The healthcare system is becoming more organized than ever before. After the epidemics like COVID19, SARS, MERS, etc that spread the world at a fast pace, healthcare systems around the world are re-engineering themselves with technology.

To keep up with social distancing measures, avoid rush of patients at the hospitals and reduce long waiting hours to get the treatment, it is imperative that patient appointments are carefully scheduled.

Despite this, there are a lot of patients who end up missing their appointments from time to time, and posing questions to the efficiency of the appointment scheduling system in place.

Thus, sending appointment reminders to patients holds the key. Here’s why you need appointment reminders to help fix the broken healthcare system:

1. Less Crowded Hospitals & Diagnostic Labs

Imagine a hospital where patients turn up anytime of the day and wait for long hours before their chance for treatment. Patients would end up crowding the hospital because they forgot the time of their appointment. If only they were properly reminded about when they should have come, the hospital wouldn’t be so crowded all of a sudden.

2. Waiting List Reduction

When patients don’t make it to the scheduled appointment time, this leads to empty slots while the waiting list grows. Due to no-shows, you’re sitting around doing nothing while you could have actually been doing a lot if you were a bit more organised.

Services like relatient.net guide the way on how the patient reminder services should work. Sending out a reminder allows your patients to cancel or reschedule if they cannot make it, which gives you an opportunity to move other people from the waiting list. In case your clients wait for too long, chances are that they may also go elsewhere to get the services they need.

3. Better Patient Experience & Satisfaction

Those patients who forget to show up may end up feeling embarrassed and this can lead to changing their doctor because they were too embarrassed to call for another appointment after missing a few of them.

All of this can be avoided with the help of the reminders. Your patients will be satisfied with receiving them, since it gives them an opportunity to either show up on time, or reschedule if they are too busy. In any case, they will be happy to receive a text or something to jog their memory.

4. Staff Productivity Improvement

If your employees have to spend the whole day calling patients to check whether they will show up, then they will have no time left to do anything else. Even if they don’t make the calls, having people just show up whenever they feel like it or having them miss their appointments leads to a hindered productivity.

Instead of finishing that important task they had, your employees might find themselves juggling between no-shows and early-shows, trying to solve up the confusion and make everything more organized.

While everyone might have a different idea about the definition of productivity in healthcare, the truth is that it shouldn’t be taken for granted. By using reminder services, you will allow your staff to focus on different issues and consequently be more productive. They won’t be wasting their time on calling everyone individually or clearing up the mess that occurs if patients end up not following the schedule.

5. Revenue Maximization

Every single missed appointment is essentially a loss to the hospital of both time and revenue. No-shows lead to a loss of money and even a low no-show rate can have a negative impact on your overall annual revenue. Sending out patient reminders allows hospitals and clinics to use their time perfectly every day.

Conclusion

Patient appointment reminder services are, thus, important for all healthcare businesses.