Leverage Patient Engagement to Reduce Cancellations and Increase Clinic Revenue
Are Cancellations and No-Shows Impacting Your Therapy Practice?
It seems that these days, with the typical rise in missed appointments in healthcare practices, especially physical therapy practices, resulting from the economic environment and the rapid commoditization of healthcare services, clinics across the country (and even the globe) struggle to ensure that prospective patients who book an appointment actually keep the appointment that they scheduled.
Obviously, increasing cancellations impacts the revenue for the business and causes stress and uncertainty for management.
Attached is a framework I outline in my book Better Outcomes: A Guide to Humanizing Healthcare to help you reduce missed appointments and keep your therapy clinic schedule full.
Whether you run an outpatient orthopedic clinic or a home health- care agency, improving patient experience and engagement is always a priority. Many points along a patient life cycle (see how we’re building on previous chapters) have the ability to either add to or detract from a patient’s total experience in your clinic or facility. Often, these “touch points” appear rather benign and harmless; but taken in totality, they have far-reaching effects on how our patients perceive the quality and ultimate value of the care we provide.
A Bottom-Up Process to Preventing Cancellations & No-Shows
Enter what I call a Bottom-up Framework for on-boarding new and prospective patients.
If you look at that flow of the information collected in that preceding process, you notice that you not only end up with the necessary information (administrative, demographic, and insurance), but you also get some insight into the patient’s situation.
On top of that, the order in which you obtained that information was entirely patient- centered. You give the patient the opportunity to share their experiential perspective before you get to the traditional and necessary information.
Following this process leaves patients with a unique experience that builds trust, increases their confidence in your clinic’s ability to help them, and increases the odds of them showing up to their first appointment.