Doctor's have enough to worry about during their daily routine and if you are a doctor with an exceptionally large practice, you also realize that finding good, educated help can sometimes prove to be difficult.
Even the best medical staff occasionally gets overwhelmed and your patients frustrated because they do not get the quality of service they expect.
What should you as a doctor do in a situation like this? One solution is to look into the benefits of an online scheduler and seriously consider getting one to help your staff out.
An online scheduler acts not only as an appointment reminder for you, but also as an interactive and comprehensive answering service for your busy staff.
There are numerous online scheduler and appointment reminder service available and the last thing you want to have to deal with is finding the right one.
You can narrow your search down to some of the top ones out there when you take into consideration how your office truly works, what demands are placed on your medical staff and what your patients are looking for.
An online medical scheduler could very easily help you reduce revenue loss from no show appointments that should've been rescheduled but weren't because of lack of communication between you and your patients.
Obviously there are more advantages to an online scheduler than just retaining more of your revenue.
When you look at the benefits from your staff's point of view, you can see how a scheduler can help during the busiest times of year.
For one thing, an online scheduler can perform most of the receptionist's duties for a fraction of the cost, eliminating the need to have someone on duty during lunch breaks or worrying about having to cover the position if your human receptionist gets sick.
Medical staff can perform more important work, such as patient records updating and filing for billing purposes without having to drop everything to answer the phone.
An online medical scheduler can also provide twenty-four service, seven days a week so that your patients can contact you whenever they have an emergency.
Most online schedulers also require little to no maintenance, making them a cost effective alternative to keep your practice up and running at top efficiency.
While your patients would prefer to speak to a human, an online scheduler can aid them when they need to make simple changes that would take just a few seconds of telephone time.
With an online scheduler they can cancel appointments and ask for a call-back to reschedule, thereby making the communication short and to the point.
They will not have to be put on hold and wait extended periods of time.
You and your staff will be able to set the online scheduler to answer the calls after so many rings, allowing patients to be taken care of regardless of whether or not they speak to a human.
An online scheduler will allow those patients that have access to the Internet the ability to cancel and reschedule their appointments without staff intervention.
Plus, if a patient calls in on the scheduler with an emergency, they will be connected to the doctor immediately.
An online scheduler has the ability to separate the emergency and non-emergency calls.
When you begin to look for an online scheduler for your medical practice, look for one that is customizable to your particular needs.
You will want the online scheduler to comply with the current HIPPA guidelines that protect a patient's privacy.
Make sure your online scheduler include an appointment reminder that can be programmed with the patient's contact information for their convenience as well as yours.
Ensure that the system you invest into has the ability to print a hard copy of all of your day's appointments just in case there is a computer failure.
And finally, you are not only a doctor, but a business owner.
Invest in an online scheduler that can provide you with statistics about your practice that may be useful when analyzing your financial information.