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.