Learn some techniques for properly scheduling your patients’ appointments to enhance cash flow, improve your staff’s well-being, and enhance the overall patient experience.
Patient scheduling is critical for a successful practice. When done correctly, medical practices can improve their effectiveness while improving cash flow, staff well-being, and patient care. However, if it’s not done properly, it can affect patient care and the overall operation of the practice.
Even if patient scheduling seems straightforward, it requires considerable planning, experience, and skills.
Patients should be scheduled to promote sufficient provider time for each visit and guarantee short waiting times. Long waits and limited access to care can jeopardize your practice as patients seek care elsewhere.
Here are some strategies you can reinforce in your medical practice to improve the way you schedule your appointments:
- Monitor your staff: Is your staff filling every available slot, or are they leaving some slots vacant that they could have filled? When people call and want to be seen, does your staff routinely offer the first available slot, even if it’s today or within two hours? Ask yourself these questions to determine if your staff is properly scheduling and managing your patients.
- Confirm appointments: Confirm the patient will show up according to the schedule. You can do this through text or email reminders. Use an appointment reminder software system to improve the number of appointments on time and keep on time. Consider charging a cancellation fee to reduce no-shows and cancellations with short notice.
- Define the right appointment approach: Prioritize appointments. Some patient issues can be treated with a brief phone call or a telemedicine visit. This approach ensures that patients needing the highest level of care have better access to same-day appointments if necessary and maximizes practice profitability.
- Recall patients: A patient recall system ensures that patients return for their regular care appointments, keeping your schedule consistently full. You can do this by sending out an email reminder, text, or voice call letting them know it’s time to reschedule.
- Set up preventative care appointments: Investigate how many patients have not scheduled regular check-ups in the last year. Insurance companies must pay for these annual check-ups for all their subscribers. This can help your patients find something that could save their lives while allowing you to see more patients. Read about this on our blog One More Patient per Day and the Benefits for your medical practice.
At Health Prime, we can help!
Health Prime offers Prime Scheduling, our optimized solution for appointment scheduling, confirmations, and reminder calls, depending on your medical practice’s needs. We do the callback and scheduling so you can fill your calendar with new and repeated patient appointments.
Calling your patients to schedule appointments may seem like a tedious task. We can do it for you. Schedule regular appointments or appointments for preventative care. Find slots in your schedule that will allow you to have additional appointments. If you want to make the call, we can give you the list of patients you can call.
If you want to know more about how Health Prime can help you improve your scheduling processes, contact us at [email protected] to set up a meeting. Let’s discuss how we can help you return to what matters most: your patients!
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