Top 5 Medical Appointment Scheduling Mistakes You Should Never Make

Online appointment scheduling has seen a drastic growth in adoption during the last few years. Every year, in the US healthcare system, the average no-show patients cost around $150 billion. As it is an easy way to access care online, both individuals and healthcare organizations make some common mistakes when scheduling and processing online appointments.

Making use of the appointment scheduling software may be the best solution. But when mistakes happen, the appointments are lost and patients may feel less cared for. In this article, we enlist the top 5 medical appointment scheduling mistakes that you should never make.

1. Not collecting more information from patients

An important part of online appointment scheduling is to gather necessary information about the patients. Are they new patients? Do they visit for an annual check-up? What kind of health concerns do they have?

Knowing the perfect answers to these kinds of questions will help your practice staff to predict how long the appointment does might take. What happens if the provider doesn’t gather enough information about the patients? You might truly end up with a long appointment scheduling process, which leads to a huge time loss for providers and patients too.  So, when starting your scheduling process, it is important that you concentrate more on the nature of your specialty and the types of appointments.

In the same way, new patients would expect to know the service information before they book an appointment with the specialists, Patients wish to know exactly what the services are offered and how it benefits them in terms of good health outcomes.

It’s the provider’s job to state out the clear and detailed information about the appointment scheduling and services offered. Lack of information drives new patients out of your practice and seeks other specialty practices to book online appointments.

RELATED: Promoting Appointment Adherence: Cut Down Your ‘No Shows’

2. Failing to provide timely appointment reminders

Appointment no-shows are really costly to a healthcare organization. With their busy lifestyle, people actually forget about their scheduled appointments.

What happens when the patient forgets to show up for an appointment? It’s the organization that suffers a lot here than the patients. However, the main reason behind the appointment no-shows are, the health practices didn’t provide sufficient appointment reminder at the right time.

So, the best way to fix and avoid this scheduling mistake is to choose the best EHR software or to optimize your scheduling software to send out automated text reminders. It’s too good if these text reminders can write to your EMR, which gives you the ability to confirm the scheduled appointment.

RELATED: Automated Appointment Reminders: Why It Matters In 2021?

3. Over-booking appointments

Overbooking means accepting online appointments beyond the capacity for an allotted session. The main purpose behind this overbooking process is to maximize practice revenue. Yes, this process could result in a bad patient experience. This can be easily avoided by using the right scheduling software to organize your busy schedules.

4. Being unprepared during appointment

Don’t wait until a patient arrives on appointment day and only begin preparing all the required materials. If there is anything that patients need to prepare, state clearly before a customer makes their booking with you.

Online appointment schedulers often provide a feature, known as “Appointment Lead Time”, which allows you to set the number of days you need before the meeting. Make sure you have sufficient time to get prepared before the meeting.

5. Not using a scheduling software

To wrap it all up, ultimately the biggest mistake a healthcare organization can make is to not make use of automated scheduling software. Not only can AI software streamline the scheduling process for patients, but it can also optimize the efficiency of staff time.

With medical office scheduling, patients can easily remember, cancel, book, and reschedule appointments. If appointments are bumped, scheduling software can be automated to give the patient an option for rescheduling – right from their phone.

Vozo is Here to Help!

We hope this blog has shown how our electronic health records system can help your practice improve efficiency, compliance, and patient care. With customizable templates, intuitive workflows, seamless integrations, and robust analytics, our EHR enables your team to spend less time on paperwork and more time focusing on what matters – your patients.

Investing in an advanced EHR is a big decision that pays dividends for years to come in the form of time savings, improved documentation, reduced errors, and more.

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Ready to learn more? Try our free trial and know it for yourself. An EHR expert will give you a customized walkthrough based on your specialty, practice size, and specific needs.