How Can Better Patient Scheduling Improve Modern Healthcare Experiences?

Sometimes just having the patient ready to see someone isn’t enough if the waiting time on creating that appointment is long, overwhelming, or requires 86 phone calls. This is where patient scheduling software  has advantages in the modern practice. 

For some practices, there has been excessive focus on reception staff, paper calendar use, or spreadsheet analysis; in some cases, administrators simply bore a hole in their foreheads with a pencil talking on the phone for 30 minutes trying to find a time slot. Digital scheduling tools, though, can enable the appointment process to work better by somehow cutting through the chaos in waiting for the employee or the caller, making it more visible and easier to manage for providers, patients, and office staff. 

In the end, providers can offer an easier experience for patients, and staff can spend more time on service lines that need direct attention than rearranging a pile of appointments.

What is modern patient scheduling actually required to provide?

A scheduling system should be more than just a way to drop names onto an electronic paper. Healthcare scheduling has its own idiosyncrasies, and a good system should acknowledge that. A standard follow-up visit doesn‘t need the same rules to be scheduled as a new-patient appointment, a specialist visit, or a telemedicine visit. A good practice management system will leave enough room for an office team to account for these types of nuances without creating a scheduling nightmare. 

The system should empower staff to minimize inefficiencies such as double-bookings, empty booking gaps, and ordering an appointment with the wrong provider. Additionally, online scheduling is today a very important component. Patients have come to expect the ability to make, modify, and even cancel appointments outside of the traditional hours of an office. Any provider working 9 to 5 all week shouldn‘t be expected to wait on the phone just to schedule a 20-minute follow-up appointment at 9:15. 

Offering patients a technology-driven solution makes for a more effective, less time intensive use of staff resources. Using scheduling solutions for handling cancellations and rescheduling plans is another great example of how technology can increase efficiency where human error is likely. The key is to realize that plans change. You don‘t need a perfect practice, but making occasional changes should be easy. When scheduling data syncs with the rest of practice workflow, decision makers know about updates sooner rather than later and can act quickly without jumping through the various management systems.

How Patient Engagement Starts Before the Appointment

Patient engagement begins long before the individual arrives at the clinic. It is often the first thing they do, even before setting the phone or browser down. As a result, solutions around patient engagement are now becoming much more tightly coupled to scheduling technology. Providing easy-to-access appointments, reminders, and the ability to fill out basic information in advance allows patients to become participants in their care process long before their visit actually occurs. This is a significant change. 

Earlier healthcare delivery methods often created a passive experience: call a practice, wait for someone to pick-up, accept the appointment time offered, hope the brain remembers it later. Today‘s digital tools can give patients more control. SMS or e-mail appointment reminders can help keep healthcare appointments top of mind, while online check-in can cut back on paperwork. Some solutions can include access to a portal where users can more easily orchestrate their appointments and patient interaction. None of this replaces the personal aspect of delivering healthcare, but it does help eliminate some of the unnecessary obstacles around it. 

It‘s not about throwing more technology at the problem. It‘s about leveraging technology to (literally) make it easier for patients to get where they want to go. When scheduling is one less thing they have to think about, patients will feel that healthcare organizations are better managed and more respectful of their time.

Reducing No-Shows Without Making Patients Feel Pressured

No-shows are both costly and frustrating. A practice may have set a thirty minute or longer block of time aside for an appointment, they have the room ready, staff ready, and then the patient doesn‘t show up. This isn‘t always a problem that can be filled at the last minute. Practices have used many methods to try to decrease no-shows; however one of the most simple solutions is better communication. Automated appointment reminders provide a nudge in the right direction before the visit. 

For example a reminder email or text sent a few days in advance may be enough time for someone to reschedule and avoid forgetting about an appointment. Then a reminder closer to the appointment date re-insures the patient remembers. The key variable is how those messages are send. A patient doesn‘t want five robotic missed call messages repeating the same thing. Too much messaging is discouraged. 

Scheduling technology can make reminders more specific to the needs of a practice over time, while allowing the workflows to be centered around practice needs. If a patient needs to confirm the appointment, make a change or reschedule they can do so, ultimately helping the practice to identify for sure available time slots. Over time repetitive things can help maximize use of appointment scheduling, benefited by greater predictability. Predictability in scheduling has the added benefit of improving workflow efficiency in healthcare.

Why the Work Flow for Staff Is as Important as the Ease of Access for Patients

As convenient as it is to think about these digital-based tools from the patient’s perspective, there is another side to the story. The staff need to use the system each and every day. If the software is a hindrance to the day-to-day work of receptionists, coordinators, nurses and administrators, implementation will be a logistical nightmare in no time. Nobody needs one more piece of software that takes ten clicks to do a simple task. 

Scheduling software should fit into the way busy schedules operate. They simply need to be able to view appointment availability, reschedule and make changes, troubleshoot scheduling conflicts and get a sense of the flow of the day without bouncing to a new page with every keystroke. It will also provide a common scheduling system for the department or even a group of practices. Managers and coordinators could look for trends in their available versus booked capacity and identify scheduling patterns that show significant strains on staff resources or alternate resources that show slacking and excess capacity. That is an area with a lot of room for improvement. The real world benefits are all about, again, fewer repetitive tasks. 

If staff are no longer devoting half their time to answering basic availability questions, the remaining time can be devoted to the patients that need their attention the most. It’s appropriate that technology free up the time of staff members to handle the non-routine tasks that take a little more time and forethought. The routine tasks that can be automated could then be.

Connecting Scheduling With Broader Patient Communication

Scheduling works better when it is integrated. Scheduling a patient for an appointment may tie into confirmations, reminders, intake forms, follow-ups, billing workflows, and even referrals. 

When those workflows are communicating with each other, the overall experience can be vastly improved. That‘s where more comprehensive patient engagement solutions come in. When a patient goes online to schedule an appointment, they can be instantly confirmed. Before the appointment, a reminder and/or instructions of what to bring or complete before the visit can be sent, and afterward, additional follow-up information sent, or even assistance scheduling the next visit. That‘s just an idea; presumably the actual workflow will vary depending on the organization. No matter what the flow looks like, the concept is fairly simple: don‘t make the patient start over every time. Integrated systems can help eliminate communication gaps when a patient reschedules an appointment. 

Rather than have one staff member adjust multiple pieces of information, details should change everywhere that they do to avoid any human errors. Certainly, special attention must be taken to ensure the integration is implemented thoughtfully and securely. Healthcare entities need to consider issues of security, privacy, access control, and applicable compliance regulations. An elegant, user friendly interface isn‘t enough if the platform manages data poorly. Practices should consider how well, or how poorly, the scheduling module integrates into their existing healthcare IT environment, and whether those integrations work. A system with fifty billion features isn‘t the best. The best system fits the workflow and doesn‘t cause chaos in the backend.

Opting For a Scheduling System Capable of Scaling Up With Your Practice

Healthcare software shouldn‘t be selected based on a polished if scripted demonstration. Vendors can make just about anything impressively appear on a thirty-minute demo. The real proof of efficacy is how staff perform once they are navigating the platform on an all-too-busy Monday morning. In addition to usability, usability and more usability, priorities should include compatibility with existing practice systems, scheduling flexibility, communication capabilities, reporting, security, and available support resources. Scalability is another important attribute. 

Today, the practice may be a ten-provider/three-location, business. Tomorrow, a provider group, a new primary care specialty, or a remote service line could be added, along with additional locations and virtual visits. A system that doesn‘t run efficiently on ten appointments a day might not scale well to 50, or 500. It‘s wise to consider whether a growing practice‘s needs can be met by the solution. Furthermore, practices should consider the patient view. Is the online booking portal intuitive? Is there a simple way to reschedule or cancel an appointment? Are email or smartphone reminders understandable? Is the portal mobile friendly? Those may seem like small touch points until patients begin mentioning them. And don‘t overlook staff experience. 

If your staff are spending significant time receiving training on how to complete even routine scheduling tasks, find a provider with another set of features. Reporting is another feature yielding great insights. Scheduling data can identify demand and cancellation trends, schedule mix efficiencies, provider productivity, and room utilization. This key operational intelligence might serve to drive other decisions inside the organization, rather than spoon-feed hunches to the provider and leadership team. In other words, don‘t buy software because it boasts twenty concurrent features. Buy software because every feature is appropriate, and actually addresses a need. Now that‘s a litmus test.

The Future of Healthcare Scheduling Is More Connected

Digital scheduling in healthcare is moving toward a platform where all aspects of appointments, communication, patient data and operational processes are increasingly integrated. While automation is expected to keep operating on basic and repetitive tasks, front-line staff will still be present for more interactive situations that are context sensitive or require judgment. Artificial intelligence could play a role in helping practices recognize usage patterns of appointment demand, project gaps, or optimize access within existing provider capacity.

However, it is important technology does not get complicated simply for the sake of being current. Patients don‘t care what the scheduling system does in the background as long as they get an appointment without taking half of their day. Staff don‘t care either as long as it doesn‘t have a catchy new name. They want to enjoy a system that works when the waiting room is full and the phones are ringing off the hook. That‘s the true test. Going forward, digital scheduling will probably be all about convenience, automation, interoperability and personalized communication. 

A practice might be able to provide patients time slots to choose from based on provider capacity, type of visit, location, and preferred method of communication. Meanwhile, staff could benefit from having greater insight into the system overall. When scheduling and engagement are in sync, healthcare organizations are more likely to create an experience that‘s cohesive and not scattered. And in the end, for patients that is what they have been requesting for a very long time.

Conclusion: Better Scheduling Creates a Better Patient Experience

Meeting patients’ scheduling needs might be a seemingly small administrative task, but it touches every aspect of their healthcare experience. If they find the booking process difficult or time-consuming, it can put them off even before they get in the door. Failure to send reminder communications can lead to no-shows. Suboptimal integration between practice management and additional practice systems can result in excess administrative work. Conversely, a thoughtfully designed digital scheduling operation can eliminate many of those everyday annoyances. 

Patient scheduling software provides a tool that healthcare organizations can use to streamline the scheduling process, manage appointment availability, send automated reminders, reduce appointment cancellations, manage scheduling flows, and more. When used in conjunction with patient engagement solutions, it can also afford patients greater control and present a more consistent user experience. 

The goal isn‘t to automate every single interaction. Healthcare is a human industry, and whatever else can be said for all that, healthcare experiences should not feel sterile or unwelcoming. The goal should be to eliminate repetitive tasks while providing a human safety net for when it counts. Practices that achieve that recipe can improve their efficiency while continuing to treat their patients as people. Now that‘s a change well worth making.

FAQs

What are the software for patient scheduling?

Patient scheduling software, as the name suggests, is a healthcare program intended to keep one record of patient‘s appointments, provider availability, cancellations, rescheduling, reminders and any kind of scheduling. It can give a practice an opportunity to overcome the handwritten scheduling process by allowing it to work in a more organized manner.

In what ways does patient scheduling software enhance the patient experience?

It can also enhance the speed and efficiency of appointment scheduling by providing patients access to availability, booking appointments, sending reminders and rescheduling (if the patient chooses) without having to call the practice. That‘s less friction.

What are patient engagement solutions?

Patient engagement. Patient engagement solutions are technologies and communication solutions that enable patients to more actively participate in their healthcare. They can be appointment reminders, portals, digital forms, messaging tools, and other services designed directly for patients.

Will scheduling software minimize missed appointments?

It can help. More advanced appointment reminders and the ability to schedule a new appointment more easily makes it easier for patients to be reminded of their appointments or to reschedule them in time, which can decrease needless no-shows.

In the event that scheduling software connects with other healthcare software

Should be, if possible. Integration can cut down on redundant data entry and help scheduling information integrate with other administrative and clinical workflows. Practices should assess the security, dependability, and interoperability of the platform before implementing it.