Watch Now
As a healthcare or med spa provider, it’s likely that you pride yourself on providing excellent care and a first-class patient experience.
So, how frustrating is it to set up everything for an appointment — setting up the equipment, turning around a room, making sure you have the products in stock and ready to be used, assigning your staff for their appointments — only to have the patient be late or, even worse, not show up at all? It throws your entire schedule off course and wastes your time and resources.
No-shows cause loss of time and revenue, create gaps in your calendar, and lead to inefficient resource spending. They’re also not great for team morale.
So, what’s the solution…?
Effective patient appointment scheduling lays the groundwork for your med spa or medical business to work flawlessly and have sustainable revenue.
And the good news is there are simple ways you can improve how you schedule appointments… without overloading yourself and your staff.
In this blog, you’ll learn five effective patient scheduling and appointment management tips to maintain a full schedule, create a smooth practice workflow, create happy clients, and, most importantly, stable and ongoing cash flow.
Follow along below!
Why is effective patient scheduling important?
In healthcare facilities and medspas, appointment scheduling can get unnecessarily complex without the right systems and processes in place.
A good appointment scheduling process is crucial not just for smooth practice processes but also for the patient experience – which is what keeps patients coming back.
There are several important components to effective patient scheduling.
Streamlines appointment booking
Booking an appointment with a healthcare provider is the first step in the patient journey.
Whether it’s done over the phone, online, or in person, having a smooth appointment booking sets the tone for the entire healthcare journey.
An important thing for smooth patient scheduling? Gathering all the right information about a patient.
In healthcare practices, a designated scheduler is usually in charge of booking appointments. They collect relevant patient information, such as name, contact details, reason for the visit, and any previous medical history relevant to the appointment.
They also need to check the practitioner’s availability to find a free appointment time and date and try to find a time slot that works for both the patient and the provider.
It may sound like a lot of work, but appointment scheduling software can make things a lot easier.
An advanced patient scheduling system pulls data from your appointment calendar and available staff members’ diaries and auto-populates the scheduler without them having to jump through hoops.
This way, finding the right appointment slot doesn’t feel like playing chess. Instead, it’s a clear and straightforward path designed to meet patients’ needs and make your staff’s lives easier.
Allows for better resource allocation
Besides making your operations smoother and life easier, efficient patient scheduling allows your practice to allocate resources better while also reducing any wasteful spending.
Why resource allocation is so important, you ask? Well, it may be that only be specific staff members that are qualified to administer some of your treatments, such as microdermabrasion or IV therapy. So you need to check that they’re available and bookable for those treatments.
Also, specific treatments need specific equipment and consumables. Resource allocation helps you make the equipment available and avoid double-booking, and to make sure you have the correct consumables ordered and ready.
Therefore, efficient resource allocation is crucial for:
- Better use of providers’ time. Efficient scheduling and appointment planning allow you to provide a steady stream of patients to your staff while making better use of their skills and time.
- Optimized equipment usability. All medical equipment, devices and supplies are available and reserved appropriately based on the patient’s needs. This also means better inventory management coordination to ensure all tools and products are in stock and well maintained.
- Better room utilization. You can also plan and assign rooms to be used most efficiently, considering the nature and duration of treatments. At the same time, you can avoid double-booking and minimize turnover time between appointments.
- Balanced workloads. Well-managed scheduling also helps you balance the workload by assigning appointments to staff evenly and strategically to avoid burnout and ensure timely patient care at the same time.
Enables efficient time management
Coordinated patient scheduling also helps you stay on top of time management.
It’s crucial for minimizing wait times and ensuring that a practice or hospital operates smoothly.
You can estimate how long each medical appointment will take and schedule buffer slots between appointments to manage potential delays and address additional patient needs.
You also need to take into account the time it takes to prep the room and equipment for the next appointment and leave time for any patient admin tasks in between.
Good appointment management helps you take all of this into account when creating the schedule so you’re never caught off-guard in the case of unplanned delays like patients running late or equipment malfunction.
Using tools can help you manage your appointments a LOT more efficiently.
For example:
- Using a dictation tool to make recording treatment notes quicker
- Sending out intake forms and medical questionnaires in advance so you don’t have to leave time aside to do it in practice
- Tailoring appointment length to the individual practitioner, as new starters may take longer than an experienced practitioner
💡 Pro tip: Pabau has all these features built-in, so you can have smooth appointment scheduling and keep your mind at ease.
Helps you handle cancellations and rescheduling
On average, 42% of scheduled appointments end up as no-shows.
This mind-blowing percentage has a huge negative impact on the quality of care, patient flow, and revenue. Last-minute cancelations and no-shows cost the healthcare industry more than 150 billion dollars every year. Wow.
Unfortunately, you can’t stop patients from canceling. Life does sometimes get in the way and they may need to cancel or reschedule appointments for various reasons, such as illness, work conflicts, or personal emergencies.
However, the good news is you can manage what happens before or after. Effectively managing cancelations and rescheduling requests ensures your healthcare facility or med spa continues to operate smoothly.
A cancelation and rescheduling policy protects your practice from unwanted revenue loss, recoups the time and resources spent, and reduces the risk of last-minute changes that will leave you with gaps in your diary.
It also sets clear expectations with patients about what will happen if they cancel and encourages them to notify you as soon as possible.
🤓 Pro tip: Add your cancelation policy in your online booking, confirmation emails and rescheduling option (if you have it), so your patients are aware of it before booking, canceling or rescheduling an appointment.
Keeps you compliant and accessible
If you run a medical office, you know how important compliance is. Your patient scheduling process plays a big role in ensuring your healthcare practice complies with healthcare regulations and policies.
This includes patient privacy and data security, like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which focuses on protecting patient privacy and ensuring that all patient data is handled securely.
An efficient patient scheduling system should enable you to limit access to sensitive patient information only to authorized staff.
For example, your admin team should be able to see your upcoming appointments, time slots, and booked rooms and manage appointments. However, they shouldn’t be able to see patient medical histories or treatment notes.
Another important thing to consider is to accommodate patients with special needs and disabilities. Widening accessibility may include:
- Flexible scheduling options, for example, scheduling via an online portal, text message or email for patients who are deaf or hard of hearing, or phone-based scheduling for patients with visual impairments
- Extended appointment slots for patients who may need extra time, like cognitive impairments or complex medical conditions
- Telehealth options for patients who are homebound or have mobility issues
5 quick tips to master patient scheduling:
5 best practices for efficient patient scheduling
As you see, a lot goes into well-managed and organized patient scheduling.
Of course, some things are out of your control, like patients canceling or being late. However, there are lots of things you can control too, which help you to automate and smooth out your scheduling process.
1. Enable patient self-scheduling through a client portal
Making patient scheduling smooth and easy doesn’t mean someone from your team is taking phone calls and taking appointment details around the clock.
There’s a much easier way – with patient self-scheduling via the client portal. What we mean by this is that a client can book, reschedule or even cancel an appointment themselves, without your team having to do it for them.
Not only does it free your team from a lot of administrative work in terms of taking calls and responding to emails, it also gives your patient a convenient, easily accessible, 24/7-available way to book appointments.
Here’s why patient self-scheduling is a no-brainer for your practice:
- It reduces the average time of 8.1 minutes, which is how long it takes to schedule a patient via phone, to under a minute.
- 80% of patients prefer a healthcare provider that provides online scheduling. Yes, that also includes clients across all ages, even more mature clientele like Baby Boomers.
- 43% of self-scheduled appointments are booked after business hours, which means if you don’t have a mechanism for clients to book appointments after 6pm, you’re missing out on a big percentage of potential clients.
2. Send automated notifications and reminders
Forgetfulness is the most common reason patients miss appointments. Most patients have every intention of attending their appointments, but they simply slip their minds amid their hectic day-to-day lives.
Appointment reminders are how you reduce the no-show rate in your practice, and help patients come prepared for the appointment, which also positively impacts patient engagement.
A study showed that reminders reduced missed appointments by 41% on average and increased attendance rates by 34%. It was also proven that SMS reminders are more effective than phone calls.
This doesn’t mean you have to spend the majority of your work hours texting patients. There’s a better way.
Comprehensive scheduling software like Pabau offers features for automating appointment confirmations, notifications and reminders.
Automated appointment reminder notifications can be set to be sent out at a selected time and frequency — a week, three days, or a day before an appointment — when it best suits you.
It’s one less thing you have to worry about in your busy day.
3. Prioritize appointments
Some patients may need your care sooner than others, depending on their medical condition and urgency.
Prioritizing appointments helps you accommodate those who require immediate care and attention, without causing complete mayhem in your schedule.
On the other hand, some patients may need a short phone call consultation and may not need to book an appointment. Your front-of-house staff can best make the judgment call to determine the urgency of the case if patients call.
An easier option is to use a scheduling tool to block out time slots during the day for different types of appointments, such as urgent care, routine check-ups, follow-ups, and non-urgent consultations.
Train your staff to identify and prioritize urgent care needs and provide clear protocols and guidelines to help them prioritize effectively.
4. Offer telehealth options
Telehealth is a great opportunity to improve the scheduling efficiency in your practice. It allows you to provide more flexible care to patients, fill in gaps between in-person appointments and even offer appointment slots outside of traditional office hours, such as early mornings, evenings or weekends,
Patients can attend appointments from the comfort of their homes, which reduces the need to travel and take time off work.
Patients are also less likely to miss appointments when they can join from anywhere, and because there’s less ‘friction’ this also reduces no-shows.
This flexibility allows healthcare providers to offer a broader range of appointment times, which potentially means more billable hours and more revenue.
5. Facilitate scheduling with practice management software
All the tactics we’ve discussed above are made possible – and made simpler – with the help of a robust practice management software.
Patient scheduling involves a lot of synchronized steps. If you do them manually, you risk confirmations and pre-care emails not being sent on time, missing intake forms, or equipment not being available for the treatment.
A great practice management system:
- Automates appointment scheduling: Regardless of whether you’re booking new patients or existing ones, you simply select the time and treatment. There’s no manually writing down names and timeslots that might get mixed up.
- Enhances patient communication: The software includes automated confirmation and reminders notifications, as well as sending intake forms and medical questionnaires. It keeps patients informed about their upcoming treatment and ensures all forms are completed beforehand.
- Provides real-time availability and updates: Both staff and patients can easily see real-time availability and schedule. They can book, cancel, or reschedule appointments as they wish, which are immediately reflected in the schedule. This way, you avoid scheduling conflicts and double-bookings.
- Improves patient experience and convenience: Patients are always going to appreciate the ease of booking appointments online and receiving timely reminders. This improves their overall experience with your practice.
- Streamlined workflows: An integrated system reduces the need for duplicate data entry – such as manually adding information from forms into the system – and ensures that patient information is consistently up-to-date.
Improve your practice’s appointment management easily with Pabau
Dealing with no-shows, late arrivals, and resource-wasting is frustrating.
However, effective patient scheduling gives you the foundation to deliver high-quality patient care, send timely and consistent communications, and maintain a seamless workflow.
By implementing the best practices we’ve discussed, you’ll be able to run operations smoothly, use resources effectively, and ensure clients have more flexibility regarding appointments.
Adding all-in-one practice management software like Pabau in the mix simplifies your scheduling processes with a full coverage of features, such as:
👉🏻 Automated reminders and notifications
👉🏻 Automated intake forms and review requests
👉🏻 Automated pre-care and post-care per communications
👉🏻 Patient self-scheduling portal
👉🏻 Telehealth functionality
📅 Experience the future of patient scheduling with Pabau. Take a glimpse at how Pabau can transform your appointment management today.
