How to Use Appointment Reminders Reports to Lower Patient No-Shows

October 9th, 2007

It has been proven by numerous studies that automated appointment reminders lower your no-shows by at least 20%. However, if you schedule a lot of patients and many of them don’t show up, this percentage might not be enough. Fortunately there are little known actions that you can do to decrease your no-show rates. This article will examine some of the lesser known ways to bring more patients in your clinic.

Every appointment reminder service offers a report that shows the results of each reminder call. It is very important that you keep track of your call results, as this will give you an indication of how useful the calls are. Make sure the majority of your patients are reached by the calls. As a rule of thumb your vendor should be able to contact at least 85% from all patients called. If that number is lower, determine if multiple calls are being made in case of busy lines and no-answers. In addition, check to see if the calls are spread over a longer period of time to give you a better chance of reaching your patients at home. You can do that by looking at your call times. If all of that fails you should consider switching your appointment reminders vendors.

What should you do with the appointment confirmation reports once you receive them? The first and most important category to look for is canceled calls. You should print all canceled appointments and give them to the front office staff to remove the patients from your scheduler. This will allow you to fill those empty slots the day before the appointment. This might seem apparent, but there are still thousands of medical offices that don’t use this feature and continue to overbook their patients.

The second category you should focus on is invalid phone numbers. If that percentage is high, it usually means that your front office staff is not doing a good job of entering new patient information into your practice management software. Print all patient names with invalid phone numbers and ask your receptionist to update the information when the patient comes for his or her next visit.

Lowering your patient no-show rate is hard, but will ultimately have a huge effect on your practice’s profitability. Using appointment reminders is proven to be the best single step in the right direction, however, you need to constantly monitor the results and make sure that you utilize the service to its full potential. Make lowering no-shows a priority for your clinic and involve your entire staff in the process.

Entry Filed under: appointment reminders