Appointment Reminders in depth analysis

What makes a difference between good and great medical appointment reminder system? Two things consistently come on top of customer satisfaction surveys are Ease of Use and Vendor Support. Are you not surprised that feature set was not mentioned? You should be, because many practices do not realize how much appointment reminder system used by a practice could be missing in terms of minimizing no show impact on practice financial results.

Technology

Most of not all appointment reminder systems can be bucketed in one of two major categories – on premise or cloud based. Each technology has its pros and cons.

On Premise Appointment Reminders

For enterprise-scale customers, such as large hospital systems and I mean really large with 5-10 hospitals and thousands providers, an on-premise system might be a better choice. It would run the system for several hundred thousand on a yearly basis and minimize system integrator or IT provider related risks.

Cloud based appointment reminders

A cloud based system would be a choice for smaller hospital systems and definitely the only cost effective choice for groups and individual practices. There is no need to talk much about benefits of cloud based appointment reminder system. Most practices have already gone through the process of getting their Electronic Health Records systems in place and cloud adoption is really high. The main advantage for the practices is no need to keep, support and maintain all the infrastructure required for an appointment reminder system to function, e.g. computers, phone lines or IP trunks, monitoring software, and support personnel. It is much more cost effective to pay a relatively low monthly fee, which ranges from $50 to $300 per provider.

Hybrid or private cloud appointment reminders

There is a third option available for Medium to large size hospitals – a private cloud. This is an equivalent of outsourced cloud, but hosted in house. This usually entails licensing fee paid to provider, but enables the hospital to have full control over access and maintenance to the in house appointment reminders system.

As of time of this article, the only known private cloud medical appointment reminders provider was www.GoToClinic.com provided by IMG Residency. As the technology has started making traction, more and more hospital CIO’s are looking into private cloud appointment reminders systems. It provides same cost effective cloud approach, but at the same time minimizes hospital exposure to the risks of accidental information disclosure.

Medical Appointment Reminders integration with Practice Electronic Health Records

Medical Appointment Reminders EHR integration 

For the average medical practice, about 7 percent of patients are missing their appointments. These appointment no shows result in $50,000-$500,000 lost revenue per medical provider.

Is there anything that a medical office can do to minimize impact of no shows to how the doctors practice medicine? Fortunately yes. There is an array of choices when it comes to selecting a medical appointment reminder system.

Many Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Practice Management (PM) Systems come with some form of appointment reminders available out of the box. These appointment reminders vary by features, price, and technologies. But they all have one thing in common – tight integration with appointment scheduling software. This is one of the greatest advantages that a fully integrated appointment reminder system has over a stand-alone one.

Some stand-alone providers such as reremind.com or GoToClinic.com have realized the gap and provide seamless appointment reminders integration with practice appointment scheduling software. How do they do it?

Appointment scheduling software is on premise or cloud based. Appointment reminders software providers enable full integration via an integration agent that is installed on one of practice computers and periodically pulls appointment data from the scheduling system and updates scheduling system with appointment cancelations received from the appointment reminders calls.

So, what’s the difference between fully integrated appointment reminders and custom integration? There should be no difference if vendor implementation accounts for all nuances. Data flows between practice EHR and Appointment Reminder system, effectively providing a seamless integration.

Some appointment reminder systems, however do rely on standard interfaces enabled by practice EHR or Practice Management software. Unfortunately this is not something a practice can rely on. When comparing and selecting automated medical appointment reminder systems, practice manager should take into consideration EHR integration aspect of the system

Automated Medical Appointment Reminders - Is there a value?

Why would a medical practice want to implement an automated appointment reminder system?

Medical appointment reminder software is aimed at minimizing doctors’ no show rate and optimizing physician time allocation. When a patient misses her appointment, time that could have been re-allocated to another patient is lost. Well, to be fair, at a busy clinic, doctor always has something to do, but missed appointment time will likely to be dedicated on administrative task. One might say, so what, this saves doc’s admin time that he can later dedicate to seeing another patient. But this is not really how time allocation works. Time fragmentation and task hoping impacts efficiency and hurts practice bottom line.

Doctors have a whole arsenal of tools aimed at improving productivity and minimizing lost time. An automated appointment reminder system should be considered as a single most effective tool that costs a small fraction of benefits it brings.

So, what makes use of an automated appointment reminder system is a big game changer in the doctor’s office set up? There are several factors.

Firstly, it minimizes chances for patient  not showing for her scheduled appointment. No show has a measurable impact on practice revenue and is easy to assess. Typical outpatient medical office no show rate varies between 7 and 15%. Even best case scenario hurts the practice. 7% no show rate translates to about 500 patients a year. Depending on physician specialty, this could be from $50,000 in Primary Care (Family Medicine, Pediatrics) to $500,000 in procedures, e.g. minor surgeries. If the rate drops by just 1%, practice is making $5,000-$50,000 more a year!

Secondly, if medical office has no automated appointment reminder system in place, an employee should be calling patients with reminders and pre-procedure instructions. This is a cumbersome task that makes one bored in a minute. This is also a task difficult to supervise and control, so quite often an individual responsible for reminding patients does not complete the task 100%, leaving some patients uncovered.

Finally, an employee that is calling patients with appointment reminders gets paid salary and fringe benefits that add up to about $5,000 a year.

Add up One, Two and Three and see if you can afford not to use an automated medical appointment reminder system.

When it comes to selecting a reliable Automated Medical Appointment Reminders system, there is a large array of choices. They span from on-premise to cloud hosted solutions and vary by feature set. Naturally, the following features come as most important while selecting an automated appointment reminder software:

- EMR/EHR integration

- Practice Management integration

- Cloud vs. on-prem based

- Ability to pre-record templates in a warm human voice

- Ability to combine text-to-speach with pre-recorded voices

You can quickly get an idea on what's available on the market:

www.GoToClinic.com

www.Reremind.com

www.televox.com

Decide for yourself. Good luck!