If there’s something that could harm the success of the medical practice, then it has to be having a long queue of patients spending too much time at your front office. Appointment scheduling is a critical duty of a doctor’s office, yet many practices schedule in a seemingly haphazard fashion. Often, the practice’s scheduling strategy, if you want to call it that, is to fill an appointment into any slot available with little regard for the reasons patients are being seen.
In today’s competitive healthcare space, as you’re dealing with crushing administrative burden and rising operating costs, you need every tool at your end to keep your medical practice profitable. The tactics we’ve included below can have a powerful impact on your bottom line, with just a little bit of time or cost investment.
Take a look and decide which tactics would work best for your practice. Evaluate where some of your potential areas of improvement are (inefficient appointment calendar? Patients leaving because of long wait times?) attack them with these simple tips and make scheduling a piece of cake.
Stay available all the time-
This may sound easy, but be open all day. There are still practices that close at lunch or short tea breaks! Nowadays, you just can’t do that. There is too much competition. If you aren’t open someone else will be. Someone needs to be there at lunch to answer the phone and provide appointments when people are able to get off work which makes it quite impossible for a human to answer back and forth calls or the long email threads. Kickstart using online scheduling software such as Picktime, for 100 percent availability and reliability when it comes to scheduling.
Even working for a couple of extra hours a week can make a big difference in access for your patients and keep them coming back.
Offer After-hours Virtual Visits-
Everyone knows that doing after-hours patient visits can increase revenue. It just makes sense, you can fit more appointments into a day, compete with nearby practices that are only open 9-5 pm, and keep patients in your practice with convenient scheduling options. Of course, if you’re like most doctors, you’re probably looking for a little more work-life balance and don’t want to work after-hours. But what if you could offer after-hours visits from your home? What if you could replace those after-hours urgent patient calls you already get with reimbursable video visits? With this change, you could increase your patients, recapture lost revenue from uncompensated time, and maintain a work-life balance.
Prioritize complex visits-
Each patient visit has different levels of complexity. Assign a weight to the different visits and automatically list them for reference by using your scheduling software. Ask your patients to provide extra information regarding their symptoms or level of complexity while fixing the appointments themselves. Manage uncomplicated issues outside the office visit by phone, email, and group visits. While this may not be directly compensated, it can provide indirect financial rewards by increasing the complexity of office visits. The average reimbursement per visit should go up, offsetting the loss of simple visits.
Maintain the patient database-
Get your information from online. Let your patients fill up their digital appointment form and the cloud automatically stores the patient database securely. This immensely saves your time whenever you want to go through your records. Just apply filters or go to any particular day and save all the information you need.
Group Similar Patients-
Some doctors appreciate seeing patients with similar conditions or medical histories on the same day. This method of appointment scheduling allows a doctor to remain in a more focused medical mindset, enabling quicker appointments and diagnoses. In addition, the clinical staff can maintain a rhythm through the appointment needs. Fix such special appointments days and block off your regular consultation with ease via Picktime.
Plan for seasonality-
Know your patient base and their seasonal needs. For example, a pediatric practice will tend to get a lot of wellness visit requests at the beginning of the school year and just before. Other practices find that access is most in-demand at year-end when deductibles have been met. Make sure you’re analyzing your appointment slots year over year to maximize access for those who need it most. Go through your weekly or monthly reports to check when you have more patient inflow or similar cases you’ve dealt with.
Personalized reminders-
Today’s patients expect personalized engagement. A consumer-oriented mentality is driving care delivery, particularly in specialty medical practices. For providers, this means delivering more options and automating administrative tasks. Online Medical practice management software is the best way to offer personalized engagement adding staff without reckoning to their existing workload. The patient appointment scheduling experience must be convenient and easy. A good phone system and excellent staff are still the bread and butter of any medical practice (and most businesses in general), but patients should be able to schedule and cancel their visits through an online patient scheduling system that does not require them to pick up the phone.
A growing number of patients appreciate the ability to schedule anytime instead of having to call the office during their lunch break. This functionality also frees up your front office staff for more pressing patient-centered needs.
Recur patient appointments when needed-
Most of the patients need a revisit for regular check-ups or need to know about their recovery at intervals. Let them have the ease to rebook your appointment without making a phone call or rebooking it through the scheduling software with the recurring option turned on. Block off certain times for treating them. Let your patients feel free to get their services on time without having to enter their details again and remind you about the previous visit.
As much as possible, stay on time-
Patients will adjust their appointment times to match what they expect from the practice. If a physician is often an hour late, the patient will consider herself on time if she arrives within an hour or so of the appointed time. If the physician’s timeliness is sufficiently erratic, she’ll consider herself timely if she appears on the scheduled day. The result is that the physician, on those occasions when he is running close to on time, will find himself waiting for patients to arrive. An added benefit to consistently running close to schedule is that providers and staff have to deal with fewer angry patients. Getting and maintaining control of a clinic schedule pays huge dividends. What has worked for you? What seems to be an intractable challenge? Say good-bye to all your scheduling woes and make your medical practice a breeze with Picktime on your side. Sign up for free, now!
