A good patient recall system and message can give your optometric practice the ability make valuable connections with your patients to keep your patient schedule full. In today’s post, we’ll provide tips on how you can optimize your patient recall strategy to fill your office schedule.
Using Patient Recall To Fill Your Schedule
Choose The Right Delivery Method
Your patients are busier than ever. Mailboxes and inboxes are filled with junk from people and organizations we may have never had a relationship with before. And, with the increase in scam phone calls, many news outlets are warning people to not answer calls from people they don’t know. So, how do you connect with your patients?
To ensure you're connecting with your patients, you want to identify their preferred means of communication. To identify this, ask if they prefer text messages or email. Also, you should ask them to save your phone number or email address so that they know it’s you when you reach out.
Focus On The Message
Whether you’re emailing, texting, or calling your patients, your message has to be optimized to get your patient to act. To improve the chances of your message being read and your patient taking the desired action, you need to optimize the content using recall best practices like:
- Personalizing the message
- Explain why you’re contacting them
- Show the benefits
- Ask for action
Make Scheduling Easy
If you’re delivering an effective message to your patients, then your patient schedule should be full all the time, right? Not yet.
There’s still one other component that you need to provide to help fill up your schedule. You need to make it easy for your patients to act.
If you make scheduling an appointment too difficult for your patient, then you’re probably not going to see a dramatic increase in appointments. However, giving your patient a way to schedule their appointment through a patient portal, without having to call your front office, will free up your staff and give your patients the ability to pick a time that works best for them.
If the recall system and patient portal are embedded in your practice management and EHR software, the information can sync together and improve patient communication.
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