Medical practices are complicated structures with many responsibilities. The approach each physician chooses, to maintain timely communication with his patients, is crucial for earning trust, building rapport and increasing the number of the patients drawn to the practice.

Disadvantages of Manual Scheduling

Practices that are engaged in manual scheduling of appointments and follow ups suffer logistic disadvantages. Filling in manually appointment spreadsheets, except for making your staff ineffective, is prone to duplications, unnecessary visits and skipped follow ups. It is practically impossible to make a faultless appointment schedule, if done by hand. Furthermore, changes and correction are so often necessary to be done, that the chance of errors and duplications increases enormously.

An appointment scheduling software can solve your dilemma. Using the proper software will substantially improve your scheduling capacity. Different applications are available in themarket, some are parts of integrated system, such as EMR, while others are specially designed for appointment scheduling.

What can software offer you?

Quick booking, timely appointment’s confirmations, easy check-in and checkout, appointments review, daily, weekly or monthly summary of the visits, reduction of no-shows, appointment reminders. By easy clicking and dragging, alerts can be created for cyclic activities as vaccinations. The appointment scheduling software supports online booking applications, so your patients can benefit from a comfortable way to set an appointment, remote accessibility of appointment schedule. Last, but not least, matching the staff calendar with the appointments scheduled eliminates the risk of wasted visits.

How does a software help?

The benefits of applying specialized software are obvious – the appointment schedules are much easier to be generated. Date, hours, time frames are easy to monitor, switch and revise when necessary. The software creates customized appointment settings based on physician, time necessity, reason, and patient status. Easy appointment confirmations in lead time enables the staff to eliminate duplications. The system automatically notifies the patient in due course for any pending appointments, follow ups or changes made. This feature would reduce the number of the no-shows your practice might suffer.

Reports

The appointment scheduling software can supply you with reliable figures for the number of actual visits within a specified period of time. Figures will display the efficiency level of your practice and point the weak sides of your patients flow managing. Thus you will know which services needs to be utilized more.

Tracking Patients

Another profit of applying software for your appointment scheduling is the patients tracking. The staff can “follow” the patient from check-in to visit and departure, thus estimating the time cost of service provided in the specific case. The tracking feature will furnish the practitioner with valuable data as how to improve the cycle of come in and go out.

Managing Follow-Ups

Follow ups, sometimes several in a row, can be confusing with regard to timing and staff availability. The scheduling software will match the staff and the patient and pick up the best time for follow ups by medical and logistics point.

All the above features display the practical benefits of the appointment scheduling software to save time, hence money for the practitioners, keep a trustful communication with the patients and perform flexible services.