5 Appointment Scheduling Mistakes Avoided By an Answering Service
Medical centers receive a lot of calls. However, many of these are about scheduling, re-scheduling, or canceling an appointment. The experience on the phone determines the patients’ level of satisfaction with your practice. Patients must be treated with kindness, empathy, and respect regardless of the time and period they’ve called your practice. So, you have to provide a 24/7 answering service to meet patient requirements and for a better experience.
What is an appointment scheduling service?
New and current patients usually call a medical office for a variety of reasons including appointment requirements. Keep in mind that every patient has unique requirements. Unfortunately, your staff might not be in a position to answer all phone calls to give every caller the time and attention they need. This is what makes hiring a professional answering service a great idea. Your practice will have access to a team of friendly call operators to respond to all your callers’ requests including appointment scheduling. This will encourage the smooth running of operations in your practice.
Here are mistakes in appointment scheduling avoided by an answering service.
Over-booking appointme
The biggest mistake made in medical centers is booking many appointments on a single day. With many appointments, patients are likely to wait longer leading to frustration and exhaustion. Making too many appointments results from relying on in-house staff who use conventional calendar systems. Additionally, it might also be promoted by other office inefficiencies like lack of experience and appropriate systems. Luckily, a professional answering service will have operators to manage your calendar leading to appropriate appointment scheduling.
Poor scheduling system
Relying on in-house staff to handle your practice’s appointment scheduling isn’t a good idea. It encourages the use of inefficient scheduling systems prone to various errors such as poor handwriting. Additionally, the paper scheduling systems are likely to get lost or misplaced creating a disaster. The solution is to get looking for medical call center with a digital scheduling system. This is less prone to errors, more secure, and readily accessible anytime. This will significantly make appointment scheduling a smooth process.
Not asking enough questions
With activities in a medical center, handling patients and phone calls is hectic and leads to burn out. It makes it hard to ask enough questions when talking to patients on the phone. The chances of failing to capture comprehensive patient information are high. This makes the appointment scheduling process prone to issues and backups regularly. Partnering with a professional answering agency gives your practice access to professional and experienced agents. These ask patients the right information for effective appointment scheduling leading to the appropriate allocation of time slots.
Neglecting appointment reminders
Another mistake common in medical centers during appointment scheduling is a failure to account for no shows. There’s a possibility of patients failing to show up for their appointments because they simply forget. This is where sending appointment reminders is highly recommended. It reduces appointment no-shows.
Medical call center agents send reminders and re-schedule appointments to ensure patients show up for their appointment. Poor scheduling is likely to cost your medical practice a lot of time and effort when patients fail to show up or turn up on a wrong date. Regular mistakes in your appointment scheduling system make patients unhappy and frustrated. Fortunately, professional answering agents understand the best way to ensure patients show up for their appointments.
Entering inaccurate information
Making your front office staff to handle regular tasks and phone answering encourages entering inaccurate information. Multitasking encourages making costly mistakes that might get noticed later on after impacting on patient care and appointment scheduling in your practice. A dedicated team of phone operators from a medical answering agency devotes time and skill when handling patient care. It encourages capturing of correct patient details in your system to ensure appropriate services are rendered to meet their medical requirements.
Conclusion
Proper management of a medical practice requires appropriate bookings with a patient balance on the calendar for patient satisfaction and improvement in the bottom line. To eliminate chances of errors in your appointment scheduling process requires outsourcing the task to a professional answering agency. There will have a team of experienced and competent call operators to prioritize patients’ requirements for efficient appointment scheduling. It eliminates appointment no-shows while encouraging customer satisfaction.
