When a patient arrives late to an appointment or misses it altogether, it can disrupt service for others and have a negative impact on the patient experience at your practice. This can lead to losing clients, hurting your practice. The good news is patient reminder software can quickly and easily remind patients of their appointments and increase the odds they will keep their appointments and arrive on time.
Benefits of patient reminder software
While there are many reasons patients may miss an appointment, many of them simply forget about it. In addition to helping patients remember their appointment date and time, here are additional reasons why patient reminder software is helpful.
Improving waitlist efficiency
It is not uncommon to have a waitlist of patients during the most popular days and times of the week. When patients receive an advanced reminder about an appointment and realize it needs to be rescheduled, the patients on the waitlist can be notified faster.
Saving time for front desk staff
Rather than spend the morning leaving voicemails or sending appointment reminder emails, with patient reminder software handling these tasks, your front desk staff can tackle more important patient care issues. There is even software that can send a reminder email as well as a phone call or text to improve the odds the patient receives the notification.
Increasing quality of patient care
According to the Journal of Family Medicine and Disease Prevention, 37.6% of patients fail to keep their appointments because they simply forgot about them. This causes delays and disruptions to the schedule and can impact patient wait times. With practice management for healthcare such as patient reminder software, that percentage can be reduced and keep patients from feeling either ignored or rushed during their visit.
Finding the right program for your practice
Here are several features to consider when choosing a patient reminder software.
Appropriate for your area of medicine
If you are a dentist, you may want to consider software with a text-to-speech feature or other scheduling template that does not require talking. Patients experiencing mouth pain often want to avoid speaking. If you are an optometrist, software with larger font options or a night mode could be helpful.
Friendly personality
Just because a message is automated does not mean it has to be dull and sound like a robot. Picking a software that sounds conversational can encourage patients to communicate with you and ask questions. It can also improve your patient experience.
Customizable reports
What are your stats for cancelations? Where do you stand on payment timeliness? When data is captured by a software system, you should be able to analyze it many different ways to gain insight into where your practice could improve and what you are doing well.
Get software help for your medical office
As a busy healthcare professional, we know you may not have time to search through countless versions of patient reminder software. The team at Doctor Genius can help. Give us a call today to find out all the ways we can support you, with everything from our Patient Experience Package to practice management tips. Let us make a difference in your practice so you can make a difference in people’s lives.
Doctor Genius, located at 16800 Aston Street, Suite 270, Irvine, CA 92606, provides a range of services for practice success. We seek to meet our clients’ needs by providing a variety of marketing, SEO, practice optimization tools, and coaching to transform the healthcare experience. Though we work to provide the most accurate information, the content found on this website is solely intended for entertainment purposes. Therefore, we cannot guarantee that the information provided is entirely correct. You may not use the information on this site to cure, prevent, or diagnose a perceived medical issue. If you have healthcare-related needs, please speak directly to a healthcare professional. Never self-perform medical treatments discussed on this website. All images displayed are also for entertainment purposes only, and personal experiences may differ. Please note that the business tactics mentioned on this site might not be applicable to your industry or practice.
