Healthcare organizations across the globe face challenges with the increasing rate of patient no-shows. Consider that 1 in 3 patients miss their scheduled appointment with their Physician on an average. As a result, no-shows and missed appointments alone cost the U.S healthcare system a whopping $150 billion every year. Patients’ cancellations could therefore have a direct impact on the financial health as well as the health outcomes at large.

Hospitals and Medical Practices can consider automating and modernizing their patient management system to effectively reduce no-shows and cancellations. Engaging patients in their care journey prior to their Doctor’s appointment could help patients show up for their appointments.

Customized and automated solutions like digital appointment reminders, self-scheduling, secure messaging, conversational AI like chatbots can make a difference to the patient journeys. This blog outlines top ways in which you can leverage digital to reduce no shows and elevate patient experiences. Dive in.

Patient Self-Scheduling

Patient scheduling through manual methods involve extensive processes, cost and time where the patient outreach coordinators have to reach out to the patients several times before scheduling an appointment for them. This can be overwhelming for both the staff as well as the patients if it’s during the patients’ busy time at work. This results in frustration, poor member experiences and lower patient satisfaction scores.

Automated self-scheduling features are designed to enable seamless appointment booking for patients on a click of a button. Patients can easily book appointments with their Physician through their preferred medium at a convenient time. This eliminates the hassles for patients while saving the hospital admin staffs’ time and energy, which could be spent on high-priority tasks.

Automated Appointment Reminder

Most often, patients forget their appointments with their doctors. Timely reminder about their upcoming appointments go a long way in ensuring that they show up for their Doctor’s visit. What’s more, it’s reported that automated appointment reminders reduce no shows by at least 16%.

Today’s patients are tech savvy and are attuned to high-touch digital experiences as consumers, and they expect the same from their healthcare providers. Automating appointment reminders and follow-ups eliminate friction and simplify their care journeys, while enhancing patient satisfaction and outcomes.

Patient Follow-up Strategy

Most oftentimes, patients are not followed up after a cancellation, which has a negative effect on patient engagement and retention. This also has a huge impact on patient outcomes by creating care gaps. It’s essential that patients are followed up at the right time to re-engage them and encourage them to make the doctor’s visit.

The best part about a strategic patient management solution is that the entire process of rescheduling can be automated and streamlined through a digital patient outreach program. Digital care coordination platforms like RippleCare for instance can harness real-time Patient Generated Health Data (PGHD) to provide timely reports on patients’ health status, medication adherence, their progression, medical emergencies, preferred time and channels of engagement and patient outreach, among many other critical health data that are structured in a patient management framework.

RippleCare is a trusted patient engagement platform used by Fortune 500 brands, 450+ hospitals, 3850+ Physicians and millions of patients worldwide. It is a personalized and customized care coordination platform that can be scaled to cater to small enterprises and large hospitals. Our strong patient database and robust solution ensure that it simplifies healthcare experiences for all our stakeholders

To learn more about how our patient outreach program can help improve health outcomes and boost bottom line of your organization give us a shout!