Does appointment management drive you up the wall in your medical practice? It can be a nightmare keeping up with attendance, no-shows, and cancellations all while trying to take care of other daily operations. If you’re having a hard time managing appointments, you need quality patient management software.
Designed to streamline everything about appointment management, patient management software is crucial for busy practices. If you operate in a group of practices with multiple locations, it’s even more imperative that you have the best software available.
Here are a few ways you can achieve smarter appointment management with great software.
Multi-view appointment layouts
Standard medical practice software usually only gives you one view of the appointment calendar. But what if that doesn’t work for your staff? By upgrading your patient management software you can get multiple views. Whatever suits you best, it’s available.
You can sort the calendar by hours, by the clinician, and even get easy snapshots of available appointment times. If you run an online booking system, good software will link in with it directly and update in real-time.
Multiple practice workflows
If you have multiple practices, it can be hard to manage appointments effectively. However, with doctors in such high demand, it’s likely your patients are prepared to travel if they can see someone sooner. That’s why you need software that’s capable of managing appointment lists across practices.
Great software allows staff from all practices to view and update appointment lists through one central point. This gives patients more options and ensures you’re maximising available clinician time.
Cancellation list management
The same can be said for cancellations. Even in one medical practice, it’s hard to manage cancellations lists, let alone across multiple practices. Premier software, however, gives staff the flexibility to take cancellations over the phone and immediately contact people from a central waiting list. This means you can serve more patients and doctors aren’t idle due to cancelled appointments.
Customised appointment types
Every medical practice has its own little quirks. Unfortunately, not all medical management software caters to these quirks. However, with the right software, you can run your appointments the way you want to.
Rather than using generic appointment types, you’ve got more flexibility and control with good software. The ability to customise appointment types makes for smoother appointment management. If one clinician prefers to spend longer with patients, you can allow for this, rather than simply locking them into a standard consult.
Attendance monitoring
Finally, attendance monitoring is so much easier when you have the right software backing you up. Managing appointments can be a bit of a juggling act, so the ability to have an instant view of where the days at is crucial. You may have a patient turn up early while another has called to say they’re running late. Easy, just switch the appointments and both can still be seen.
You can also keep track of no-shows, but more importantly, you can send automated reminders and confirmation SMS to customers prior to their appointment. This decreases the number of no-shows and makes everybody’s day easier.
Interesting Related Article: “5 Reasons Patient Management Software is Great for the Healthcare Industry“