Kareo
You go to your practice as if it were any other day. When you check at your appointments for today, you discover that they are all full. “That’s fantastic!” you exclaim.
A fully packed schedule means you’ll be able to treat as many patients as possible while also generating income. Then you see that the first three patients did not show up.
So you’re sitting there wishing you could have spent this time caring for other patients. In this post, we’ll go through some of the methods and suggestions you may utilize with Kareo EMR Software to reduce no-shows.
According to a recent survey, approximately 30% of all appointments are canceled.
But what difference does it make? No-show appointments cost US physicians almost $150 billion each year, with as little as 60 minutes of unplanned time costing up to $200.
So, if you see 10 patients each day and three of them do not show up, your expenditures would be more than $600 a day. When these expenditures start to add up, they might amount to more than $10,000 in lost income every month.
Kareo EMR is one of the first healthcare IT suppliers to recognize this trend and attempts to reduce no-shows with cutting-edge features and services. Here are some ways that Kareo EHR employs to prevent no-shows and increase income in your medical practice.
Flexible Payment Options
We always show up for visits as patients when we know we’ve already paid for it. Patients are subject to the same logic.
Offering a pre-payment option with incentives to attract patients is one of the most successful methods to do it. For example, you could utilize Kareo EHR to provide a 10% discount to everyone who pays in advance. Your payment and appointments would be safe in this manner.
You may also utilize this option to attract uninsured patients, who account for around 12.22% of the population in the United States.
Automated Appointment Reminders
You could believe that phoning each patient before an appointment is an excellent approach to remind them. Although it was a good strategy at one time, it is no longer the most cost-effective one.
Kareo EMR provides automatic appointment reminders, which may save you more than $5,000 per year for every staff person who spends time phoning patients.
If you’re anything like me, you might not think automatic appointment reminders are all that useful at first. However, once you realize how simple it is to remind patients to use this function, you’ll fall in love with it. Here are some of the advantages of Kareo EHR’s automated appointment reminder feature:
Increases Administrative Efficiency: Your medical staff will no longer have to phone each patient ahead of time to remind them of their appointment. This saves time, which may then be spent on more productive duties.
Enhances Patient Health: Appointment no-shows have an influence on the patient’s health as well as your practice. Failure to seek appropriate medical assistance on time may result in health deterioration. As a result, Kareo EHR is advantageous not only to you and your practice but also to your patients.
Ensures Patient Satisfaction: When you contact someone, it generates a sense of urgency for the receiver to respond.
They may be attending a meeting, going on a date, or even napping. Patients, on the other hand, have the option of responding when they are available, thanks to automatic appointment reminders sent through email or text message.
This improves your relationship with your patients and assures them pleasure.
To save time, patients can cancel or reschedule their appointments through text message.
Reduce Waiting Time and Hassle
An hour at a doctor’s office is a luxury that many of us cannot afford. People with demanding occupations cannot afford to take time away from their hectic schedules for an appointment unless it is really required.
So, in order to give medical care to the working class of the United States, you might concentrate on lowering patient waiting time and annoyance. You may pick features like telehealth visits, online patient intake, and simple patient collecting services with Kareo EHR, which greatly decrease waiting room difficulties.
Another strategy is to shorten the time between arranging an appointment and the actual appointment. The greater the time between scheduling an appointment, the more likely patients may forget. So, with these tactics, strive to keep patients from having to wait too long.
Set the Right Expectations
Most patients are unaware of the costs you will spend as a result of their absence. Although telling them straight is not possible, you may utilize innovative methods to ensure patients are aware of them. One of the most common methods to do this is to include it in your cancellation policy and ensure that the patient is aware of it.
In most circumstances, if the patients were aware of the costs you endure, they would want to do the right thing for you.
Finally, it is critical to recognize that life does not always go as planned. Your patients probably didn’t want to skip their appointment, but something more pressing came up. In such instances, you can contact your patients via their preferred method of communication and ask them if they want to postpone their appointment.
When patients do miss their appointments, instead of saying something like, “We’re sorry you missed the appointment,” you can say something along the lines of, “Thank you for booking an appointment.” You’ve missed your appointment, but you can quickly reschedule by…”
Instead of stating anything with a negative meaning, such as “I’m sorry,” you say something with a positive meaning, which ensures a better patient reaction.
Conclusion
Nobody enjoys being stood up, especially practitioners. You can eliminate no-shows and increase patient engagement with Kareo EHR software.
Kareo EMR software helps maximize patient engagement, minimize appointment no-shows, and help you run your practice more efficiently in the process.
