In about one month, your practice is going to experience one of the busiest times that it will have all year, the back-to-school appointment rush. Does this occur at your practice? Between August and September, you are going to have hurried, rushed parents trying to get their children in prior to school starting. Your office phone is going to ring off the hook and of course, the time slots that you have available are not what they want. Some doctors, with fear of the patients going to another practice, will double book their schedule and cause a backlog in your waiting room resulting in less than happy parents. Unhappy parents won’t refer their friends to your office. Don’t let this happen to you! With Practice-Web you don’t have to let it happen. In this month’s article, we are going to teach you how to control the chaos.
The first step in making sure you have your appointment scheduled under control is to take the initiative and contact your patients first. You can generate an age-specific list by using Patients-Raw under list in your report menu.
Patients-Raw will allow you to create a custom report based on specific criteria. Look at the example below:
On the left-hand side, the Select tab allows me to select what information I want to see when this report is generated. Since we are creating a mailing list I have the patient’s name and address selected. If you want your staff to call the parents you might want to have phone number and guarantor selected also. The right-hand side shows the Where tab. The Where tab allows you to set conditions for your information so that you can filter patients from your database. In the example above we are targeting patients between the ages of 5 and 18. Once you click okay this would generate a query result of patients you could contact to schedule for back-to-school appointments. You can now export the resulting query to an Excel spreadsheet and use mail merge to create letters or mailing labels.
When the parents receive your courtesy letter letting them know they don’t have to wait to schedule their child’s appointment they would have the opportunity to schedule a time that is most convenient for them, not just the first appointment that is available. When people schedule appointments just because it is the first one available, not because it is the appointment that works with their schedule, that is when you will have broken appointments and no shows. You can go one step further to secure your appointments by utilizing the pwConnect Text reminders and have a reminder automatically sent to the parent the day of the appointment. No more excuses! Is your office ready to take control of your schedule?
You don’t have to limit your practice to just back-to-school appointments to use Patients_Raw, you can use it for any marketing campaign really. You can click here to visit our website and you can find a video demonstrating the process we just talked about. Look under the Revenue Enhancers Gallery (the green one). If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact support.
Until next time, happy appointment scheduling 😀