1-800 Notify

The Top 10 Tricks to Reduce No-Shows in Your Doctor’s Office

admin — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 17:28:34 +0000

You may run the most organized doctor’s office in the nation, but patients are still going to no-show on you. Patients usually don’t need to cancel their appointments at the last minute. They just forget to keep you informed and leave your time slot empty. These no-shows are taking valuable time and money out of your practice. So let’s take a good look at some simple techniques to significantly reduce no-shows in your medical office.

Be careful to schedule accurately, avoid double-booking patients in a single time slot. Nobody likes to feel disrespected by sitting in the waiting room for too long if both patients show up for the same time appointment.
If your staff is trying to manually call patients for reminders, that is taking a lot of time during the day. Remember if your staff gets busy, and they miss one or more calls to your patients, that could likely turn into one or more no-shows! An automated reminder system that reliably sends reminders to 100% of your patients will reduce your no-shows.
If you are sending just phone call appointment reminders, try sending text appointment reminders. The vast majority of patients have cell phones these days and might appreciate and respond better to a text reminder.
If you’re only sending a single reminder one day ahead, try sending a second reminder two days ahead – mix it up a little bit. Send a phone call two days ahead and a text reminder one day ahead. This gives your patients two chances to let you know if they need to cancel or reschedule. And two reminders to make sure they show up to that appointment!
If a patient does happen to cancel or even no-show his or her appointment, you cannot afford to wait to be called back. Be sure to call (or text) the patient the very next day with a Missed Appointment Notice. This will help your patients realize you are serious about your no-show policy.
If you have no-shows, you can reduce their impact on your office by creating a list of patients who can come into your office on short notice. They can often fill empty time slots, preventing you from losing money.
It never hurts to create a strict no-show policy. Regardless of your no-show fees and policies, you should always create some kind of policy to share with your patients. It’s very important to stick to your no-show policy. Otherwise, patients will know you’re not serious and start no-showing again.
Create a clear policy on no-shows and add that to your new-patient intake paperwork. Have your patients sign off on it so it’s clear they understand the policy. That way, patients cannot complain when you stick to your policy down the road.
Depending on your practice, you might be able to ask patients to prepay before the next time they come in. You may be amazed at how few no-shows your office will experience.
Schedule each of your appointments appropriately. Keep in mind that some of your patients rely on public transportation to visit their doctors. It cannot hurt to remind them to check the bus, train, and subway schedules to make sure they will be on time to their appointments.

While no-shows are bound to occur at any doctor’s office, using the best appointment reminder system available can always save you valuable time and money. Following the right tips, more of your patients are bound to show up on time for each of their appointments. Rely on 1800 Notify to handle all your dentists, doctors, physicians, physical therapists, and hospitals scheduling needs.

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Need an Effective Solution for Patient Billing Reminders?

admin — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 19:00:30 +0000

Successful practices prosper because they do their job well. Providing high-quality services to patients with an exceptional staff is their focus. Practices like this usually don’t have trouble with acquiring new patients in because they are built on a solid reputation and skills. However, with growing patient responsibility from both larger deductibles and co-pays, they may have a hard type sustaining themselves if they don’t receive patient payments. Patient-responsible balances are steadily increasing — more patients owe more money. Receiving patient payment for services rendered is an elemental part of any practice and is what keeps it running. The challenge in today’s environment is how to actually get money owed paid to your practice without have to spend too money or staff time to do it.

Getting Paid Without Spending Too Much (Paper Statements, Manual Calling, Manual Payments)

The only way a practices can thrive is if they receive full payment for services they performed. Challenges occur when additional paper statements mailed to patients are ignored or set aside, to be buried under other mail.

How is a practice to push the “lazy payer” into paying their invoice?

Having your staff try to call each patient over a small balance owed is not cost-effective.
Sending extra paper statements is not working.
Calling only the high-balance patients misses the mark.
Calling only the very late patients (90 or even 120 days late) is also not effective.

Ensuring payment is received can end up costing practices a lot of money particularly if it is done the old-fashioned way through paper statements and manual calling. A billing system like this is expensive because it requires a number of staff members to get the job done.A person needs to be in place to not only take the initial information and payment, but also to input the remaining amount into a logging system, follow up with billing for another payment amount, and sending out the bill to the customer. Someone also needs to keep track of when the bill went out, if payment was received, adding the payment into the system and actually depositing payment, and following up if the entire amount was not paid. This system of billing also leaves a lot of room for something to go wrong. Mistakes are bound to happen when you have a lot of different people being relied on to get the statement printed, out the door, into a mailbox, and picked up by the right recipient. In the end, this type of billing system is quite costly. Through the evolution of technology, there are more options for businesses that can help alleviate the costs and complications of billing and receiving payment.

Automatic Billing Reminders and Automated Payments

The advancements in technology now provide practices with options to automate patient billing reminders and take in payments over the phone automatically so that outstanding bills can get paid quickly and easily. It basically works by having a patient contact list uploaded that shows the outstanding amount. This may be generated from a client list taken from an Accounts Receivable report or a file that is used by a statement vendor. With clients on the list to call, a recorded message can be set to call and remind clients about the amount due and invite them to pay with a credit card over the phone using an automated pay-by-phone system. Your staff is freed up to do more important and valuable work. Or, you can even setup an online payment portal that will allow your patients to pay online 24/7 — allows patients to pay their balance without ever having to interrupt your staff. Over 80% of patients today expect and demand an online payment portal. Why not your practice?

Learn more about Patient Billing Reminder Calls and Patient Payment Solutions or call us at 1-800-939-1853.

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Get More Done While Saving Money Using an Automation

admin — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 18:52:20 +0000

In order for any practice to be prosperous and profitable, it needs to make money. The popularity of any practice comes from happy, satisfied patients. High quality and unquestionable standards will continually bring patients in and back for more. Once you’ve got your successful practice model in place, it is just a matter of time before you’ve got more customers than you know what to do with! This is where many practice owners start to falter because no matter how many patients you have, if your staff gets overwhlemed with mundane tasks, patient satisfaction will drop. If your patients don’t pay their bills, your practice will suffer.

How to Get Paid Automatically

Although some businesses are paid upfront, there are many others who don’t work under those same type of rules. Medical practices are one. Paying for medical services typically involves an insurance company. Depending on your practice, you may receive more or less money from the insurance company. All practices have to deal with patient-responsible payments including co-payments and deductibles. Collecting what is owed to you from your patient population can be complicated and labor intensive. But it doesn’t have to be anymore.In fact, with the advancements in technology, it actually can be automated and done quite simply.

Automated Software Saves Businesses Time and Money

Practices don’t have time to chase down payments or locate customers to get paid and, they don’t have to do so! In today’s world of technology, there now are ways that businesses can eliminate the excessive amount of personnel time and effort to remind customers about paying their bills on time instead of the old fashioned method of paper billing. Automated software can send messages to patients, customers, and other business clients to remind them of an outstanding balance or upcoming bill payment. There are several methods that can be used to get messages out through automated software. Some of these are:

Automated Text

Text messages are one of the best ways to ensure that a client will actually see and read information sent out by you. Statistics shows that text messages are opened 98% of the time versus an email that falls, at the most, under 21%. 90% of all text messages are read in under 3 minutes. It takes an average person 90 minutes to respond to an email, but only 90 seconds on average to respond to a text message. With an automated software that incorporates text messaging capabilities, businesses can send patients information about their outstanding balance including a pay-by-phone number or link to an online payment portal. Source: OneReach Blog

Pay-by-Phone Payment (You call the Patient or the Patient Calls You)

Automated software offers patients an easy way for them to pay their outstanding bill over the phone using a credit card. This can be added as an option to a billing reminder call (where your practice calls the patient), or as a stand-alone 800-type number (that you can print on your statements) where patients can call in and pay their invoices 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Without ever needing to speak to staff. If your phone system allows transfers, then you can setup your own practice phone system main menu to offer the option for every patient that calls your practice – “Press 4 to pay your statement using our auto-pay by phone system.”

Online Payment Portal (Available 24 / 7)

Patients are used to paying their utilities, cable, and almost any other bill online. Why not offer them a way to pay their medical statement online? You can with a free online payment portal. Link to it from your web site. Put the link to it on every statement you mail out. Offering more ways to pay or “payment channels” that are available 24-hours a day, will definitely improve patient payments.

Appointment Reminder

Other forms of automation that can dramatically save staff time from manual appointment reminder calls is to use automated appointment reminder software. Using such automation will call, text email patients for you reminding them of an upcoming appointment. Appointment reminder software also provides easy options for patients to connect to your front desk via a live transfer of the phone call or a click of your phone number in a text message. Removing manual appointment reminder calls from your staff work load will typically save 1 hour for every 20 appointments reminded, as the average time to stop what you were doing, look up the number, dial the phone, talk or leave a message, re-try busy signals, is 3 minutes per appointment. All that time should be spent focusing on items that are more valuable like insurance verification, or enhancing the patient experience in the office.

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Need an Effective Solution for Appointment Reminders?

admin — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 17:53:08 +0000

Today’s healthcare organizations realize just how valuable missed appointments truly are to a practice’s bottom line. The higher the number of missed appointments, the more money will be lost. When there is a high number of missed appointments, it indicates an organization is not running as efficiently as it should. This directly impacts the resources of the organization, whether that be a healthcare company, business corporation, law firm and many other types of business offices where time is factor. The main reason clients, patients, customers, and others miss appointments is just because they forget about it. This practice can be dangerous especially in health care services where a patient may not get the required medical care. Doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel also lose valuable time. To combat the negative effects missed appointments can have, businesses are increasingly adopting appointment reminder systems.

Appointment Reminder Systems

The solution to missed appointments and the problems it creates is to use an effective appointment reminder system. These may come in many different forms.

Text Messages

One simple solution is sending text messages in the form of appointment reminders. A survey reveals that the text message open / read rate is 98%, so this will lessen the probability that an appointment reminder will be missed. Another study reveals that 97% of the population uses text messaging every day, so text messaging will work for most people. Also text messages are opened quickly and read, unlike emails. A text message can be sent using an automated reminder system to all your patients within minutes. Responding to text messages is much simpler and convenient for your patients, and many prefer this method above all others.

Voice Messages

Appointment reminders through a recorded voice message are the tried-and-true method of reaching all your patients. Everyone can receive and listen to a voice call. This is especially if your patient population tends to be older and not as inclined to use text messages. In these cases, a voice call is still the sure way to send a reminder. Unless your patients come to appointments 2 or 3 times every week, calling 2 working days ahead of an appointment is typically the best time to do it – close enough to the appointment so the patient does not forget, but with a working day in the middle, so you can keep your schedules filled if the patient calls to cancel their appointment the next morning. The only drawback with voice messages is some clients or patients may be annoyed with a phone call interruption and feel like it’s a waste of their time.

Email Alerts

A final solution for appointment reminders is to send an email message. Appointment reminders are sent to patients’ email addresses to remind them of their appointments. The benefit of this solution is another one that works well because it is non-intrusive. However, this can also be a drawback, if the email reminder gets buried in the patient’s inbox and never read. Emails allows clients to check their emails whenever it is a convenient time for them and where there are no distractions. Email can be particularly useful for those who do not own a mobile phone or have a limited plan and don’t want to pay extra for text messaging. In instances like this, emails are a great way to communicate appointment reminders.

Combination of Types of Appointment Reminders

A growing number of practices use a combination of text messages, emails, or voice messages. Most appointment reminder services allow practices to send a variety of reminders. The overall goal when using appointment reminders is to avoid “no-shows,” while balancing the need to now overwhelm or upset the patient with too many reminders. When a practice sends reminders either in form of text, email, or voice message, they will minimize missed appointments. Patients will be alerted to both the time and location of their appointments. All the above solutions can drastically improve the “no-show” rate for your office, reduce administration time, improve efficiency, improve patient satisfaction, maximize revenue and save money.

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Save Time with Text Message Appointment Reminders

admin — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 17:49:05 +0000

In the past decade, the biggest change in the way we run businesses has been the way we use mobile phones. This means most businesses have been forced to change the way they reach customers. Research has shown that 79% of mobile users check their phones within 15 minutes of waking up and do this over 150 times a day. It’s, therefore, not strange when businesses are looking for the best way to reach their customers through their phones. Ahead of emails and Facebook, texting is one of the most frequently used modes of communication in the world today. Although almost 100% of texts are opened within the first three minutes, as much as two thirds of emails are never read. Due to this, it’s obvious that text messages can deliver the best results. In fact, you can save time with text message appointment reminders. Missed appointments can cost a medical practice significant money in terms of lost productivity, not to mention the patient who may have their health adversely affected by not receiving the care they need.

Why Text Message Appointments Reminders Are Important

Several studies have shown how effective text message appointment reminders are and just how important they can become to a practice. In one study, hospitals that use text messaging have greatly reduced the number of no show patients. For healthcare concerns or businesses, the best time to send messages, especially if the practice has already sent another reminder 2 days prior to the appointment, is the day before the scheduled appointment. This is enough time for the clients to organize themselves so that they do not miss the scheduled appointment. It’s also advisable that when sending the message, you need to stress the importance of the appointment to the client. More so, proper use of wording is very important. You can use phrases such as: “be sure to”, “don’t forget”, and “important reminder” so as to emphasize the urgency of the appointment.

The Problem with Phone Call Reminders

The effectiveness of text message reminders is well documented; however, the most common solution many companies turn to in their attempt to reduce no shows have been phone call reminders. Some patients no longer prefer a phone call reminder because it can prove more disruptive and requires and effort to listen to the voice mail. An increasing number of people are not taking the effort to listen to their voice mail messages, “because it takes too much time and effort.” More calls may be directed to voice mail systems and not listened to in a timely manner. Fortunately, text messages work in such a way that some software companies have created text message appointment reminders that you can easily use. The idea is to confirm with the patient that text messaging reminders are acceptable. When choosing a text message appointment reminder service, it’s critical that the service provider is able to answer all your questions and provides you with all the information you need. In the end, you will find that you save time with text message appointment reminders.

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Appointment Reminders Keep Your Schedule Filled

admin — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 17:45:14 +0000

Manually calling patients to remind them of their appointments is a significant time-drain for your staff. The last thing a medical office needs is for one of its essential medical or front desk personnel to be tied up trying to remind a patient about an appointment. Unfortunately, this happens more frequently than many offices want. The staff member gets caught on the phone with “chatty” patients as they call to remind them of an upcoming appointment. When your staff initiates the call to the patient, it’s very hard to end the call when the patient wants to continue talking about the weather or any other topic.

No Shows and Re-Scheduling Are Both Costly

The lost revenue and lost opportunity to see a patient who needs to be seen due to a missed appointment is quite costly. Depending on the office and the type of procedure or appointment, a no-show can mean serious repercussions for everyone involved. There can be back and forth of medical office staff trying to reach the patient and find available times that will fit in a patient’s schedule. All of a sudden, your staff has spent twice the time dealing with this single patient appointment.

For the patient and the team, this entire procedure can be exhaustive in both hours and frustration. Sometimes, an agreed upon appointment will get keyed in and set after several minutes, just to have the patient call back to reschedule and the process happens all over again.The amount of time and money this takes from a medical practice is quite costly. From the time it takes for staff members to get a patient re-scheduled to the number of missed appointments from patients forgetting the time, the monetary loss can reach the thousands of dollars.This is why medical facilities are now using an appointment reminder software from 1-800 Notify that keeps staff working, patients happy, and the office calendar filled!

Appointment Reminder Service That’s Easy to Use

Appointment reminder services allow clients to remember and show up to their own appointments without having to talk to anyone in a medical office. Research has shown that most people prefer appointment reminders because it reduces missed appointments and the need to reschedule them or even pay a fee for the missed appointment. Your staff can control when the automated appointment reminders are sent to patients. Growing numbers of practices have started sending 2 reminders – a call 48 hours in advance and a text message reminder 24 hours prior. This software is flexible and easy to use.

Besides just appointment time, the reminder system can be customized to advise patients about other things they may need to bring with them to their appointment to ensure a proper examination, review, or procedure can be done. Reminders about their insurance cards, referral paperwork, what they should and should not do in advance of the appointment – all of these things can be added into an appointment reminder so that everything that needs to get done is able to be done. For medical offices, appointment reminder software increases productivity since medical staff isn’t spending an excessive amount of time trying to reach patients to reschedule a missed appointment.

1-800 Notify Appointment Reminder Service

At 1-800 Notify, the reminder service web site is easy for both patients and medical staff. The appointment reminder service benefits both patients and offices because it keeps calendars full and patients on-time for their appointments.

Find out More About Appointment Reminders with 1-800 Notify

Not all appointment software is the same. With 1-800 Notify, you will be able to customize your appointment reminder so that it does all the work you need it to easily for you! It is a full-featured software that is user-friendly and simple to use from the office side as well as the patient side. Once you try it, you’ll wonder why you hadn’t thought of this sooner!

Find out more about the 1-800 Notify Appointment Reminder Software and other services that can make your medical office run much more efficiently and effectively.

Call 1-800-939-1853 to get more information today!

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