What is the best approach for handling the cancellation of an appointment by a patient?

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• Top 5 Benefits of online Scheduling for Healthcare Practices
• Trends indicate booming opportunities for healthcare practices with online appointment scheduling
• Communicate Reminders in the Method the Patient Prefers
• Be Clear About the Reasons for Follow-up Visits
• Implement a Telemedicine Program
• Have a Cancellation Policy
• Reduce Wait Times
• Follow-up After a Cancellation or No-show
• Identify Patients Who Regularly Miss Appointments
• Make it Easy to Change or Cancel an Appointment
• Don’t Schedule Appointments Too Far in Advance
• How do you handle patient cancellations?
• How do I respond to a client who has to cancel an appointment?
• What is the best way to deal with patients who are routinely no
• How do you get patients to come to their appointments?

Canceled appointments are counterproductive to healthcare practices and can also prove detrimental to patients’ health. Busy schedules, other priorities or casual attitudes; the reasons can be endless, but a canceled appointment creates a huge lag in treatment follow-ups and also causes loss to medical practices.

Missed or canceled appointments are not the good news of practice growth. Too many cancellations can fail your appointment schedule system and increase the waiting time for other patients. If you, too, are facing a high patient cancellation rate, we have a few tips for you to increase your show-up rate-

Send reminders to your patients
One of the most effective ways to reduce cancellation is sending reminder texts and notifications to the patients. Forgetting about medical appointments is not strange in busy schedules. A reminder text, call or mail can work wonders for medical practices. Automated reminders are one of the rapidly adopted solutions proving very helpful for practices. Send them reminders before 24 to 36 hours to avoid last-minute cancellations, depending on your cancellation policy.

Implement a cancellation policy
It is not mandatory to charge a fine from your patients for not showing up or canceling the appointments at the last moment. Simply setting up a cancellation policy and conveying the same to your patients can effectively reduce the episodes of frequent cancellation. Communicating the cancellation window works best in managing the no show-offs. E.g., establishing a rule that patients must notify at least 24 hours before the cancellation can bring a substantial reduction in last moment cancellations.

Propose Tele-consultations
There can be many reasons behind canceled appointments. However, offering teleconsultations can actually convert canceled medical appointments into video/audio consultations. This way, you retain your patients and save your resources from getting wasted. Patients can connect from anywhere, and the precious time of both doctor and patient gets saved.

Offer easy rescheduling
By providing ease of rescheduling to your patients, you can retain your patients. However, the cost of canceled appointments remains. The rescheduling option serves the bigger picture. New patient acquisition and patient retention are as important as avoiding cancellation. By offering easy rescheduling, you achieve the first two and effectively tackle the appointment cancellation.

Manage your waitlist
With the help of an effective practice growth solution, utilize your waiting list to fill in slots that arise due to canceled appointments. By offering vacant slots to patients on the waiting list, medical practices can easily manage the scheduling and deal with canceled appointments.

Modern-day patient growth solutions offer effective ways to manage medical appointment cancellation. Skedule.care offers a premium solution for managing appointment scheduling in healthcare practices. We bring the ease of adding online appointment scheduling to your practice in under five minutes. We understand your unique needs and provide customized solutions. Get started with our seven days trial now and feel the difference.

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July 16, 2017

Communicate Reminders in the Method the Patient Prefers

Telephone appointment reminders never hurt, but some patients are more likely to pay attention to a text or email. Although it adds a bit of complexity, choosing the reminder method that the patient prefers can have a big impact on reducing no-shows.

Be Clear About the Reasons for Follow-up Visits

The first step to avoiding a no-show can begin when the appointment is scheduled. If the visit is to be a follow-up, be sure to communicate the reason that an appointment is necessary, what will be discussed, and what additional actions can be expected. People are more likely to come to a follow-up appointment even if they are feeling better if they have a clear understanding of why it is important.

Implement a Telemedicine Program

Although no-shows and cancellations are a big pain for practices, there are many legitimate challenges that can make getting into the office difficult for patients. Missing time from work, finding child care, and wasting time or money in traffic are real-world concerns that lead to missed appointments. One way to take these burdens off patients is to implement a telemedicine program. Visits via video are much easier, quicker, and less expensive for patients and they eliminate many of the reasons people fail to show up.

Have a Cancellation Policy

Opinions differ on whether it is a good idea to charge a fee for no-shows and last minute cancellations, but whether or not you decide to do so, it is helpful to have a written cancellation policy that patients sign. It should state the reasons that no-shows are bad for the practice and detrimental to patient health outcomes. It should ask the patient to commit to a reasonable notification period if they do need to cancel or reschedule an appointment.

Reduce Wait Times

Your cancellation policy will ask patients to respect your time by giving notice if they have to cancel, it is reasonable for them to expect that your office will respect their time by minimizing the time they have to wait to be seen. This is another benefit of a telemedicine program, which tends to lead to shorter wait times for the patients who do need to come into the office. If the office is running behind for some reason, be sure to communicate that to patients so they know what to expect.

Follow-up After a Cancellation or No-show

By reaching out to learn why an appointment was missed, your staff may see some trends or notice process errors that could be corrected to improve the number of kept appointments.

Identify Patients Who Regularly Miss Appointments

Be sure to track no-shows and cancellations so that you can identify particular patients who routinely miss appointments. You may uncover a barrier that keeps them from making it in that can be addressed. They may also need a reminder about your cancellation policy. In extreme cases, it may make sense to discharge a patient who habitually misses appointments due to carelessness, but often there is a way to solve the challenge and turn the situation around.

Make it Easy to Change or Cancel an Appointment

Patients should understand how to cancel an appointment in advance or how to reschedule it. The more ways that they can do so, the more likely you are to get the notice that you need. Online scheduling tools help, especially when used in conjunction with electronic appointment reminders.

Don’t Schedule Appointments Too Far in Advance

If a patient needs to come in for a check-up in six months, you might consider waiting until closer to the due date to schedule an appointment. A lot about a person’s schedule can change in that amount of time and people are much more likely to forget about something that far away.

There’s no silver bullet or one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of no-shows and last minute cancellations, but these steps can go a long way toward minimizing the problem. Get started with Chiron’s user-friendly platform today!

(How much additional revenue could your practice be making after adopting telemedicine? Use our Telemedicine Calculator to find out!)

How do you handle patient cancellations?

How do I respond to a client who has to cancel an appointment?

What is the best way to deal with patients who are routinely no

How do you get patients to come to their appointments?