Want to Cut Down Patient No-shows in Your Medical Practice? Here's How


by Anika Andrews - Date: 2010-10-25 - Word Count: 509 Share This!

If your medical practice has a long history of patient no-shows due to your patients keep forgetting about their appointments and not showing up, thus dragging down your bottom line, there's a feasible solution that is both cost-effective and efficient. Not only will this solution help you improve your bottom line, but it is something that your patients would also appreciate.

Use an online patient reminder

You may have heard of the use of an online patient reminder as a reminder tool for your patients before, but until now are still not fully convinced yet about its practicality, usefulness and effectiveness. To help you decide, here are the main benefits of an online patient reminder and why you should have one in place right now.

First, let's review the reasons why patients usually miss their appointments. One of the top reasons why patients don't show up for their appointments is simply because they'd forgotten about it in the first place. But who could blame them? They have their work to do during the day and family to take care of in the evening. Instead of putting the blame on them, you should be proactively helping them remember their appointments. By doing so, your medical practice can avoid the much dreaded patient no-shows, while at the same time providing your patients with the medical care that they required.

Why it's better than the old way

Now, what's the best way to remind your patients about their medical appointments? The old-fashioned way would be to have your staff manually calling your patients one by one. However, not only is this a waste of human resource, but it is also ineffective. Since your patients are most likely will be working during the day, any calls that come in may just get lost among the tons of things that they have to do that day. There's also a possibility that your staff may be calling them in a bad time, such as calling them while they're in an important meeting.

The best solution for this problem is to have a system that can contact and remind your patients about their medical appointments at a time most convenient to them. If your patients are working and would not like to be bothered during the day, the system can be set up to remind them after working hours. This is a more effective and efficient solution rather than having your staff calling patients at random time.

An online patient reminder can be used to remind patients about their medical appointments either by calling them on their cell phone or landline number, sending them text messages, or sending them e-mail messages. It's up to the patients how they'd like to be best contacted and reminded of the appointments.

When your patients are happy and satisifed with the level of service and medical care that you provided them with, you can be sure that the bottom line of your medical practice would be positively impacted as well. Getting an online patient reminder is something definitely worth considering and one that will be worth the investment.


You can get a free trial of the online patient reminder provided by AngelSpeech Inc., as the trusted name in medical management software. Try also other services like an online appointment scheduler.n
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