If you can save them a drive and a wait in your office by answering a question over the phone or with a quick email, why not? Saving in-person appointments for patient issues that truly require face-to-face time with a provider is not only a time-saver for your practice, allowing you to fill your schedule with more revenue-producing appointments, it’s also a huge satisfier for your patients. Some patient issues can be resolved over the phone or via email/a secure patient portal. Consider whether care needs to happen in-person.Patients on the wait list will appreciate the follow-up, too. This eliminates the need to call patients one-by-one until the appointment is filled. Even better, use a system that allows you to send out a mass text to your current patient wait list to notify them of availability and have them respond if they’d like to take the open appointment, or look for vendors that manage waiting lists automatically on your behalf. You can mitigate their negative effects, however, by maintaining a waiting list of patients who would like to get in earlier than their scheduled appointment. Late cancellations and no-shows are inevitable. Use a patient waiting list to fill in late cancellations or no-shows.Good communication is a key component of patient satisfaction, and automated appointment reminders are one way to improve communication and reduce no-shows. It’s also important to remind them of your practice’s cancellation policy if your practice collects a cancellation fee past a certain time, for example, make sure that policy is included in appointment reminders until the patient confirms their appointment. Give your patients the ability to cancel or reschedule, up to a certain point, by responding directly to the reminder. Minimize the number of no-shows by using an automated system to text or call patients at set intervals before their appointment. Implement an appointment reminder system.Scheduling appointments consecutively can also help reduce overhead costs as you may be able to have staff come in late or go home early on days with lighter appointment loads. Staff can use blocks of time that are not filled with appointments to catch up on documentation, hold team meetings or complete other administrative tasks. Many practices find that scheduling morning appointments from noon backward and afternoon appointments from noon forwards helps reduce the number of empty appointment slots throughout the day. Schedule appointments in consecutive blocks.Not only can this increase patient satisfaction, it allows your practice to reallocate some of the time front-office staff are currently spending scheduling, confirming, reminding, and re-scheduling appointments by phone. As patients are increasingly comfortable with apps and online portals, it makes sense to allow them to schedule their own appointments by providing a patient-friendly online scheduling system. Get on the patient self-scheduling bandwagon.īy 2019, Accenture predicts that 38% of appointments will be self-scheduled.How do you balance the two, seemingly competing interests? Here are some patient scheduling best practices to consider. On the other hand, you want to avoid long patient wait times and keep patient satisfaction high by giving each the attention they deserve. On one hand, you want to maximize your care team’s productivity and see as many revenue-generating patients as possible.