Appointment Reminder Card

Do you remember the last time you received an appointment reminder card? Perhaps you still receive them. If you're the organized type, perhaps you remember to add the appointment information to your calendar. If you're like most people, you stick the card in your wallet and forget about it. 

Appointment reminder cards are easy to lose, misplace and overlook, particularly when they are given weeks or even months before the actual appointment. Another drawback of the appointment reminder card is that they lack interactivity. With a phone reminder or email reminder, the patient can confirm or cancel an appointment in one step. If the appointment reminder is mailed, it's impossible to know whether the patient actually received the reminder. Finally, the mailed appointment reminder is much more expensive than the automated reminder call. 

Timely appointment reminders that get your attention are more effective. Reminder calls work well for most of the population. Even if you don't reach the person, chances are you can leave a message. 

Emails can also work well for some people. They have a clear record of the appointment that they can refer to and perhaps even access from their cell phone. 

With automated notification technology, one person can send out hundreds of messages in just a few minutes - and those messages can be for more than just appointment reminders.  Automated messaging services can send out notifications for account balances, lab test results and more.  For additional information, please visit Webley.

Did you know that your practice could be losing up to $180,000 per year? As shocking as that seems, it is very likely to be true. Most practices suffer from a steady percentage of “no-show” rates that take great chunks out of their annual income.  If your practice sees 1,000 patients a  month, has a no show rate of 20% and earns $75 per visit, no shows cost your practice $180,000 a year in lost income.

It is easier than you think to get most of that money back.  There are three simple steps to regaining lost revenue by reducing your no show rate:

Step 1: Get Answers

Ask your patients how they would prefer to communicate with your practice. How can your practice most effectively remind him or her of an upcoming appointment?  For many patients, the most effective appointment reminder is going to be something other a call to a home number during the day or an appointment reminder card.  Plus knowing how your patient would like to be reached will also come in handy when you need to reach him or her for lab test results, account balances, etc.

Step 2: Be Flexible

Being flexible in your communication is going to reap multiple benefits for your practice. Not only will your patients be pleased with your technological savvy, but it's going to keep them from forgetting appointments, thus keeping them healthier. Plus, you will be able to count on patients coming in. You will even attract new patients who want to be able to communicate efficiently with their doctor; studies have shown that 1/3 of patients are more likely to choose a practice with electronic communication systems over one that does not offer this convenience.

But how can you increase your flexibility when it's already a challenge to make telephone calls?

Step 3: Get Technical

Automated patient notification systems make it quick and easy for you to communicate with patients using multiple channels.  For example, reminder call software can handle routine appointment reminder calls for your staff.  This means that your staff will have more time for other tasks around the office including spending time with patients at the practice or who require assistance over the phone.  When your staff has more time for patients, your patients will be happier.  

A typical medical practice is an extremely busy place.  The staff spends much of their time on the phone with patients for various reasons and it's often a challenge to keep up with appointment reminder calls, lab test results notifications, billing/account balance calls, etc.  Some of these calls are routine and therefore can be efficiently handled by a quality automated notification system at a cost and time savings for the practice.  Automated patient reminder calls are becoming commonplace for multiple reasons, the key ones being cost and time savings and improved communications technology.

Today's high quality patient reminder calls are often indistinguishable from manual calls for the patient receiving the call.  These calls can be more effective as well as they can be made during the evening and over the weekend, when the patient is more likely to be home.  And they are easily tracked.  The practice can be assured that the patient reminder calls will be made.

No practice can survive long with a constant stream of no show appointments.  While your office might give out patient reminder cards, sometimes those don't help with patient no shows.  This is especially true when the appointment is 3-6 months out; there are just too many chances that the appointment reminder card will be lost or get buried underneath something.  Even with reminder cards, it's important to call the patient a day or two before the appointment.

A phone dialer program can send the patient a personalized reminder with the date and time of their appointment.  It can also give the patient any other information they might need for their visit.  And it may be able to automatically capture the patient's response, including appointment confirmations and appointment cancellations.  The same program may be able to help with other types of notifications as well, including account balance notifications, lab test results notifications, immunizations and more.  

An automated reminder service is easy, affordable and best of all, allows you to communicate more effectively with your patients so that they receive timely reminders. 

Do you remember when you were a child and you'd receive postcards from faraway places sent by friends and family members?  You would get so excited because Mom said, "You've got mail!" It made you feel important.

Now you're busy running a medical practice. Those postcards cost fifty cents each to print and send through the mail. If you see 1,000 patients a month, then you're spending $6,000 per year just on printing and postage. That's not even counting how long it takes for your receptionist to address those postcards.

There is a much cheaper and more environmentally friendly way to remind your patients of their appointments without sending appointment reminder cards.

Instead of sending each patient an individual appointment reminder card, try reaching them with an automated multi-channel communication system. An automated reminder system can remind your patients of their appointments by phone and email without adding any additional work to your receptionist's to-do list.  It will free up her time.  The service even gives you a complete record of the calls and emails, and texts sent, including patient responses to these messages.

Save paper and remember that sending automated reminders saves trees and saves money for your practice.

DrScore.com released the 2009 Annual Report Card for Patient Satisfaction.  The results are based on 64,000 responses to an online patient survey. Longer wait times had a much greater impact on the patient satisfaction of younger respondents (34 and under) compared to those 65 and over. Average patient satisfaction scores for visits where they had to wait 15 minutes or less were similar (8.4 for the older group, 8.2 for the younger group).  

While few patients like long wait times, sometimes they are inevitable.  The best way of dealing with long wait times when they occur is to keep the patient informed and apologize for the delay. 

Press Ganey, a health industry survey firm, looked at hospital satisfaction scores and found that keeping patients informed of delays can increase patient satisfaction.  They also found patients were equally dissatisfied with wait time in the exam room vs. the waiting room.

Being placed on hold on the phone for a long period of time or waiting a long time for a call back from the practice can also lead to patient dissatisfaction.  Busy practices can decrease call volume and keep phone lines free by using an automated notifications service.  Such a service can send patient appointment reminders, lab results notifications, account balance notifications and other messages without using the practice's phone line and with minimal staff effort.  

An automated answering service can help a busy practice organize its messages and direct callers to the appropriate department or individual.  With advanced call management features, this virtual medical receptionist can answer all calls, take messages and distribute messages.  

Tackle long wait times by automating routine office tasks like appointment reminders and call/message management.

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.

Do you think it is possible to cut costs and at the same time, provide better service to your patients?  Spending more does not always lead to a better patient experience.  

Think about what makes patients happy.  They may be anxious and they may expect long wait times, being placed on hold for a long period of time, and waiting hours for their messages to be returned by someone at the practice.

Patients are definitely pleased if they are able to get in touch with the proper person at your office on the phone without a long wait.  Call routing can help direct calls to the right person.  An automated answering service answers all calls so that the patient never hears a busy signal.  

A patient who becomes ill and wants to reach your office after hours is unhappy if they reach a telephone operator who is not even sure which practice they are answering for. A virtual medical receptionist system will answer your phone and then route your patient's call to the department they need to speak with.  When the office is closed, the virtual medical answering service alerts the on-call physician that a new message has been received and allows him/her to replay the voice message.  Your practice can provide better service at a lower cost by eliminating the live operator and relying on the automated answering service to quickly and accurately relay messages to the on-call physician.

Automated appointment reminders are more effective and less costly than manual methods such as appointment reminder cards and manual phone calls.  These reminder systems can send a large volume of reminders in little time - and with little effort.  Typically the only staff effort involved is in pulling the patient appointment information and sending it to the vendor.  These reminders are appreciated by patients and they've been proven to reduce no shows.  Lowering no shows and eliminating the need for the staff to make reminder calls gives the staff more time to spend with patients.

While the expectation has been that patient demand for healthcare will continue to increase because of the aging population base and the increase in chronically ill population, patient demand has been decreasing, due to a growing number of uninsured and underinsured and a slow economy.   

The number of visits to physician office visits fell 1.2% between July 2007 and July 2008.  In a survey conducted by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation in October 2008, 36% of patients said they had postponed healthcare.  Getting patients to your practice is just part of the battle. Bad debt has been increasing at practices as well.  

Given the current situation, practices should reevaluate their billing and collections.  Collecting co-pays upfront, verifying eligibility and offering payment options can help.  More practices are refusing to accept credit card payments to save on transaction fees, but this also makes it less convenient to pay the practice. Payment reminders can be sent with little cost and effort through an automated messaging system. 

If your practice needs to increase its demand, look to existing patients.  Identify who is due for preventive and follow-up visits and reach out to those patients.  An automated messaging system enables a practice to send out messages by phone or by e-mail with little effort and little expense.  

Be sure to send appointment reminders.  They've been proven to reduce no shows in a wide variety of settings.  Your best option is likely to be an automated appointment reminder system that sends personalized messages and tracks patient responses automatically.

Finally, it may be worthwhile to consider adding in demand, cash-based services.  

There are many reasons why patients do not show up for their appointments, and many of these reasons are easily remedied by reminding patients of upcoming appointments. Many doctors' offices use appointment reminder cards to help patients remember their appointments. But these reminder cards are easily lost and overlooked. Having staff make appointment reminder calls is also common but sometimes the staff forgets to call or runs out of time to make the calls. Messages left on answering machines can easily be erased or overlooked.  

What happens when your patients misplace their appointment reminder card, or never bother to write down the medical appointment in their planner?

Patients appreciate the courtesy phone call to remind them about their appointment. Courtesy calls can even save lives when they remind patients about preventive medical procedures for which they are due or even overdue. A phone call breaks through the clutter and grabs the patient's attention much more so than a piece of paper in a stack of junk mail.  

Although patient reminder phone calls are effective at decreasing no-show rates, receptionists are not always the best answer. They call during office hours when patients are not home. Sometimes they misdial, dial slowly, or do not speak clearly. They can easily become bored by the task and this boredom can be conveyed in their tone of voice.  In contrast, an automated reminder system reliably and quickly delivers clear, consistent messages. These pre-recorded messages employ professional voice talent for message quality that exceeds that of your typical receptionist. 

By automating routine tasks such as making appointment reminder calls, you leave the receptionist free to do less routine, higher value tasks, such as greeting patients, answering billing questions, and taking important messages.

For most medical practices, dealing with no-shows and late patients consumes a large portion of the time that office staff could otherwise spend on billing, coding, digitizing patient information, answering the phone, etc. Over 75% of physician's practices use reminder telephone calls to remind patients about their appointment time and date. High demand for medical care sometimes necessitates that less urgent appointments are scheduled weeks or months in advance -- enough time for appointment cards to be lost and previously wide-open schedules to become packed with events.  Many practices have found that the longer the lead time between the time the appointment is made and the actual appointment, the higher the no show rate.

While the patient's side of the dilemma is understandable, for the practice, a missed appointment means a lost revenue opportunity.  Reminder phone calls from a phone dialer program help maintain peak patient flow. An automated appointment reminder system uses a computer program to dial customers at a preset time before their appointment. A pre-recorded message provides a details of the appointment, including date, time and patient name.  Even messages that are left on answering machines serve as effective reminders.  One study found that leaving a reminder message on an answering machine was as effective as reaching a live person.*  

Reminder call software can automatically draw information from appointment databases and customize each reminder message. The technology also works in a similar fashion to create custom email reminder messages.  Few practices send appointment reminders via email though most people have email addresses that they use on a regular basis.  Patients will likely appreciate email reminders from your practice and sending these reminders will help differentiate your practice from the competition.

* Haynes & Sweeney, The Effect of Telephone Appointment Reminder Calls on Outpatient Absenteeism in a Pulmonary Function Lab. Respir Care 2006;51(1):36–39.

Let me paint a little scenario for you regarding the typical appointment and the follow-up process.

The Initial Visit

A patient visits the practice in search of quality medical care. He may want to treat an existing condition and/or prevent the onset of health problems.  Let's assume that he reaches his initial appointment on time and that he likes his doctor and the friendliness of the staff.  He decides that he’s found the right doctor for him and sets up an appointment two months in the future for a follow-up visit.

The Follow-up

Time passes.  Unfortunately, the well-intentioned patient has misplaced his paper appointment card, and has made plans to visit a business client during the time originally scheduled for his appointment.  The doctor waits for his patient on the appointed day and time, but the patient never shows up.  What the doctor doesn’t know is that had the patient received a reminder call, he would have been there for his appointment.  This doctor-patient disaster never had to happen because there was an easy answer.

The Appointment Reminder

Reminder phone calls help the practice and the patient.  Most patients do not intentionally miss appointments.  Something simply happens between the initial visit and the follow-up appointment that makes them forget they had an appointment in the first place.  Receptionists are excellent at what they do, but they are often bogged down with more work than they can handle.  Automated reminder calls are the best way to ease the stress of the front desk and to help patients who have trouble remembering appointments.

Automated Reminder Services

Is it a good practice to charge patients for missed appointments?  These missed appointments directly hurt the practice's income and lead to added inconvenience for all involved.  Some practices make it a policy to charge for missed appointments.  This policy is permitted by Medicare (as long as the policy is applied Medicare and non-Medicare patients) and deemed ethical by the American Medical Association (AMA).

Some practices have found it extremely difficult to collect the missed appointment fee, particularly from new patients.  These fees could alienate and upset patients, whether they pay the fee or not.  Imagine it from the patient standpoint - how often have you kept them waiting while they are at the practice without compensating them for their lost time? Perhaps the doctor has even cancelled an appointment with that patient before.  

In the ideal world, the patient would never miss the appointment.  Appointment reminders have been shown to be effective at reducing no show rates.  Automated appointment reminder services are more reliable and cost effective than manual methods such as the oft overlooked appointment reminder card and phone calls from the practice staff.

If you would like to charge for missed appointments, you must make this policy clear to your patients and regularly communicate it to them.  Posting a sign in your office is not enough as some patients will not see the sign and new patients won't have any opportunity to see the sign.  Have patients sign and acknowledge the policy.  

Time is very important to busy medical offices and advanced communication technologies, such as phone reminder software can help your practice save time and money.

Automated phone reminders can increase the productivity of your staff because the software makes it virtually effortless to delivers routine reminder messages.  These automated reminders have better reliability, consistency, and effectiveness than manual methods like mailing appointment reminder cards and making manual phone calls.  Clear and natural sounding patient reminders will not only increase productivity and enhance patient satisfaction, they will also decrease missed appointments by approximately 30%, which will directly improve your bottom line.  

Auto dialers have been available for years but they have evolved over time.  It is no longer necessary to buy a bulky, expensive hardware.  The newer generation of appointment reminder services offer their hosted software services on demand, providing a more reliable and lower cost solution.

With an automated appointment reminder system, your message will consistently and clearly be conveyed in a professional, friendly manner.  Patients may have the option to replay the message as well.  These friendly reminders will benefit your staff's time, patient reliability, and increase your revenue. Detailed reports and tracking results will also aid your business to manage its appointments.

Automated phone reminders and automated answering services will boost your productivity and profitability. 

"No shows" happen.  Everyone at the practice is well acquainted with this fact.  At a typical practice, missed appointments cost medical practices money every single day.  Smart practices take proactive measures to control the practice's no show rates but not all methods work equally well.  Some offices routinely overbook appointments, but this can lead to long wait times and angry patients.  Most offices provide reminder cards for the patient's next appointment, but patients lose them and forget about the appointment.

The other commonly used solution is to have staff call patients to remind them of appointments.  This process uses staff time, which is costly.  Most calls are made to the patient's home during office hours, and in these days of dual career marriages, usually end up on an answering machine because no one is home.  So this solution is costly and not always effective at reaching the patient.

A Webley survey in 2009 of physicians showed that 63% used staff time to make reminder phone calls to patients.  The smaller the practice, the more likely the practice was to use this method.  This means that the smallest practices who can least afford it are using the most labor-intensive and costly method to reduce no shows.

Using an automated appointment reminder system can increase the effectiveness of reminder calls.  They can be set to run after hours when the patient is most likely to be home, they can include e-mail reminders, and they don't require your staff's time, so they are less costly in the long run.  Automated reminders can reduce your no show problem by 30% or more.  

Automating routine appointment reminder calls can help decrease both your staff costs and your no show rate, and that means an increase in your practice's profit.

The Forgetful Patient

Every doctor has her share of forgetful patients.  These well-meaning clients take the reminder card, stare at it, and walk out of the office never to be seen again until a receptionist calls to ask why she didn’t return for his follow-up appointment.  Patients simply forget because small pieces of paper can so easily be overlooked or lost.  Because it’s impossible to provide a patient with good medical care unless she shows up to the practice, many practices realize the value of appointment reminder calls.  A simple reminder call can make all the difference for a forgetful, but otherwise cooperative patient.

The Busy Receptionist

Receptionists take phone calls all day.  They set up appointments, make cheerful banter with patients, and coordinate a wide range of critical office functions.  They’re typically busy, so asking them to make reminder calls in addition to their regular duties adds an unnecessary burden and leads to less reliable reminders.  It's not their fault if they run out of time to make the reminder calls and play phone tag.  Sometimes they will forget to reminder calls.

Meet the Virtual Receptionist

When the time comes to send a reminder patient message, the virtual receptionist never forgets.  The virtual receptionist never gets distracted or frazzled.  Many doctors are installing virtual reminder systems in their offices as a courtesy to busy receptionists and to patients who have trouble remembering appointments. These automated reminders are effective in reducing missed appointments and providing a better patient experience.