Physicians and patients both struggle with the healthcare system’s many idiosyncrasies, albeit in different ways. On the caregiver side, missed appointments are estimated to cost the average solo physician $150,000 annually. Moreover, they can have a negative impact on patient relationships and retention, making for a poor (and pricey) experience for all involved. For patients, missed appointments have a trickle-down effect that not only slows the delivery rate of what may be critical and time-sensitive treatment, but they can also hit patients – even those who are always present and prompt for their visits – in the pocketbook as physicians implement no-show fees to mitigate lost time and revenue.
Missed appointments also have wider repercussions for the healthcare system. Gaps in patient schedules can create ripple effects that strain administrative workflows, reduce overall efficiency and disrupt the coordination of care for other patients. These inefficiencies can lead to longer wait times, reduced access to care and an overall decline in the patient experience. Additionally, consistent no-shows may push practices to increase fees to offset revenue losses, contributing to the rising cost of healthcare and further burdening patients.
Thankfully for all involved, several strategies and technologies have been developed over time, and are easily accessible by any physician’s practice, that can help mitigate the problem of missed appointments.
How Missed Appointments Harm a Practice and the Healthcare Industry
These are busy times. Our culture no longer merely values characteristics such as industriousness and skills such as multitasking – it demands them. We jam our calendars full, rushing from one commitment to the next, occasionally double-booking and often walking a scheduling tightrope that one short delay threatens to send us toppling into chaos. Not surprisingly, some of the most common reasons for patients missing an appointment with a physician are scheduling conflicts and simple forgetfulness.
It is a common mistake and one that most of us can relate to, yet a single missed appointment can have a domino effect that creates stress for physicians and administrative staff, reduces the effectiveness of practice and cuts into physicians’ earnings while raising the price of care for patients. Imagine the logistical scrambling – and the cost – when a small practice with relatively limited staffing and resources is saddled with multiple missed appointments in a day. Consider the fallout of scheduling snafu when a family schedules consecutive appointments to streamline healthcare visits and then fails to show. Some practices even double-book these patients in anticipation of missed appointments, leading to a logjam on those occasions when everyone does show up.
Patients, physicians and staff are doing all they can to meet everyday obligations, but sometimes life gets in the way. Missed appointments will likely always be a problem to solve, but there are several strategies and tools that can reduce the consequences of missed appointments without causing significant financial strain or time investment.
New Technology Solutions for Mitigating Missed Appointments
Physicians’ offices once relied solely on analog tactics to provide patients with appointment reminders. Some still use business cards and phone calls (typically in tandem with other tools). However, these often require additional staff and financial resources, and they have always been somewhat limited in their usefulness. Modern digital communications such as texts and emails have proven more effective, and many practices combine them with legacy tactics in hopes that an all-angles approach of volume and repetition will get the job done.
Yet what the data reveals is that one of the most successful strategies for preventing missed appointments is to give patients an option that allows them to add appointments directly to their calendars with one click. An ‘add-to-calendar’ option, which can be embedded in emails and text reminders to maximize efficiency, has been proven to reduce missed appointments, improve patient satisfaction and increase profitability.
Landing on patients’ digital calendars – the all-in-one scheduler and to-do list that they typically access at least a handful of times in a single day on their smartphones and computers – positively impacts missed appointment rates and saves valuable time and resources. Especially when compared to non-tech alternatives such as handwritten cards, spoken reminders and phone calls, reminders that can be added to a digital calendar with a single click offer the best results in mitigating the healthcare industry’s missed appointment problem.
About Michael Nilsson
Michael Nilsson is CEO and founder of AddEvent, a San Francisco-based software company that offers cutting-edge calendar, appointment and event management solutions to enhance customers’ event and appointment engagement. As a software engineer by trade, Nilsson developed AddEvent’s primary “add-to-calendar” solution himself in 2012. Since then, he has scaled the company and its offerings to become one of the leading calendar solutions for over 250K+ customers, including Fortune 500 companies.