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The Value of Patients' Keeping Appointments
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As a medical professional, having your patients’ showing up to their appointments is integral to the success of your practice. Patient messaging adds value to your practice in many ways, but most importantly, it helps your patients keep their appointments. Practices utilizing automated appointment reminders increase office efficiency, increase revenue and reduce costs with minimal investment.
Office Efficiency
Your office staff keeps your practice running smoothly and allows you to focus on patients. However, if your staff is spending time calling patients to remind them of appointments and not focusing on essential office duties, your office becomes less efficient. Automated appointment reminder systems can reduce reminder calling from hours to just minutes per day, and with automatic reporting, your staff knows who was reached. With the burden of calling patients removed, your staff can focus on other duties such as patient follow up and referrals.
Increasing Revenue
Whether your office is one or 100 medical professionals, patients’ missing their appointments affects your bottom line. Consider this: a 10-doctor practice with one daily patient per doctor missing an appointment ($100 patient charge); this practice is losing $5,000 per week. Most no-show patients simply forget their appointments, especially if they’re booked months in advance. With reminder messaging, you’re removing the burden of having patients remember appointments booked far ahead of time or keeping up with reminder cards. In the same example, by reducing the no-show rate by just half (five patients per day), this practice is now realizing $110,000 in otherwise lost revenue per year. A corollary affect on your bottom line is that you do not have to spend money or time on other forms of reminders.
The annual cost of these systems is usually recognized within a month or two of use, simply based on the amount of patients now showing up in your office. |
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Reducing Costs
Operating a medical practice is an expensive endeavor, but you can reduce costs using automated appointment reminders instead of sending postcard reminders by mail. With automated messaging, costs are based only on the volume of calls made — priced well below postal service rates. If a staff member is calling all your patients by phone, you can redistribute the cost of that person to other office work and put off hiring additional staff. As your patients show up more regularly, you office is reducing the cost per patient and these cost reductions will positively affect your balance sheet.
Automated messaging systems offer you a valuable tool for making your practice more efficient and profitable with less cost by just reminding patients of upcoming appointments. The annual cost of these systems is usually recognized within a month or two of use, simply based on the amount of patients now showing up in your office. In many cases, the increased revenue is enough to purchase new practice equipment or pay for recently purchased office systems. For medical practices looking to become more profitable quickly and with little staff disruption, consider an automated appointment messaging system.
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