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