You and your staff work hard to optimize your patient schedule so you can see as many patients as you can without decreasing the quality of care. Unfortunately, multiple no shows and late patients complicate your schedule, slow down productivity, and decrease the revenue in your optometric practice.
In this post, we provide a few tips to help you increase your patient attendance rates.
Increasing The Patient Attendance Rate In Your Optometric Practice
Pick the Right Platform
Sending a patient and automated patient recall message through email may work for a majority of your patients. Unfortunately, many of your patients may also receive hundreds of emails a day. If you have patients who don’t check their email very often, or they get too many emails, there’s a chance your recall email will get lost in their inbox.
While email can be an effective platform for some of your patients, sending a text message may be more effective to remind your patients of an upcoming appointment. Using a patient recall system embedded in your cloud-based practice management and EHR solution, you and your staff can automate recall messages to send to your patients through email or text to help deliver your message to their preferred platform.
Provide Directions To New Patients
Sometimes your practice can be difficult to find, causing a large number of new patients to become late or not show up. If a new patient schedules an appointment at your practice, send them a reminder a few days in advance and include directions to your practice, where they can park, and any other information that will help them get to your practice more easily.
Give A Nudge To Repeat Offenders
There will be a few patients in your practice who are always running behind or always have something come up. If there are repeat offenders in your practice, consider sending multiple recall messages and reference your late and no show policy so there are no surprises if you have to administer a no show fee.
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