3 Ways to Reduce No-Shows with Patient Reminder Calls

No-shows are painful for almost every practice. At first, the inclination may be to breathe a sigh of relief—a minute to catch up! But if a no-show costs your practice an average of $100 in lost revenue, that means if your office has just one missed appointment every single day, you are going to lose over $24,000 every single year. That would go a long way toward paying someone’s salary.

That’s why it’s important to keep your no-show rate as low as possible.

How do you accomplish this? With good patient communication. As busy as people are these days, you can’t expect them to remember an appointment they made months, weeks, or even days ago. Automated patient reminder calls can improve no-show rates significantly.

In fact, studies have shown that automated reminder calls reduced no-show rates from 23.1% to 17.3%.

Here are a few key pointers on improving your no-show rates with reminder calls:

• Use an automated system to insure consistency of messaging and timing of calls.
• When using phone reminders, make sure patients have the option to repeat the phone message so they can get all the details
• Personalize the reminder message with the patient’s name and your practice name

Many practices have traditionally used a postcard reminder system; the downsides of this include possible human error or slow/missed postal delivery. And since the percentage of advertising mail has increased, the likelihood of the postcard getting lost in the pile of mail received in the home is very high.

Another traditional reminder method is the personal phone call from a member of the practice’s staff. While this has been shown to be highly effective, you need to weigh the cost of having a staff member’s valuable time dedicated to this task—often the benefits in terms of show-up are outweighed by the cost of staff time. In addition, reminder calls are often pushed to the back burner by a staff member who is too busy or reluctant to make the calls.

Kareo has long offered email appointment reminders as part of our practice management software, and many of our customers have found this to be extremely effective. However, the need for practices to improve no-show rates demands a more dynamic approach. Watch this blog for an important announcement on Friday.