to automate your appointment confirmation process. The traditional postcard reminder made it difficult for a patient to confirm or cancel an appointment and phone call reminder made during the day usually reach an answering machine.  Automated reminder services can make reminder calls during the evening - and thus are more likely to reach a live person who can then easily confirm or cancel the appointment during the call by pressing a button.  Or with email appointment reminders, the patient can click to confirm or cancel an appointment.  The system captures these responses and allows them to be easily viewed in an electronic report.

Patients who confirm appointments a day or two before the scheduled appointment are far less likely to miss their appointment.  

While it may seem like a no-brainer, the easiest way to combat a high no show rate is to remind your patients of their appointments. Of course, this is something you already knew. Medical practices have been sending appointment reminders for decades.

What many busy practices have overlooked is that the patient's communication preferences and lifestyle have changed. The era of the mailed appointment reminder card has passed and next in line is the reminder call from the medical receptionist.  Reminder cards and reminder calls from your front desk are no longer as effective as they used to be.

Today's patients prefer to communicate by cell phone and e-mail.  Today's medical practices can respond to changes in patient communication preferences by using a multi-channel automated appointment reminders service.  A good automated reminders service sends interactive messages that allow patients to easily confirm (or cancel) the upcoming appointment, whether that message is sent by e-mail or by phone.

Sending timely appointment reminders and asking for confirmation is an easy way to reduce your no show rate.  Automating the process saves time and money and makes the process easier and more reliable.

For more information about automating appointment reminders and confirmations, visit Webley MD.

Keeping up-to-date with the healthcare industry means keeping up with the latest developments in your area of expertise.  But that's just one aspect of providing good patient care.  Effective communication is also critical to good patient care. The use of an automated notification service can improve patient care in several ways. 

Telephone reminder services are used primarily to let patients know about their upcoming appointments. Good reminder services can significantly improve the efficiency of your practice's appointment reminder and confirmations processes.  Automated reminder systems can accurately track reminder attempts and patient confirmations.  Patients receive a clear, professional recorded message which they can replay as often as they'd like.  

Offices that are interested in virtual reminder systems should also know that some systems offer multilingual functionality.  This can be extremely beneficial for certain practices.  In some cases, this benefit alone is worth investing in a good telephone reminder system.

Not only will the reminder system reduce incoming call volume, it can also free up valuable time for your practice staff, as it reduces the amount of paperwork and busy work that they have to accomplish within a given day.  This provides them with more time to deal with patients that are at the practice.  Spending more time with patients has been shown to increase patient satisfaction.  

Automated notification systems can also be used to quickly and cost-effectively broadcast messages to your patients with other types of messages.  A flu shot recommendation can be used to boost revenues.  Messages that remind patients of preventive health screenings can generate revenue and improve patient care.  

Communication between you and your patients at regular intervals tends to create better, longer lasting relationships with patients - not to mention increased revenue for your practice.

Word of mouth coupled with the Internet makes it easier than ever for a practice to build a reputation, good or bad.  Like it or not, medical practices are in the customer service business.  Websites like vitals.com, drscore.com and ratemds.com allow patients to rate doctors anonymously.  Wait time, punctuality and customer service skills affect patient satisfaction.  Here are several ways to improve your patient's experience and keep them coming back for more.

Waiting Time:  The  biggest complaint that patients have is long waiting times.  Keeping patients waiting a long time makes them feel that their time is not considered valuable.  The amount of time physicians spend with patients has been declining as well, and the visits are often perceived as rushed.  

Some practices use an automated appointment confirmation process and have found that this has reduced their no show appointments and cut down waiting time.  If more patients show up for their appointments, there is little need to overbook appointments.  Overbooking can easily lead to long wait times.

Sometimes waits are inevitable.  If this is the case, you can make the waiting time less painful by (1) communicating with the patient - explain why there's a wait and how much longer it will be, (2) creating a pleasant waiting room environment.  Add inexpensive touches such as current magazines, educational materials, tea and water, and so forth.  

Staff Attention:  Patients often have questions or other things that they would like to discuss with staff.  If a practice is utilizing a large part of its time to make phone call reminders, then fewer people are available to attend the patients in the office.  Adopting automated reminders allows your staff more time to spend with patients.

Be More Accessible:  A patient that feels ill or is concerned with a medical problem does not want to go to an emergency room where they will face a long wait and a large bill.  However, some people are uncomfortable leaving word with an answering service because they aren't sure that the physician will actually receive their message or the issue is sensitive in nature.   A practice with a good automated phone message service will usually find this a solution to this problem.  The on-call physician can hear the complaint in the patient's own words and make their medical decision based on that.  It's also important to return important clinical calls in a timely manner.

When making appointment reminder calls, we estimate that a typical receptionist can place about 20 calls in 60 minutes. With all the rings, busy signals, and redials, it’s no wonder the process is so time-consuming. If the receptionist earns $15/hour, the practice spends 75 cents per reminder call. However, if the physician chooses an automated appointment reminder call service, the savings amounts to 50 cents per call, or an amount equal to two-thirds of the cost of a manual call.

Regardless of your receptionist’s actual salary and dialing speed, the savings add up quickly for practices of all sizes. Automated phone dialing software can dial a number in a fraction of the time it takes a human.  And with an automated phone dialer program, your receptionist is not tied up with redialing, waiting for an answer, or being put on hold.

A good automated notifications service does all the medical appointment reminder and confirmation work for you. The program generates personalized appointment date and time announcements. Automated caller software improves tracking, as it records every call made and the results of each call, including whether a live person or answering machine was reached.  And, this type of software captures and tracks patient responses and offers greater convenience to patients. To confirm or cancel an appointment, the patient only needs to push a button. 

Automated phone dialer programs can be used for other types of notifications, including the availability of lab results and preventive health messages, such as flu shot reminders.  With automated caller software, sending notifications to many patients takes very little time and patient/practice communication is improved.  These notifications will generate greater income for your practice and improve patient satisfaction.

Using email to remind patients about their appointments is a smart move. Here are some tips to make email reminders work even better for your practice.

1. Get permission

In order for email reminders to work for appointment confirmations, you should you have permission to send email to your patients. Have patients sign up for appointment reminders via email. It makes sense to do this for several reasons. Unexpected emails can find their way into spam folders, and may never be read. Also, not every patient actively checks their email. Only sign up patients that use email as a primary means of communication and who expect to receive appointment reminders from you via email.

2. Remind about reminders

Put a little sign out at your reception desk telling patients that they can get appointment reminders via email. This will help patients to get in the habit of looking in their email for appointment reminders. This will also help you to grow your list of email recipients.

You may also want to include information in your first email on how a patient can add your email address into their address book. This will help future emails avoid being accidentally marked as spam.

3. Strong subject line

If you are sending out a medical appointment reminders via e-mail, make sure you use a subject line that will call attention to it. At the same time, be sure to protect your patient's privacy. Use a neutral subject, such as "Reminder About Your Appointment." Work with a professional appointment reminder system to customize subject lines with appointment dates or other information.

4. Automate

Sending emails may be cheap and easy, but it can be time-consuming as well. Avoid tying up your office staff on a task that can easily be automated. Work with Webley to create scripts and an automated process for appointment reminders via email.

If you are looking to trim some costs at your medical practice, one area where you can realize quick and real savings is with an automated phone services that handle calls to and from your practice.  Your practice can save money with an automated call reminders and after hours patient calls.

Save on the Cost of Office Staff

If your appointment confirmation process requires a great deal of effort from your office staff, including making calls and keeping track of information, then you can save real money with a appointment confirmation system.

With a fully automated call reminder system, all that your office staff needs to do is enter the patient's appointment information into your appointment software, and the rest is done automatically.  Each patient receives a clear, understandable and professional reminder message with information about his or her appointment.  Responses are tracked automatically.  This saves valuable time for your office staff, and can save your practice real money by reducing the amount of staff you need.

Save by Reducing "No Shows"

"No shows" are often considered the bane of scheduling in a small practice.  Missed appointments can turn what was supposed to be a profitable day into a day that drains the financial resources of the practice.  Automated appointment reminders have been proven to reduce "no shows" by an average of 30%.  These reminders will help you keep the patients coming in, and to keep your day fully scheduled.  This also reduces the cost of running your practice, as more patients equals more money.

Save on Costs of Answering Services

If you use a costly live answering service to handle after hours call-ins, an automated phone answering system can drastically reduce your costs.  By using a virtual office phone answering system, you can save money and enable the on-call physician to receive the patient's urgent message quickly, without the intervention of another person. 

A busy medical practice needs to keep patients coming in while minimizing wait times. No-shows seriously hamper these efforts. Some medical practices try to make up for possible no-shows by overbooking appointments. Of course, this can backfire, causing embarrassingly long wait times for patients.

Top practices have discovered a solution in automated appointment reminders. Using reminder call software, the practice can be sure that every patient receives an appointment reminder call prior to the appointment.

Automated appointment reminders make sense for a number of reasons. Reminder call software streamlines the appointment confirmation process. Top practices understand that they do not need to tie up the office staff by having them make appointment reminder calls, play phone tag, and track down patients. Since the process is automated from the moment the patient's appointment gets entered into the reminder call software, the practice saves time and money. Automated appointment reminders also guarantee that each patient receives a scripted, professional sounding message about their appointment.

Patients that receive a professional doctor appointment reminder are often grateful. Missed appointments can be just as aggravating to them as they are to any busy practice. Top practices use automated appointment reminders because they work and because they provide extra service to their patients.

Webley MD offers professional reminder call software specifically designed for medical practices. Webley MD fully automates the call reminder process, from the moment the patient's appointment is booked. Using professional scripts and advanced speech technology, Webley MD can turn your patient appointment data into a clear reminder call and e-mail reminder that can go out during business hours, after hours, and on the weekend. This service decreases no-shows an average of 30%. Automated appointment reminders save time and money, and are appreciated by patients and staff alike.