4 Reasons Why Automated Appointment Reminders Are a Provider’s Best Friend

No show visits are a pain in the side of any medical provider. They waste invaluable time, they steal from your bottom line, and they leave patients without the care they sought out from the start. When a patient fails to show up to their visit, it could be they forgot, something came up, or they couldn’t make it on time. Regardless of the reason, providers are left with holes in their day that are too late to fill, a gap in services completed, and a lack of payment.

Automated appointment reminders offer a solution to providers who are struggling with a rise in missed appointments, increasing the likelihood that patients will show up.

Benefits of Automated Appointment Reminders:

1) Reduce Missed Appointments Without Wasting Resources

Appointment reminders have always been a tool to help reduce missed appointments within a medical practice. Traditionally, this consumed the time of a provider’s front-line staff and caused large workflow inefficiencies. Staff members would have to manually call each patient to verify that they would be coming in for their appointment. Some practices are still operating under this model.

The benefit of automated appointment reminders is that it frees up the time of your front-line staff so they can focus on more patient-critical tasks like insurance verification and collecting patient payments. With automated appointment reminders, your patients will receive that important reminder they need in order to make it to their appointment.

2) Reschedule Appointments Efficiently

When your patient receives an automated appointment reminder, it enables them to assess their situation and determine if that appointment still works for them. If they need the chance to cancel, an automated appointment reminder gives them the window they need. Automated appointment reminders are achieved through a fully integrated practice management software. When a patient gets their reminder and they are unable to make their appointment, they simply log on to their patient portal or give the office a call to cancel or reschedule their appointment rather than not showing up at all.

3) Reactivate Lapsed Patients

A lapsed patient is a patient who has not been into the practice for an extended length of time. This can happen for a long list of reasons but is largely due to patients putting off the management of their health and a decrease in patient engagement. Automated appointment reminders offer your patient every chance to press the restart button on their level of patient engagement and schedule an appointment. They are not only for patients to remember upcoming scheduled appointments, but also exist to help patients remember important steps in their ongoing care. Automated appointment reminders help keep your patients aware of any annual testing, labs, or work that needs to be done in their care, helping to reactivate lapsed patients.

4) Reach Your Patient’s Most Effectively

In the digital age, automated appointment reminders can be sent to patients in multiple different ways to make sure your practice is reaching them most effectively. For patients who prefer to receive their reminders on the go, a text might work better than an email or a phone call. The right vendor of software and services will help you reach your patients most effectively, helping to decrease no show appointments and improve patient interactions.

To learn more about how to access quality automated appointment reminders, click here.