Best practices for patient scheduling
Patients around the world are persons who need urgent care. Whether it is a clinic or a practice that a patient needs to rush to, they most definitely need to be scheduled with an appointment. The patient scheduling part comes right at the first of the patients' journeys, a significant part of which rests on the patient's shoulders, while another valuable part of patient appointment scheduling rests on the provider.
The patients need to initiate the search and book the doctor appointment, but it is the practice that offers the patient appointment scheduling services. Therefore, practices today must have effective online doctor appointment scheduling facilities that help patients skip the line and get their services with minimum delay.
How patient appointment scheduling benefits the patients and the practices
Smooth and fast patient appointment scheduling certainly delights the patients and helps them get the quick and much necessary medical aid that they want. This help saves many lives, aids faster patient recovery, reduces complications, and boosts overall medical care and patient-first approaches in the healthcare industry.
Along with all of the ways that effective doctor appointment scheduling help patients achieve, proactive medical appointment scheduling by medical practices also helps them gain a lot more than they might guess. Before we discuss all the advantages that an effective patient scheduling system brings to the practices, let us first check out how patient scheduling works today and the best practices that medical providers are embracing to enhance their patient scheduling system.
Top 10 Practices for Doctor Appointment Scheduling that Medical Providers are Adopting Now!
The internet has truly opened new doors of opportunities for sectors more than one. It is the same even for the medical sector where the digital medium has been radically transforming day-to-day services and applications.
The emergence of cutting-edge medical appointment schedulers and patient appointment scheduling systems today is changing the way patient appointments were booked, thereby making them faster and effortless. Besides, with these fast and efficient doctor appointment scheduling software from providers like GrowPractice, the medical clinics and practices are seeing good growth in terms of patient influx and overall satisfaction.
67% of patients prefer online booking today. With more and more practices onboarding the online mode, patient appointment scheduling is becoming easier and more efficient for the patients themselves. Therefore, the online shifting of patient appointment bookings for practices is proving to be a remarkable boon for providers.
However, along with embracing the online mode for patient scheduling systems, the medical practices also need to adopt the best booking practices that would make their process efficacious and more streamlined than their competitors.
So, here's looking at some of the proven practices that are enhancing patient scheduling methods at medical offices:
Providing self-scheduling options for patients
Self-scheduling software for patients is a much-needed push in the healthcare industry. The digital software systems of self-scheduling are opening faster and easier gateways for patients to help them get the care at their own pace.
In contrast to the earlier process of handling the patient bookings all by themselves, the medical practices, with the introduction of the self-scheduling systems, have handed the sole control to the patients to book their own appointments.
Recent reports claim that around 97% of patients expect to use online scheduling options for booking their appointments with their providers.
Self-scheduling means greater control in the patients' hands, which is a major step towards bringing the patient-first approach to healthcare.
Opting for a 24x7 window for booking appointments
Patients need attention round-the-clock, and there is no specific time for people to fall ill/sick. This is why the patient appointments should also not be fixed at a certain time, and should rather be done 24x7.
Surveys revealed that 40% of appointments are booked after business hours. To battle this problem, the culture of booking patient appointments all around the day is emerging now, with medical practices and clinics accepting online doctor appointment scheduling throughout the day.
GrowPractice is one of the leading medical office software and systems providers that is helping a large number of medical practices to offer 24/7 appointment booking facilities.
Offering appointment reminders
In our busy lives, it is quite that we keep on forgetting things, but the digital drive has helped a lot in alleviating this issue of ours. With the digital reminders that it has brought up, people are hugely benefitted today and rarely miss out on important things.
Patient appointment reminders are one such game-changing digital advancements that you should bring to your practice to help the patients stay duly aware of their appointments and lessen no-shows.
Going by the opinions of 75% of the millennials, we have discovered that they believe receiving text reminders for appointments is useful. By choosing GrowPractice as your medical software provider, you can make it customary for patients to receive easy and instant reminders through a variety of mediums with customized templates automatically.
These reminders would not only increase the patient satisfaction rate, but also significantly reduce no-shows, and maximize the credibility of the providers.
Preparing a patient waiting list
If you are worried about late cancellations of patient appointments and/or no-shows, then preparing a patient waiting list is something that you can look for. Implementing a waiting list for the patients would help providers document the patients' arrival accurately to the last minute. Sending mass messages to the patients to let them know of the current status of the waiting list, is also a great idea, else you can also hand over the entire thing to a third party.
The patient waiting list would not only help in the filling of the appointment slots, and minimize no-shows for the provider, but also help the patients receive a follow-up message
Prioritizing appointments
Patient scheduling is an important step in the journey of the patients. Along with giving the patients an opportunity to see their doctors for a variety of conditions, patient appointment scheduling also determines the time when they would likely get their appointments during the day.
Here, prioritizing the appointments play a crucial role in enabling the patients get the right outcome. Prioritizing patient appointments would ensure that the most critical patients or the patients who require emergency aid, gets them before others.
Using medical staff efficiently
The medical industry has seen its staff drastically reducing, and this has been striking since the outbreak of the COVID-19. Nearly 18% of the medical staff have left their jobs ever since the pandemic broke out, as per reports.
This means that the number of medical professionals working in medical practices is already less that what it used to be. So, it is important that the practices use their staff judiciously.
This can be done easily by distributing the tasks among them, and defining them clearly. For example, earlier if the physicians or the nurses themselves were involved in checking the patient vitals, then that can be avoided. This task can rather be performed by the medical staff, which would help bring efficiency to the workflow and improve it.
For further improving the patient workflow, there are the medical office software, and patient systems from GrowPractice that you can install at your practice.
Brace your provider against patient no-shows and last-minute cancellations
Patient no-shows are a palpable fact in the medical industry. Data revealed that the patient no-shows went over 50% in the US before the Covid-19 pandemic struck. These no-shows not only hamper the patients but also negatively affect the medical clinics.
One recent study reported that missed patient appointments costs a whopping $150 billion dollars annually for the US medical industry. Therefore, no medical practice can simply afford to absorb the effects of the no-shows.
Implementing a hassle-free patient scheduling process with easy options for rescheduling and cancellations with GrowPractice is a smart move, which would certainly boost their overall satisfaction. Furthermore, they can also send automated reminders, patient satisfaction surveys and reviews and more as an added bonus with GrowPractice's advanced medical software systems.
Lower the costs of no-shows
There is a charge for patient no-shows now for most medical practices due to the losses that the providers suffer due to no-shows. However, these charges might not exceed the minimum amount. Reducing the charges for no-shows would not only improve the patient's satisfaction, but also guide the practices to focus more on minimizing the no-shows.
Automating repetitive steps of the scheduling process
The online doctor appointment scheduling process has transformed through the years. The automatic scheduling systems are now in the scene, which are making the booking of patient appointments a breeze, taking the load off the medical staff. Reaching out to GrowPractice for medical appointment scheduling would help you automatize the scheduling process of appointments. This has proven to reduce 75% of the medical staffs time on phone, saving 500+ hours for each of the providers working with GrowPractice patient and practice management software.
Top 7 Benefits that Effective Patient Scheduling System from GrowPractice Offer
GrowPractice is one of the most widely used medical office software that is helping a generation of medical practices achieve growth like it was never before. This starts with the medical scheduling software that it provides.
Here are 7 popular advantages of the effective patient first scheduling software offered by GrowPractice:
• Patient scheduling from GrowPractice is fast and easy for patients
• It helps manage schedule effortlessly
• It saves staff time
• It is convenient, which boosts patients' satisfaction
• It reduces chances of no-shows
• GrowPractice's medical appointment scheduler involves less staff
• Doctor appointment scheduling from GrowPractice is cost-effective
Along with the benefits already mentioned, online doctor appointment scheduling from GrowPractice offers a lot more. With advanced patient and practice management systems that help patients stay engaged with two-way texting, alert and informed about the appointments and complete their online registration and intake easily, GrowPractice scores way higher than others.
With GrowPractice medical office software and systems, practices can now get custom solutions that are simple yet powerful, which are future-focused, with scope of more integrations. Moreover, it has already started changing the growth trajectory of multiple medical practices. So, reach out to GrowPractice and gear up to multiply your practice revenue by 3X!
