Missed Appointments Percentage Reduction

Your biggest loss of income may stem from missed appointments. For example, you schedule a long, expensive procedure and the patient fails to show. Or one of your staff sits around doing nothing because his or her patients do not keep their appointments.

Most scheduling staff do not know how to control patients’ time to ensure they show up..

How Do You Solve It?

Some practice owners nag and complain to their staff.

Staff, who do not know how to control patients, simply pass on the excuses. “He was sick.” “The babysitter didn’t show up.” “She just forgot.”

If you accept the excuses and say, “Oh well,” and if you let the missed appointments continue, you are not only losing money, you are, to a degree, failing to fulfill your purpose to give great treatment to all of your patients.

Others threaten to charge patients for the services they miss or a fee.

For example, “If you do not give us a 24-hour notice that you cannot keep your appointment, you will be charged for the service you had scheduled.” You have to charge the fee to the patients. If you charge the insurance company for the visit, you are committing insurance fraud.

Another policy example: “If you miss an appointment without contacting our office within 48 hours, or if you are more than 20 minutes late without prior notice, this is considered a missed appointment and a fee of $50.00 will be charged to you; this fee cannot be billed to your insurance company and will be your direct responsibility. No future appointments can be scheduled nor can records be transferred without the payment of this fee.”

This might fix the missed appointment problem as the unhappy patients leave your practice. They no longer miss their appointments as they have switched to another practice. Also, despite the above policy wording, you cannot legally withhold patient records because they owe you money; the patients’ records are owned by the patients.

Fortunately, even though many offices have stern policies like this, they rarely enforce them. Good thing!

What Is Your Missed Appointment Percentage?

Out of 100 scheduled appointments each week, how many appointments actually occur? For example, if only 85 patients get their services, your missed appointment rate is 15%. Totally unacceptable!

When your practice continues to allow missed appointments, your statistics suffer. You and your staff find yourself with unwanted down time. Your stress can build to the point where you dislike your staff and the patients who do not show.

Fortunately, you can cut your missed appointment percentage in half. You can even get them down to 0%! That’s correct. Your staff members can handle patient scheduling so efficiently that no one misses. Once you and your team learn and implement ExecTech’s techniques for efficiently scheduling and confirming appointments, your missed appointment percentage will drop significantly.

As a result, your stress disappears as you are so busy seeing patients.

Two Solutions

1. Download ExecTech’s Missed Appointments Reduction package. Includes the “Missed Appointments Elimination Checklist,” “Missed Appointment and Cancellation Questionnaire,” two “Missed Appointment Logs” and the “How to Confirm Patient Appointments” guideline. Fee: $49.
2. Missed Appointment Coaching:  Includes three telephone coaching sessions and one month of email support for one person. This one-month program is guaranteed to pay for itself because of the increase in kept appointments, or we will continue to coach your staff member at no charge until the increase is achieved. Fee: $350 per person.

Five Benefits

1. More of your patients show, as scheduled
2. You spend less time talking to your staff about missed appointments
3. Less down time
4. Your staff know exactly how to make patients show up and what to do if they do not show
5. Your income increases while your stress, and your staff members’ stress, goes down.

Success Stories

Dr. John Opper’s practice reduced their missed appointments from 16% to 4%. Cathy Waag and Frances Johnson from that office wrote: “It is amazing how this has made a difference! Thank you ExecTech!”

Mission Palm Dental reduced their missed appointments from 7% to 0%. Patient Coordinator Michelle Watts wrote: “Thank you for the checklist targeted at eliminating missed appointments. We have had surprising results with just a few points we’ve implemented, and are anxious to continue with the other steps. After all, a busy doctor is a happy doctor!”

Get ExecTech’s Missed Appointments Reduction package.
Hire ExecTech to reduce your missed appointments by coaching you or one of your staff.