Tips For Improving Your Practice’s Scheduling Efficiency

They say the only appointments patients are never late to and never miss are emergencies; your practice elliminates no-shows and reaches maximum scheduling efficiency when you only receive emergencies. Set aside emergencies, scheduling efficiency and practice profitability are positively related. The more efficient is your scheduling system the less are no-shows, the more patients are seen, the more services are being delivered, the more contact lenses are being dispatched, the more eye glasses are being prescribed and sold, and the higher is the rate of rescheduling. One thing is for sure that you can never go down to all the reasons patients miss their appointments. However, you can set systems to reduce and maybe if you are lucky enough to elliminate no-shows.

In our practice we tried to track days of the week to see if for example Mondays and Fridays are prone to more no-shows than Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays but we did not find any significant difference. However, the only significant indicator for no-shows was patient’s history of no-shows. A patient who is late or misses an appointment once will probably miss very often.For this reason it would be very important to flag patients who have had no-shows in the past. A good idea to increase efficiency in the situation of a flagged no-show patient is to give him the same appointment with a new patient for whom you have no previous data. If they both show up you prioritise the new patient and make the flagged patient wait. Double booking works very well in our practice and we rarely get an empty spot.

What we also learned over the time that scheduling within two days almost always have zero no-shows. Moreover, we always have plenty of no-shows among late afternoon schedules unless they have been scheduled the same day. A good tip would be to allocate many late afternoon appointments for same day scheduling.

Text Messaging Rreminders before 48 hours are a great tip for all appointments. It is also essential to send an additional automatic reminder at the beginning of the week for appointments scheduled for more than a week. A phone call is also important the same day or the day before checking in your practice.

Many practices use waiting lists. We don’t use waiting list in a systematic way and when we use it we prefer not to call it waiting list but we use the term “priority” instead since we only employ it for same day scheduling.

One last tip is to find a way to disclose your cancelation policy (by Fax or email) and have you patient acknowledge or confirm receiving and reading it. Moreover, what is more important than your cancelation policy is to make it easy for patients to cancel; let them know that they can cancel by either calling your office or any other way: by Fax, email, Text Message, or even Voice Message.