Appointment Scheduling Software to Improve Practice Efficiency

The use of Patient Scheduling EMR Software to automate and manage patient appointments is getting more and more common within medical practices with each passing day. Patients can easily request appointment bookings via an online Patient Portal. Those appointment requests are delivered to the staff of the medical practice who then confirm them after cross-checking with the schedule of the physician.

Some modern Appointment Scheduling EMR Software also provide the facility of an online calendar which automatically checks the requested appointments against the schedules of the physicians and approves the requests or suggests time slots available for booking.

Once the appointment is booked and confirmed, the next step is to keep reminding the patients constantly of their booked slots so they do not miss the appointment, or if are unable to show up, they can cancel the appointment in time Patient no-shows are pretty common and affect independent medical practices in a number of ways. In fact, research shows that 18.8% of the times, patients do not show up to their booked appointments. One missed appointment can cause the practice a lot in lost revenues and additional labor costs.

There are a lot of reasons which lead towards patient no-shows but some of these can be controlled and reduced through a number of ways. One of these ways is using an Appointment Reminder EMR Software. While the majority of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) Software being offered provide appointment scheduling and reminding capabilities, there are software designed specifically for this purpose.

With the development of various cost and time efficient communication technologies, their use has also increased in the healthcare sector. There has been a transition to SMS texts and on-call reminders as an effective means of reminding the patients of their scheduled times. Statistics show that SMS text messages have an open rate of 98% and a response rate of 45%. Hence, using SMS to remind patients of their appointments through an Electronic Health Records (EHR) Software makes a lot of sense. Not only does it make the communication between the patients and the providers more efficient, but also helps with productivity and engagement.

These text messages help increase the level of customer satisfaction since the level of healthcare patients receive from the practice increases. When the appointment reminding workflow gets automated and streamlined, it saves the clinicians a lot of time. This time can be spent in other – better tasks and as a result, the productivity and efficiency of the clinic as a whole gets better. This chain of tasks also causes the profitability of the practice to increase since more valuable tasks get done in a lesser amount of time.