What’s the big deal of having automatic follow ups? How does it benefit you and your patients? Let’s count the ways!
We are at the point where automation is very beneficial to saving us time and money, but there are other ways automation can benefit your practice – having automatic follow ups is one of them.
Patient follow-ups are essential for long term care.
If your patients are on a plan, scheduling automatic follow ups will help you send out reminders for each future appointment they will be having either through chat, email, text, or more than one of the three. This takes stress off you and your secretary’s shoulders. Our system will set up automatic follow-ups depending on the person’s plan and how they prefer to get their reminders. Does the patient need to reschedule? Then no problem! Your automatic follow ups will adjust to each appointment rescheduled so you will not have to fix the time it is sent out. Think of Digital Patient Chart as a living thing that fully adapts to the changes you need to make.
Having automatic follow-ups save you time and money.
No practice likes a no-show or taking the time to contact patients on busy mornings just to see if they remember to come in. With our system, each patient has their own account and will have the ability to schedule another appointment, reschedule, or cancel. Because our system is connected throughout your practice, everything will update in real time. Once a patient logs into their account and makes changes to their appointments, the slots open up for other patients your practice can take in – all without you doing a thing!
Patient follow-ups allow your patients to be heard.
Want to check in on how your patients are doing after their care plan is over? You can set up emails to ask how your patient is doing and to see their feedback. This allows the patient to develop a trusting connection with you, provide important feedback, and keep you in mind if they experience something that requires your service.
New patients can be prepared.
Patients that sign up online can not only be sent automatic reminders to their phone or email but can fill out forms before their appointment as well. Digital Patient Chart makes it easy for patients to fill out forms ahead of time so they are prepared for their appointment as soon as they walk in. All information submitted through our system is safe, secure, and up to date. All forms can be adjusted to fit in more information you may need, or you may create your own forms from scratch. When a new patient signs up, you can set up your system to send out a welcome email with a link to the forms in the system they need to complete. All information is updated as soon as it is submitted.
Why is online rescheduling and cancelling important for the patient?
With Digital Patient Chart, each patient has their own personal account where they can see an overview of their future appointments. In one click, they can access unique features such as rescheduling and cancelling their appointments. Life can be quite unpredictable and when the unpredictable happens it’s very useful to have the ability to change your appointment quickly. When a phone call is not always ideal depending on the situation, a quick click fix can do the trick. Having this ability eliminates “phone tag” as well. Phone tag is when a patient calls the office and is not able to get through, so they might try calling again or leaving a message if possible. Then the office will try calling back the patient but depending on their circumstance the patient may miss the call.
Life keeps us busy, so keep it simple.
While calls may seem like a boost to your practice’s customer service, when it comes to following up on patients, patients have requested text reminders twice as often as any other type of reminder. This is because patients are usually in the middle of something when the reminder is received: a business meeting, watching their children, driving, another call, etc. Text messages are more ideal so they can look at them as soon as they can without dedicating time to get to a quieter place to call back. Imagine how many patients want to make changes to their appointments while the office is closed too, perhaps during break, on holiday, or after hours when they have the time. Patient accounts on Digital Patient Chart gives them the freedom to adjust their appointments when needed, easily and quickly; and allows you to fill in the empty slots quicker with the real time updates.
Overall, automatic follow-ups are a convenient way for your patients to stay up-to-date on their appointments, make quick and easy changes, and makes way for other patients to fill in the open slots even faster thanks to the real time updates – saving your practice time and money.
Tags: automatic Contacting and Follow-ups email practice Scheduling