Blog

Automated Patient Reminders Minimize No-Shows and Maximize Utilization

Doctible
October 23, 2020
3
min read

Key Takeaways

  • Convenient Patient Communication: Explore the benefits of Doctible's Automated Patient Reminders in conveniently informing patients about upcoming appointments and injecting warmth and personalization into your practice messaging.
  • Hands-Free Setup: With Doctible's Patient Reminders, enjoy minimal setup efforts and a hands-free system allowing your staff to focus on essential patient interactions.
  • Timeline of Notifications: Doctible's communication platform provides an automated notification process, keeping patients informed in advance through preferred communication methods and reducing the likelihood of missed appointments.
  • Efficient Practice Management: Automated Patient Reminders contribute to efficient practice management by minimizing phone calls, saving staff time, ensuring earlier notifications, and reducing the impact of no-shows.
  • Flexible and Comprehensive Platform: Discover the flexibility of Doctible's platform, offering features like Two-Way Texting, Confirmation Alerts, and customized templates, empowering practices to tailor patient communication tools to their specific needs and integrate with their EHR.

Why our clients (and their patients) Love Automated Patient Reminders

Automated Patient Reminders are a convenient way to inform patients of their upcoming appointments. Modern patient reminders inject warmth and personalization into your practice.

Build A Warm, Caring, and Responsive Practice

Doctible’s Patient Reminders require little setup and then it’s “hands-free” — no additional work needed by you or your staff. You get a warm, more personalized practice because your staff can focus on what’s most important — the patients.

Dana Schwartz (Operations & Office Manager) at Potomac Psychiatry

Phone Tag: It’s Not Fun

There’s no reason for your staff to be stuck playing phone tag with patients and wasting time leaving messages that may never be listened to. Patient Reminders are one of the key modules within the Doctible patient communications platform — a collection of powerful, flexible, and affordable patient engagement tools.

Patty (Office Administrator) at Pacific Coast Pediatrics

How Does It Work?

Instead of making multiple back and forth phone calls to confirm whether a patient will or will not be coming in, send them a text that they can view at their leisure. When they know that they are able to make an appointment, all they have to do is click the “Confirm Appointment” button.

Patients may have forgotten when their appointment is. It’s likely they missed the phone call(s) your office placed and ignored their voicemail messages. Many patients haven’t even set up an outgoing message so it may not be clear if your staff have even dialed the right or wrong number.

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Timeline of Notifications

Patients are automatically notified in advance of their appointment through their preferred communication method. This makes it much less likely they will miss or forget their appointment.

Patients are automatically notified by email or text message 30 days before their appointment and again 7 days before their appointment, requiring them to confirm. Patients receive additional reminders the day before the appointment and one last notification one hour before. The last notice is typically sent via text and contains a link to directions and a traffic report.

Patty (Office Administrator) at Pacific Coast Pediatrics explains the cadence of automated reminders. Pacific Coast Pediatrics also uses the Virtual Waiting Room module.

No Shows?

No shows eat into the income for a practice as do late confirmations! With Patient Reminders most practices get earlier notifications. That means more time to find other patients to cover gaps in providers’ schedules.

Automated Patient Reminders work with the other Doctible modules such as Patient Communicator. Unlike Patient Communicator, the Automated Patient Reminders module requires an EHR, EMR, or Practice Management System integration.

Phone Time Is Lost Time

Calling patients for regular well-care appointments, reminders for scheduled appointments, and follow-up calls for procedures or test results eats up hours a day of staff time. Your staff also has to spend time listening to messages left by patients. It’s a “truly unnecessary task” that inconveniences patients and staff.

While staff are placing phone calls, listening to outgoing messages, or listening to voice messages left by patients or other medical professionals, they are not available to answer incoming calls. The cycle then repeats, with calls not answered within three rings and often ending up in voicemail.

Patients Frustrated by Cold Impersonal Outreach

The endless cycle of phone calls and voicemail tag, combined with automated call routing systems leaves patients with a strong and lasting impression of an impersonal practice where there is rarely anyone available to speak with them.

At Doctible we find that most staff care tremendously about their patients. Your staff will “shine through” when you automate patient reminders. Implementing Automated Patient Reminders ensures your staff are far more available for important calls with patients, other medical offices, or providers.

Terry and Dana from Potomac Psychiatry explain why Doctible tools help them deliver unique and personalized outreach to each of their patients.

Digital messaging such as text and email means actionable messages can be resolved quickly and efficiently. Beatriz explains, “We’re able to answer hundreds of texts a day compared to answering 25 phone calls. There’s a vast difference in how it expands our reach.”

It's a Flexible Platform

It’s important to know there isn’t one ‘right way’ to use Doctible. Every practice should select the patient communication tools that perfectly fit their needs and align with or augment their EHR. You can automate almost everything including patient reminders and safety protocol screenings.” — Charles Cournoyer, Doctible

Features of Automated Patient Reminders Include:

  1. Automated Patient Reminders
  2. Confirmation Alerts
  3. TCPA Compliance
  4. Two-Way Texting
  5. Custom SMS Templatesli
  6. Automated Confirmations
  7. Blackout Hours
  8. Cell Phone Detector
  9. Missed Appointment Reminders
  10. Custom Phone Number
  11. Recall Patients
  12. Easy-to-View Dashboard
  13. Family Messages
  14. Sequential Messaging
  15. Customized Timeline for Confirmation Reminders

Let Doctible Help Your Practice

Our team wants to help your team. Doctible wants to remove the burden of reminders and notifications so that your team can focus their efforts on providing the highest quality patient care and delivering the best experience possible. You will end up with happier patients, more energized staff and a more profitable provider schedule when using Automated Patient Reminders.

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Marketing Director says,

Service is top-notch, pricing is amazing, and it offers so many options. You can customize the message and so much more. They have been so kind and helpful through all aspects of integration and after.

Eye Care Practice owner says,

Fantastic experience with Doctible. They have helped our office with patient communication and in generating reviews. Their service is extremely reasonable in price and their services are truly valuable. I look forward to working with them in the future.

References
Doctible
January 17, 2024

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