An answering service helps triage patient calls and also relays time sensitive messages and consult requests from other providers. Choosing an answering service is an important decision for a medical practice.
Putting together a cohesive set of processes to reduce patient no-shows can be challenging and time intensive, especially for busy practices. But, doing so is critical to both optimizing revenue and increasing the quality of patient outcomes.
As practices look to drive down their rate of no-shows, there are several strategies we see practices put into place that seem promising, but ultimately aren’t effective, and in some cases have the opposite effect and drive patients away from the practice.
Patients forgetting and/or not receiving a reminder of an upcoming appointment was found to be the leading cause of patient no-shows. Scheduling conflicts and transportation issues followed as the next two most common factors. When combined, these top three issues account for nearly two thirds of all missed appointments.
