If you are a healthcare practitioner with your own private or small group practice, you are well aware of the challenges you face. Certainly, much of the success of your practice is related to the quality of care you provide and the way you relate to your patients. In addition, though, you have significant administrative overhead and staffing costs that directly affect your overall profitability.
There are a myriad of tasks and responsibilities associated with each patient who walks through the door. Your staff has to greet them and check them in, pull the charts and then do the initial intake for that specific office visit. After the consult billing and insurance issues have to be handled and follow-up appointments scheduled. Staff may also have to co-ordinate lab tests and other ancillary services. With everything going on, it’s pretty common for staff to feel pulled in five different directions at once.
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Improving Practice Revenues
For a practice to be profitable, you have to focus on maximizing revenues. Each office visit puts money in the bank and each appointment slot that goes unfilled means lost revenue. At the start of the week, it often looks like the schedule is full but over the course of time there are missed appointments and no-shows that directly affect the bottom line.
By implementing an automated appointment reminder system, you can help keep your office visits on track. The patient can be notified of their upcoming appointment by phone, text or email and can confirm they will be there at the agreed upon time. If they need to reschedule, they can let you know in advance and your staff will be able to arrange for another client to fill that time. By doing this, you help assure that the revenue flow continues. You can also schedule new patients in the open slots and further build your practice.
Provide Important Information to Your Clients
Once the patient leaves your office they may have to get scheduled lab work done. Typically, staff then has to await the results and then make several follow up calls in order to reach your patient and give them the results. With an automated communication system, you can quickly and securely deliver the lab results directly to your client. This frees staff time to handle more important issues in your practice.
Healthcare reminder systems can also be used to improve on-going patient care. You can set up the system to send follow up messages to patients with chronic conditions reminding them of what to do between appointments and giving them tips about how to provide the best self-care. If you offer seminars on issues like treating hypertension you can use the system to invite them to the next informative session.
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Broadcasting Updates and Creating Custom Messaging Campaigns
Office practices are often affected by weather events, especially during the winter months. You can use your automated system to broadcast updates about closures due to snow days or even traffic delays in the area. If your office schedule changes with a new season you can also let all of your patients know. With the pandemic dominating news cycles each day, it’s also important to make your clients feel safe. You could schedule a message that highlights all of the safety precautions you are taking.
If you want to expand your marketing efforts you can use your automated system to send out targeted communications to select sub-groups of your clients. For instance, if you are a dentist, you could create a custom seminar about dental implants and message every customer who ever expressed an interest in this option.
An automated healthcare reminder system allows you to quickly and easily communicate with all of your patients. By utilizing all of the features in the system, you’ll be able to decrease no-shows, maximize practice revenue and save significant staff time.
