No doubt Patient scheduling is an art. From one perspective, optimizing your care team’s productivity and see as many revenue-generating patients as possible. And from the other avoiding long patient waiting times, smooth your patient journey in hospitals and keep patient satisfaction along with service provision high by giving each the attention they deserve. Bearing in mind that healthcare provision starts with the moment of bookings so be ready to welcome your patient with organized patient flow manner. Is that kind of balance achievable? Here are some best practices tips and fundamentals nowadays in hospitals.

online booking / Online payment

In era of technology, patients are increasingly comfortable and friendly with apps and online portals, have your own smart application and stand high among the crowd raising your telemedicine platform. it makes sense to allow them to schedule their own appointments by providing a patient-friendly online scheduling system. Not only can this increase patient satisfaction and better manageable flow, it allows your practice to reallocate some of the time front-office staff are currently spending scheduling, confirming, reminding, and re-scheduling appointments by phone even reducing operational overheads and inflating net profits. Cash patients would also appreciate to have their payment done along with online booking to cancel any administrative steps at your hospital and shorten their journey inside. Hospitals’ Smart Application have proven to be a more convenient portal rather than website as its more easily accessible and friendly.

SCHEDULE APPOINTMENTS IN time framed slots

Many practices find that scheduling in time framed slots helps in giving adequate time for doctors to prepare for patient visits and give fairly equal duration to all patients during service provision. Hospitals with integrated electronic medical records systems would have a much smoother journey for their patients and better optimization for clinic timing as no time wasted in preparing patients files and archives. For hospitals with traditional archiving would have to consider slots in between to catch up on documentation and patient filing preparations. Nevertheless, Scheduling appointments consecutively can also help reduce overhead costs as you may be able to have staff come in late or go home early on days with lighter appointment loads. 

APPOINTMENT REMINDER SYSTEM

Minimize the number of no-shows by using an automated system to SMS/call patients at set intervals before their appointment. Give your patients the option to cancel or reschedule, up to a certain point, by responding directly to the reminder. It’s also important to remind them of your practice’s cancellation policy; if your practice collects a cancellation fee past a certain time, for example, make sure that policy is included in appointment reminders until the patient confirms their appointment. Good communication is a key component of patient satisfaction, and automated appointment reminders are one way to improve communication and reduce no-shows.

Build A PATIENT WAITING LIST reallocate LATE CANCELLATIONS OR NO-SHOWS

Commonly Late cancellations and no-shows are inevitable. You can always limit the negative effects, by keeping a waiting list of patients in parallel who would like to get in earlier than their scheduled appointment. Even better, if your system embraces a facility that allows you to send out a mass messages to your patient wait list to notify them of availability and have them respond if they’d like to take the open appointment, your call center would have a rule at this phase too. This limits the need to call all patients one-by-one until the appointment is filled. Patients on the wait list will appreciate the follow-up and definitely you would be the patient first choice when it comes to medical services.