Patient scheduling may seem like a minor task, but it is important for a medical practice to maintain consistent appointment schedules. It impacts staff wellbeing, cash flow and daily operation of the practice.
When your patient scheduling process hits a snag, everyone works harder, operations break down and patients are left frustrated and dissatisfied. To keep appointments flowing smoothly, here are five ways to improve your patient scheduling.
1. Make Appointments on a Wave
Many medical practices rely on traditional scheduling that allocates patients to specific time slots. This approach can lead to frustration for both physicians and patients, especially when there are a high number of emergencies or complex cases that take longer than expected.
Using wave scheduling to schedule appointments can help improve patient satisfaction, while also improving efficiency and reducing wait times. This type of scheduling essentially groups patients into waves with similar appointment needs and then arranges the individual appointments so that each wave has a minimum of three or four patients. Each hour, there is a buffer of unscheduled time where staff can catch up or complete paperwork before the next patient arrives.
The other advantage to this method is that it leaves room in the schedule for unexpected events and walk-ins, which are not typically scheduled in advance. Additionally, the use of a software solution that allows patients to self-schedule online can make this process much easier for both parties.
Another strategy that is particularly effective for busy practices is cluster scheduling, which combines patients who need similar services into a single appointment block. This can help reduce wait times for complex cases or for patients who require a follow-up visit after an initial treatment.
Lastly, opening the schedule 13-15 months in advance can help improve patient satisfaction and reduce no-shows. This can be done by automatically sending reminders via text, phone, or email to patients who have an upcoming appointment for a service such as pre-visit lab testing. This helps the patient plan ahead and alleviates the stress of not knowing whether or when they will have to reschedule their appointment.
2. Use Automated Reminders
One of the most effective ways to improve efficiency and reduce patient wait times is by streamlining schedules in medical practices, ensuring better utilization of resources and staff. Automated appointment reminders are an increasingly popular tool for minimizing cancellations and no-shows. They also reduce the time that medical staff must spend contacting patients to confirm or reschedule appointments.
Automated text message appointment reminders do not interrupt your patients’ daily activities and allow them to respond at their convenience. This can significantly improve patient satisfaction and loyalty, especially when combined with a self-booking option that lets patients easily cancel or reschedule their own appointments via text.
When you choose a messaging service that integrates with your EHR, it automatically sends appointment reminders by phone or SMS based on pre-configured parameters. For example, you can choose to have the system nudge clients 24 hours prior to their scheduled appointment and remind them that they can cancel or reschedule without incurring any penalty.
The software can also nudge your clients to review their schedules regularly and make changes to avoid missed appointments. It also allows clients to book a new appointment with a different provider or day and time, and it will notify the practice so that a client on the waiting list can fill in the vacant slot.
Automated appointment reminders can also improve your patients’ engagement and experience by allowing them to book appointments via your website or social media accounts, or even through their smartphones. Mend makes this easy by leveraging information from your existing EHR to populate a custom booking form that patients can launch directly from your website or social media posts. Having this option eliminates the need to manually contact each patient to get their confirmation and frees up your team’s time to focus on other tasks that improve patient engagement, care, and retention.
3. Prioritize Appointments
When you prioritize appointments, you are only booking as many patients as you can reasonably expect to attend in a given day. This makes it easier to avoid overbooking, which can be frustrating for your staff and patients alike.
You can also make it easier for your office to accommodate urgent appointment requests by setting aside time slots for these cases. This will ensure that patients who need immediate attention can receive same-day care and demonstrate your commitment to patient care and responsiveness. You can also implement a system that allows front-of-house staff to use their best judgement when answering incoming calls. They can evaluate each case to determine if it is best handled with a phone consultation or if an in-office visit will be required.
Lastly, you can utilize predictive analytics and machine learning to identify patients with a high likelihood of missing their appointment and double-book those patients. This approach will allow you to minimize the impact of missed appointments and reduce scheduling conflicts, thereby improving your practice’s performance on key quality metrics.
If a patient cancels or no-shows their appointment, they can be added to a digital wait list and automatically sent a text message inviting them to book another time slot that is open. Using this tool can significantly reduce the amount of time spent by your staff reaching out to patients and will also increase patient satisfaction.
4. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Help
Efficient patient scheduling is an important operational system that contributes to physician, patient, and staff satisfaction as well as practice profitability. When the process runs smoothly, staff members are more productive (and less likely to burn out), and patients get the high-quality experience they come to expect from a modern medical practice. When it snags, however, patients get frustrated, the office is backed up, and operations break down.
The good news is that it’s easy to implement effective appointment scheduling strategies that can improve the overall patient experience. With the right technology in place, you can create automated reminders that communicate with patients via phone, email or text and enable them to schedule their own appointments online at a time that suits their busy schedule. You can also prioritize patients’ appointments based on urgency and appointment length to help reduce patient wait times. By tracking key metrics and gathering feedback, you can ensure that your patient scheduling processes are optimized at all times.
A functional medical practice is one in which team members communicate openly and respectfully with each other. They also share the same goal of delivering high-quality healthcare to their patients. Dysfunctional practices, on the other hand, often take a toxic toll on their staff and patients. When teams are dysfunctional, it is very difficult to optimize appointment scheduling.
If you are struggling to improve patient scheduling in your medical practice, it’s important to take a closer look at your current systems and workflows. With these best practices, you can make improvements that will result in better patient experiences and improve your overall practice performance. In a highly competitive landscape, efficient appointment scheduling is vital to your success.
5. Keep Your Wait Times to a Minimum
Patient wait times can seem like a small part of the overall practice experience, but a long wait time often leads to frustration and low satisfaction scores. A study by Duke Health found that every ten-minute increase in wait times was associated with a 3-percent decrease in satisfaction levels. Fortunately, there are a few simple steps you can take to ensure your patients’ satisfaction while minimizing appointment scheduling delays.
The first step is to make sure your staff members are processing calls efficiently. Having a system for managing calls allows your nurses, medical assistants, and office managers to focus on their core responsibilities rather than scheduling appointments. This can be accomplished by assigning call handling responsibilities to specific team members and providing them with guidelines on what to do when a call comes in.
Another way to keep waiting times to a minimum is to prioritize patient appointments. By scheduling patients for routine check-ups, follow-up visits, and urgent consultations in designated slots, you can avoid bottlenecks and keep your clinic running smoothly. Additionally, by using a digital scheduling tool that offers real-time updates, you can eliminate overbooking and guarantee that each clinician’s schedule is being fully utilized.
Streamlining paperwork and data collection is also crucial to cutting down clinic wait times. Use a telehealth solution to streamline the process of gathering insurance information, health history, and prescription records while reducing office visit costs and avoiding manual data entry errors. This method can also reduce the need for in-person appointments by allowing a nurse or physician to answer questions via a phone call or video consult.
Finally, being direct with your patients about your expected wait time can help to alleviate frustration. Clearly communicating how long they can expect to wait, as well as offering a virtual waiting list that moves up appointments when someone cancels, will give your patients the confidence and willingness to stick around until their turn arrives.
