The Benefits of Automated Appointment Scheduling in Healthcare

Automated appointment scheduling can help your practice increase patient intake while improving patient satisfaction. In 2021, providers need to transition as many processes as possible into an automated format. Automation is helping providers increase efficiency, improve time management, decrease administrative burden, bring in more patients, and improve their experience. With more providers switching to automated tools than ever before, providers need to keep up if they want to remain leaders in the field. One of the best tools that providers can implement to streamline scheduling and intake is an automated appointment scheduling solution.

What Does an Automated Appointment Scheduling Solution Offer?

Eliminate Phone-Tag

30% of a provider's scheduler payroll is spent playing phone tag with patients. This is an incredible waste of staff time. If their time was better utilized, they could focus more of their energy on other critical tasks. An automated appointment scheduling solution makes those inbound calls for providers rather than their staff. Your staff only picks up a call if a patient is already on the line. This ensures that 100% of your scheduler’s time is spent talking to patients rather than chasing them down.

Self-Scheduling

Patients are used to using technology for everything these days. Scheduling does not need to be any different. An automated appointment scheduling tool can be as simple as ordering food for a patient. This tool enables patients to log onto your scheduling tool to book an appointment rather than occupying your staff’s valuable time. Here, patients can view a comprehensive list of all available appointments and choose the one that works best for their schedule.

Regulate Volume

An automated appointment scheduling solution can do more than just eliminate phone-tag and help patients schedule their appointments. The right software can also regulate a provider's call volume so that schedulers are never overwhelmed. It also manages a provider’s fill rate to help find more patients and keep your schedule full. This is essential for making sure your staff is touching base with every patient that might need to come in for a visit.

Geo-located Outreach and Selection

A provider with gaps in their scheduling is a provider that is losing out on important revenue. With automated appointment scheduling, providers can easily fill those gaps. This tool functions like popular ride-sharing apps. When a patient requests an appointment, this tool uses geo-coding to offer the patient the right provider closest to their address and with the right fill rate. This way, new providers can quickly catch up and the workload is evenly distributed across your team.

Convert Referrals into Appointment

The main function of an automated appointment solution is to increase your patient volume. Without adding extra tasks to your team's workload, this tool does just that. An automated appointment scheduling solution converts more referrals and recalls into appointments with automated outreach. It can also integrate with other systems, like automated phone, cat, and messaging systems to increase volume and productivity.

With the right automated appointment scheduling solution, your practice can fill the gaps in its schedule and visit with more patients than ever before. To learn more, click here.