Family Practice Appointment Reminders
Appointment Reminders from your family practice office help reduce no-shows, which can be costly for a medical practice. Having holes in your schedule because of missed appointments can be frustrating. Also keeping others waiting in your lobby because previous patients arrived late isn’t good for your reputation or online reviews about your family practice.
Your Family Practice Growth
The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that demand for physicians and surgeons will increase by 24 percent between 2010 and 2022. That’s much faster than the average for all occupations. Demand for family physicians is especially high in rural, poor, and other medically underserved areas. Some provisions of the Affordable Care Act seek to improve payment for family physicians. Also they will provide incentives for medical students to choose family practice as a career path.
Family practitioners are the medical profession’s generalists. They treat patients of both genders, at all stages of life and also maintain a broad familiarity with developments in all of medicine’s major fields to provide their patients with accurate diagnoses. Each doctor also must be alert for cases that require referral to a specialist. It’s an emotionally satisfying field of medicine, with the potential for long-term doctor-patient relationships. However, family practitioners face some significant disadvantages, as well.
Is your Family Practice struggling with practice efficiency?
If you’re struggling with an inefficient medical practice, you’re not alone. According to Becker’s Hospital Review, 25 percent of specialists fall behind in their appointment schedules daily. 79 percent fall behind because patient visits last longer than expected. 66 percent fall back because patients are late and don’t have time to fill out paperwork. Although there are many reasons in which practices fall behind and into inefficiency, consider the following factors that could be stunting productivity at your practice.
- Outdated technology: Is your practice still manually completing most administrative tasks? Switching to an automated system can not only save time but an estimated $9.4 billion a year for medical health plans and providers. If your technology is old, it could be hurting your practice more than helping by slowing down your process.
- Administrative responsibilities know no boundaries: If your staff isn’t used the right way, according to their job title, your practice could suffer from inefficiency. Is your team overwhelmed by administrative tasks that stop them from completing their primary responsibilities? Is your staff using the skills for which they were uniquely trained? 59 percent of professionals who report physician burnout attribute their condition to an overwhelming number of bureaucratic tasks.
- No performance management: Is your practice’s work environment so out-of-control that you have no time to track performance? Lack of awareness of what causes dips and drops in your business will result in repeated, unwelcome surprises that stunt efficiency. Without tracking costs, collections, and workflows, how can you reach revenue goals?
Improving the Efficiency and Quality of your Family Practice
To provide quality care, a Family Practice must be efficient and well-run. This is true for the obvious reason that providers can’t afford to keep an unprofitable practice open forever. It is also true because providers that work in well-run practices can worry less about daily administrative emergencies and spend more time on patients and professional development. Fortunately, many recent advances that make offices more efficient, also make for better medicine.
4 Ways to Improve your Family Practice
1. Improve patient flow with an efficient schedule
Use a strong and secure scheduling system to get as many patients in and out the door as you can – but stay realistic. A family practice physician can typically complete four visits per hour, but if you find this to be too overwhelming, then adjust your patient population. Utilize an online presence with a computerized scheduling system to make sure you have no schedule gaps and to measure user traffic. With everyone online nowadays, your tech-savvy consumers will thank you.
Appointment Reminders can schedule personal messages to multiple patients and other patient communications. Altogether, with good scheduling, you can increase your practice productivity and patient flow by two or more patients a day, which translates into more net income for your practice and potential new patients.
2. Engage with patients and create more meaningful relationships
Patient engagement is critical to building your practice and growing into the future; however, statistics show that many patients aren’t actively engaged. On average, healthcare leaders believe that only 34% of patients are highly engaged.
Family Practices can build a stronger practice and nurture patient relationships by building an online presence with innovative patient-engagement platforms. The platform should have the option to pair with their patient base using their preferred communication types. Whether it’s text message, email interactive voice response, social media, or speaking with a person. Additionally, you can stay connected to existing patients by delivering specific messages at critical touch points along the patient journey. Cash flow is also improved by speeding up the revenue cycle and keeping patients engaged with your practice.
3. Patient Reminders Help Your Office
The use of HIPAA compliant medical reminders benefits your office staff as well. Your employees can spend more time taking care of your patients when they show up, instead of tying up the phone lines with reminder calls. Your patients will appreciate it when your receptionist is not rushing them through the check-in process.
A lot of appointments are made far in advance. A friendly reminder can encourage your patients to show up even when they don’t remember making the appointment . Appointment Reminders service for doctors and medical staff allows you to send out reminders as far in advance as you wish. As well, we give you the ability to easily send multiple reminders for an appointment and roll failed patient text reminders to automated call reminders at no extra charge.
Most medical professionals who use our services experience a huge reduction in no-shows. In fact, a HIPAA compliant reminder system is usually worth it financially even if you only prevent ONE no-show. Of course, another real benefit is that you won’t have to spend all day at work waiting for patients who don’t show up.
Appointment Reminders Integration
We make it very easy for you to integrate your data into our site using our advanced appointment reminder integration methods. No matter what EMR or scheduling service you use, we can usually integrate with it using one of the methods below. If none of these are an option, we do offer some basic integration methods as well that ANYONE can use!
If you use our appointment reminder integration service to merge your data for you, then there is really very little that you need to do. All we typically need is a file that contains appointment information. We can usually integrate with most file formats and layouts. The most common type would be csv, but we can usually read excel files and pdfs. As well, if you use over 5k reminders per month, the service is free. Otherwise, there is just a small monthly fee.
Advanced Appointment Reminder Integration
Contrary to popular belief, integrating your data for fully automated appointment reminders is usually inexpensive (if not free). It takes a very small amount of time to setup. In fact, if you are using an EMR that we already integrate with such as practice fusion or if your EMR is able to generate a file with upcoming appointment information, the integration can probably be set up in a day or two.
We can interface with most EMRs and scheduling software using our integration service.
As with all our accounts, you can fully customize your appointment reminders, choose whether to send calls, texts, or emails, and accept responses from your customers.
All your data is secure and HIPAA Complaint throughout the entire process. If you would like to write responses back to your EMR, we provide downloadable csv files with the results from your automated appointment reminders. Simply parse the files and store the data back to your EMR.
4. Send out customer service questionnaires
Review sites are incredibly important. If your practice doesn’t have a presence on Yelp, make one – and encourage long-term patients to recommend your services. Community engagement through online reviews – especially positive reviews – can be the determining factor to recruiting potential new patients. But don’t only keep the good reviews. Bad news can be productive for your practice by helping you implement corrections that would have been otherwise overlooked. Keeping a dialogue open between your practice and your patients can help maintain a stable patient flow. This will open the door for potential patients.
Your Family Practice can strategically deliver personalized reminders to all upcoming patients, with specific information or instructions according to the type of appointment scheduled. Based on their preferences, patients can receive email, text, or phone call reminders. No Contracts and No Risk!
- There are No Hidden Fees, setup charges, cancellation charges or contracts.
- All appointment reminder account tiers come with a 30 Day Trial – no credit card needed (up to 30 reminders)
- We don’t believe that there is any benefit to holding a company to a contract if the service is not a good fit. Our high-quality appointment reminder service speaks for itself.
- We are sure that our services will benefit your company by decreasing no-shows and increasing your customers satisfaction! If for any reason you are unsatisfied, you don’t pay! It’s that simple!
