Learn some techniques to schedule your patients´ appointments properly to enhance cashflow, improve your staff´s wellbeing and the overall patient experience.
Patient scheduling is critical for a successful practice. When done correctly, medical practices can improve its effectiveness while improving cashflow, staff wellbeing and patient care. However, if it´s not done properly, it can affect patient care and the overall practice’s operation.
Even if patient scheduling seems like a straightforward process, it requires considerable planning, experience, and skills.
Patients should be scheduled in a manner that promotes sufficient provider time for each visit and guarantees short waiting times. Long waits and limited access to care can put your practice in jeopardy as patients will tend to 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 they 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 scheduling and managing your patients properly.
- Confirm appointments: Confirm the patient will show according to the schedule. You can do this through text or email reminders. Use an appointment reminder software system to improve the number of on time and kept appointments. 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 patients needing the highest level of care have better access to same-day appointments if necessary and practice profitability is maximized.
- Recall patients: Having a patient recall system in place ensures that patients return for their regular care appointments, keeping your schedule consistently full. You can do this by simply 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 of your patients have not set an appointment for their regular check-up in the last year. Insurance companies are required to pay for these annual check-ups for all their subscribers. This can help your patient 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.
Let us know how we can help!
Health Prime offers Prime Scheduling, our optimized solution that helps with appointment scheduling, confirmations and reminder calls depending on your medical practice needs. We do the call back and scheduling for you to 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 do the calling, 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, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] to set up a meeting with us. Let´s discuss how we can help you get back to what matters the most: your patients!
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