There Is More To Keeping Medical Appointments Than Meets The Eye...

Perhaps you think that medical appointment scheduling software is nothing more than a computer program that acts like a big fancy calendar where your staff can enter in the name of a patient that will link to all the saved details on that patient's previous visits to your medical practice.

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There is more to keeping medical appointments than meets the eye. There have been studies done on databases created by medical appointment scheduling software. In other words, it is one thing to have a person call up and make an appointment and have that person actually show up and keep the appointment.

When appointments are made and the client does not show up there is a lot of negative backlash. If a person makes a medical appointment and fails to keep it, the medical practice loses money, can suffer from scheduling conflicts if the person shows up late for instance, and the patient suffers interrupted continuity of care if he or she does not show up at all.

Studies have shown that failed appointments have ranged up to 42 percent. What kind of impact would this have on your practice if 42 percent of the appointments so carefully entered in your medical appointment scheduling software were not kept?

The surprising aspect of this is that your medical appointment scheduling software can actually help you with this problem. It is not your medical appointment scheduling software that causes it but it can help solve some of the no-show problems. Some of the reasons people do not keep their medical appointments are related to socio-economic or demographic factors. Other reasons are that their symptoms go away or get so bad that they could not wait to keep the appointment or that they simply forgot the appointment or something more pressing came up at the last minute.

One simple step that can help alleviate the problem of unkept medical appointments is reminders. You can have your medical appointment software set up a tickler system that will email the person or remind staff to call the person to make sure they plan to show up for the appointment. The software can record the best way to contact the patient and that method can be used. Even better, it can track the patients most likely to miss their appointments and you only have to remind them. This saves a lot of office labor.

As a side note, it might be a surprise to learn that clients who give you their cell phone numbers are less likely to miss appointments. But the fact is that people who are willing to give out their cell number are more apt to be motivated to come to the appointment because they are more open to communication between your office and themselves.