When patients miss appointments, they interrupt the flow of patient care, impede clinic productivity, and signal an eroding patient loyalty. The rate of no-shows runs at thirty percent for the average family practice. A missed appointment amounts to missed billing revenue. Worse, if the clinicians are part-time or full-time staff rather than contracted, they sit idle on the company clock, losing money with each passing minute. Finally, a missed appointment could be a symptom of a deserting patient, signaling a potential loss of long-term billing revenue.

Reminder calls for upcoming appointments and follow up calls on recent no-shows are effective strategies for billing revenue protection because they reduce numbers of no-shows and help early identification of incipient patient attrition and other patient relationship problems. Vendors of reminder call services quote no-show reduction rates of fifty percent. They also mention comparable improvement of long-term patient loyalty. Other no-show reduction strategy components include charges for missed appointments, no-show statistics analysis, and overbooking.

While recognizing the benefits of reminder calls, busy practice owners often neglect or postpone reminder and follow up calls because of other office management priorities, such as personnel issues or billing. As with any other management initiative, to get results, reminder call strategy must be implemented systematically and consistently.

Reminder call automation delivers the benefits of billing revenue protection and patient relationship management in a disciplined and systematic fashion and at significantly lower cost. Successful implementation of reminder call automation depends on technology and require:

1. Flexible messaging – a successful appointment reminder must consistently fit the culture of your practice, location, and specific appointment type. Typically, a practice uses a new patient, existing patient, recall patient, and several specialty messages.

2. Appointment scheduler integration - a seamless method for retrieving the appointment information without involving the medical staff.

3. Call scheduling - the ability to schedule and automatically call patients with a personalized human voice message.

4. High quality infrastructure - a facility with the highest quality fiber optic feed, digital lines allowing us to provide unsurpassed message quality and call progress detection accuracy. This technology helps:

1. Avoid the pause that accompanies most automated messages. In fact any pause after the first sound could lead a patient to hang up or improper call diagnosis.

2. Use call progress detection to determine if the phone was answered by a person or by an answering machine. It can mean the difference between leaving a complete message or only a short segment of the message on the answering machine.

Finally, when shopping for automated reminder services, focus on vendors that offer SaaS-driven service and pricing. “Software as a Service” vendors of reminder call automation solutions price their services only for the calls they make, while you avoid purchasing hardware/software and associated management and maintenance costs. In financial management terms, SaaS proposition is equivalent to turning capital expense into operating expense, which translates into better balance sheet and lower risk.