Appointment Reminder Intelligence

A practice can reach out to patients via phone, e-mail, SMS, and snail mail. Each communication media serves its own purpose. Let’s review available options for serving appointment reminders to practice patients.

Snail mail can be used to remind a patient only if appointment was scheduled long in advance. For recently added appointments, there is simply no time to deliver mail on time, so that it can remind of upcoming appointment. Another disadvantage of snail mail is cost. Printing, packing, and stamping a reminder will cost between $0.50-1.00 per reminder. With an average 400 patients a month, practice will have to spend $200-$400 just on reminders.

SMS is definitely a viable option for reminding patients. Most patients are expected to own SMS capable phone. SMS is easy to deliver and read. The disadvantage of SMS is that it can carry a limited amount of information. It is just 96 characters long, so adding web page links and long instructions is not an options. It is also impossible to deliver a calendar event via SMS. Calendar events can be imported directly into smart phone calendar and set to remind the owner of incoming appointment at pre-determined time. Another minor disadvantage of SMS is cost. Text messages cost around $0.10 per message. This is nowhere close to snail mail, but still adds up to a measurable amount for a busy practice.

E-mail is by far the richest media to deliver appointment reminders. It can include long instructions, patient forms as attachments, calendar items, links to web forms and documents to fill, links to confirm or reschedule appointment online. E-mails are also cost effective. Being virtually free, there are no budget concerns even for a busy practice. The disadvantage of e-mail is that Medicare patients might not be as acceptable to this media as the rest of patient population. Practice should evaluate what percentage of older patients might be impacted and ensure this population is covered by a voice call.

Voice call is not as rich as e-mail. Its main advantage is that this is a universal way to reach patients across all socioeconomic groups. Voice call is much less likely to be ignored compared to e-mail or SMS. When used with pre-recorded practice messages, voice call delivers personal touch. It sounds like a doctor or front desk that patient knows personally has called and spoke to the patient or left voicemail. This creates and strengthens existing connections and makes patient less likely to miss an appointment.

What is the best way to remind

When a practice is identifying best fit for notifying its patients, a table below can provide a general guidance. There are several ways to build practice appointment reminders. This depends on how much time is available and return of investment on time spent. The simplest way is to ask patients of preferred way. If patient preference is not available, practice can choose to implement universal approach with preference order based on most common scenario, see Unknown and Seniors in the table below. A practice may also choose to analyze patient panel in order to determine a category where most of the patients fit.

Patient group	Preferred Media in order of preference
Young adults	SMS, E-mail, Voice
Working adults	E-mail, SMS, Voice
Seniors	Voice, E-mail SMS
Unknown	Voice, E-mail SMS

A good appointment reminder system should enable practice to either pre-select reminder categories or even better let the system intelligently determine the order based on patient age and other cues available from patient demographics.

 

Happy reminding!