Missed appointments cost money.
Whether it is a missed dental appointment, a missed pediatric appointment, or a missed hair salon appointment, the results are the same. When ever a patient or a client does not show up for a scheduled appointment, the business owner, be it a health professional or a personal services provider, loses out.
Even though many appointments are scheduled weeks, and sometimes months in advance, some patients and clients are notorious, in fact, for not keeping their commitments. These physician appointment cancellations, however, play havoc with schedules and limit the income. For many, an appointment reminder service is the answer. With a computerized phone call that provides the necessary information about an upcoming appointment, in fact, can improve the chance that both clients and patients keep their scheduled appointments.
Automated Appointment Reminder Systems Keep Offices More Productive
When was the last time that you made it through an entire week without a missed or cancelled appointment? If you are like the majority of offices that operate on appointment schedules, you are likely accustomed to a 23.1% missed appointment rate. A 2010 study by the American Journal of Medicine, however, showed that the rate of missed appointments for patients who got a reminder drops to 17.3%. Not surprisingly, a poll by the Medical Group Management Association indicated that 90% of medical practices use reminders to help prevent missed appointments. And while you might think of a medical office as the place that could most benefit from appointment reminder services, the reality is that many other businesses can benefit from these reminders as well. Consider this list of both medical and no medical situations where reminder calls can be beneficial.
- Dog grooming services can also make use of an appointment reminder service.
- One industry outside of the medical industry that understands the benefit of appointment reminder services is the HVAC industry. These appointments typically have to be scheduled days, or even weeks, in advance, and it is important that customers are home when the certified technicians arrive.
- Nail salons typically rely on walk in appointments, but the higher priced locations that offer more expensive services use scheduled appointments and could benefit from their clients receiving reminder calls.
- One appointment that is often difficult to schedule is car warranty work. For this reason, some car dealerships are using appointment reminder services so that they can help their clients keep time consuming appointments on required warranty work.
- Tire purchases and tire repairs can be walk in appointments, but like other service industries that are growing increasingly more busy, many customers need to schedule an appointment. Making sure that customers arrive on time so that their job can be completed and the next customer can be served is important. Reminder calls can help the entire process.
- Family photo appointments are difficult to schedule and time consuming for the photographer. Making sure that clients show up on time and with the needed items is essential to a schedule that stays on track and allows the photographer to get to the next client.
- Oncology appointments are often quite complicated. They often involve a carefully orchestrated series of appointments with a number of doctors and labs. Reminder calls can help a patient keep their scheduled appointments.
- Radiation offices often have to juggle appointments from many different offices. One missed appointment can throw many patients off schedule, so automated reminder calls can keep a patient up to date on any changes, as well as regular appointments.
- Going to the doctor is not something many people look forward to. Perhaps this is why missed doctor’s appointments cost the U.S. healthcare system $150 billion every year. The fact that you dread an appointment might make it easier to forget, but a reminder call can keep patients on schedule.
- Even though missed appointments are a major problem for the healthcare industry, of the medical groups tracked in a Medical Group Management Association study indicated that only 46% of these groups had policies to address the no-show problem. An automated reminder call can also inform patients of the fees and penalties that may be assigned if an appointment is missed.
- The scheduling of medical office appointments can be a challenge. The frustration of missed or forgotten appointments, however, can be both frustrating and costly.
