Online appointments scheduling software has been helping businesses of all sizes for years and web-savvy consumers are now expecting to be able to schedule their medical appointments online as well. Your practice can now save money while providing convenient access to your web-based scheduling software for your patients’ convenience.
The following are some of the many benefits of utilizing web-based scheduling software:
A significant number of web-based appointment scheduling software programs are available for you to consider and from that long list we feel the following two companies are certainly worth a closer look:
Online appointment scheduling is quickly becoming a popular tool to reduce both office expenses and patients’ frustration with their appointment scheduling experience.
Online appointment software works like this: Patients access an online appointment book through either your existing website (or the online appointment software company will provide you with your own patient scheduling page, hosted and maintained, at no extra cost). Patients can easily see which dates and times are available and make online appointments 24 hours a day. In addition, appointment reminders are automatically generated and sent to the patient.
Just a few of the major benefits are:
Staff administrative tasks are reduced. In a busy doctor’s office, the front office staff is responsible for a number of things, from patient scheduling and checkout to processing, filing, and sending paperwork both within and out of the office. When a patient calls for an appointment, it often takes a lot of flipping through the appointment book to find a mutually convenient time for the patient to be seen. All the while, other patients calling in are put on hold, the doctors are looking for specific files, and yet more patients are waiting to be checked in or checked out. Eliminating the patient scheduling from that equation provides the doctor with either the ability to reduce staff hours, saving money, or can give staff more time to focus on other tasks to streamline the way the office functions.
Patient satisfaction is increased. When a patient calls in with a medical question, they are often put on hold because the office staff is busy with patient scheduling. Eliminating scheduling call volume frees up the staff to address a patient’s more pressing medical concerns. In addition, a patient can use web-based scheduling at their leisure, easily seeing the available appointment times and scheduling online appointments 24 hours a day. If you are in a specialty that requires multiple visits, the patient also has the option to use online appointment scheduling to book several weeks or even months at a time without any additional labor or expense for your practice.
A different option is to outsource your patient scheduling to an answering service. This would certainly free up your staff, but you’re not likely to save much money. Besides the expense of using an outside call center, your patients are still not be able to see your available appointments and would still spend more time on the phone with the call center representative trying to find an available appointment that fits their schedule.
Read on for more information about
Online Appointment Scheduling options…
