Patient scheduling appears to be straightforward. One of the most typical duties undertaken by offices is patient scheduling…and it may have a significant influence on your performance. With 85 percent or more of a typical healthcare practice’s expenditures fixed, it’s vital to ensure patients are scheduled properly and efficiently in order to maintain and maximize income.
You do everything you can to minimize missed appointments and ensure that your patients are seen by the doctor as soon as possible after their planned appointment time. However, there will always be patients who are running late, patients who require quick medical treatment, or other unforeseen circumstances that throw the entire day’s plan off.
- Self-scheduling over the Internet
If your practice doesn’t allow patients to arrange appointments for themselves online, you’re falling behind the times. But that’s fine since there’s a simple solution.
Online scheduling software used to be so expensive that only the largest hospital systems and conglomerates could afford it, but those days are gone.
The typical monthly cost of scheduling software is between $0-$150, making it accessible for even the smallest clinics.
However, if you don’t have or don’t want to spend the money, you don’t need all of the bells and whistles.
You may use Google Calendar to set up all you need to provide your patients online scheduling. The majority of people are familiar with Google Calendar as a tool for day planning and time management. It provides a built-in appointment slot function that is simple to set up and utilize. All you have to do is log in, select your appointment times, and schedule them.
-
Workflow and time management
The next step is to create a workflow or procedure that specifies which slots should be prioritized.
Use the working from noon strategy in particular.
It’s a simple method that helps your employees remember which time slots to offer first to your clients. There are two things to remember while using this method: noon-forward and noon-backward. Let’s have a look at how this works…
Noon-backward: Time slots begin at 12 p.m. and progress backward until the time you open.
Noon-forward: Time slots begin at 12 p.m. and go forward until the time you close.
-
Prioritization of visits
As a provider, not every appointment is urgent. Some are more significant than others. It’s true, despite the fact that it may appear insensitive.
A yearly physical examination isn’t as urgent as one in which a patient has excessive blood pressure.
To put it another way, you must prioritize your visits. Of course, there are a few other approaches you may use.
For starters, patients may schedule appointments with you in order to ask you questions. They aren’t necessarily sick or in need of medical attention; they simply need to know a few things that only you can answer. These are the appointments that are the least important to you. You might be able to fix them over the phone.
Second, none of the schedulers on your staff has a medical degree. As a result, they are unable to determine which kind of visits should be prioritized. Create a triage chart as a reference for them and yourself. List high-priority symptoms, their urgency, and the average appointment time in the chart.
-
Confirmation, reminders, and follow-up
We’re all prone to forgetfulness. We can’t keep up with all that happens in our daily lives. Adults, on average, forget three things every day. Depending on how many days their visit to your office is, it may or may not be included in that list of three.
So, as a physician, what can you do to help your patients remember their appointments?
You’ll want to send your patients a confirmation message right after the initial setup call or online request. These provide critical, quick input. In fact, practices that use these messages had a 62 percent lower rate of missed appointments.
-
Seasonality and waiting lists
There will be cancellations. There’s no way to completely prevent them since events in your patients’ life will force them to cancel their appointments.
When this happens, though, you’ll want to fill the voids as quickly as possible. You’ll lose money if you don’t.
There are currently solutions available that will construct and keep a patient waiting list for you. When a cancellation occurs, you press a button, and a message is sent to your impatiently awaiting patients informing them of the newly available place.
These are five steps to help in effectively scheduling appointments with patients and making work more productive and flow smoothly.