Constant patient engagement is a way to ensure patients stay up to date with their treatments. However, it is also an easy way to keep patients happy! By eliciting their feedback, you can make improvements that will improve your patient’s experience. Between 23% and 34% of outpatient appointments are missed annually. Patients who frequently miss medical appointments have poorer health outcomes and are less likely to use preventive health care services. Missed appointments result in unnecessary costs and organizational inefficiencies. Appointment reminders will help reduce missed appointments; particular types may be more effective than other types.

Boost results with patient engagement

Many patients find their doctor’s recommendations and discharge papers sent home with them to be overwhelming. At first the treatment might seem simple. However, in many cases after treatment, patients may find retaining the information to be a challenge. Technology is capable of putting detailed, real-time information in the palm of your patient’s hands. This encourages patient engagement and also gives them the confidence to follow your treatment.

Using secure messaging is an opportunity to give your patients information in a more accessible and digestible format. It leaves your patient feeling more in control and empowered with their health.

Strengthen Relationships

Constant patient engagement is also an opportunity to build relationships with them. For many patients, having direct contact with their health care provider is imperative to their overall personal care. Today, many studies show people prefer to communicate through email and text messages instead of over the phone. This means the many phone calls your staff makes per day could be time used in a more efficient manner.

With secure messaging apps, such as appointmentreminders.com, you have a more convenient method to communicate with your patients. AppointmentReminders.com is a HIPAA Compliant – but we use normal texting, emailing, etc. used to improve patient and provider communication. Using this platform, you will reduce no-show appointments. You and your staff will also streamline a two-way dialogue without sacrificing your security and privacy.

Effectiveness

With our patient appointment reminders, you can even send different reminders for different types of appointments.  For example, you may want to let your new patients know that they need to arrive early to fill out appropriate paperwork, or maybe you want to let your patients know that they need to fast prior to a lab appointment. You can also include links to download forms and paperwork as well. Our service will read the appointment type that you send us from your EMR (Electronic Medical Record), and send out the appropriate automated patient reminder. Once we configure your account and set up automation, there is very little that you will need to do!

Using text messaging is not an appropriate means of ongoing communication between a patient and provider. However, many practices are adopting enterprise-grade, HIPAA-compliant, secure messaging applications. These mimic the look and feel of SMS text messaging. While AppointmentReminders.com doesn’t provide an interactive communicative platform, we do provide a tool that will decrease your patient no-shows and increase your business. Start by signing up for a free 30-day trial now!