Appointment Efficiency Score and Revenue Impact Part II

This article is the second of two parts.

Incentives for Staff to Improve Scheduling Efficiency

Scheduling inefficiencies—that is, appointment slots with no patients in them—occur for many reasons. Some medical specialties and patient populations simply have a propensity for more missed appointments than others. Still, it’s a good idea to understand the root causes of scheduling inefficiencies, because some can be mitigated.

This analysis starts with calculating your Appointment Scheduling Efficiency Score: the number of patients seen per day divided by the number of patient appointment slots available per day and multiplied by 100. If your score is low, you probably are seeing:

• Appointment slots that go unused each day;

• A high proportion of no-call, no-show patients; and

• A high level of cancellations that do not get rescheduled.

In each of those cases, your practice is missing out on significant revenue opportunities. You need to begin evaluating the reasons for these inefficiencies. For example, staff behavior can play a role—and not just scheduling staff, but also nurses and other providers.

A Red Flag

If you see a pattern of unused appointment slots at the same times during the day or the same days of the week, that is a strong sign that staff behavior is causing scheduling inefficiencies. For example:

• You see unused appointment slots right before a lunch break;

• You see unused appointment slots right after a lunch break;

• You see unused appointment slots at the end of the day; or

• You see unused appointment slots on Friday afternoons.

The good news is that with some creativity and a few incentives, you can change staff behavior. Yes, you’ll need to spend money, but it will be nowhere near the amount those missed appointment slots are costing you:

• If behavior change is needed across functional teams (i.e., front office, nurses, or providers), you’ll need to develop a program that gives incentive to the team to work together.

• If behavior change is needed at the individual or unique team level, you’ll want to identify more personal ways to motivate and incentivize. This is a common finding when only the schedulers need to make a change.

Begin by identifying the areas you want to improve and how you’ll measure that improvement: establish a baseline measure, document how you’ll monitor activities, and document how you’ll measure improvement. Assign “prizes” or other incentives for each improvement area, and let your teams know specifically what they will get if they achieve the metrics.

Common Measures and Incentive Ideas

Specific measures vary by practice, but here are some that are commonly used across practice types:

• Target: Zero unused appointment slots per week;

• Target: Cancellation-to-reschedule metric >80%, which means more than 80% of those who cancel an appointment will be rescheduled with another appointment; and

• Target: 100% booking in slots that used to be left vacant due to lunch breaks or trying to get out early.

Most often, people are driven to change behavior when the incentive affects them personally, rather than at the team or group level. Here are three easy, personal, practical incentives that drive results:

• eGift cards: Not everyone drinks coffee, and not everyone likes your favorite restaurant, so consider a gift card to places like Amazon, the local mall, or department stores. This provides staff members the flexibility to use the gift card for life essentials or splurge items. Monetary amounts from $20 to $50 are enough to get people’s attention.

• Small amounts of paid time off: Aside from cash, nothing’s more personal than giving someone paid time away from work. You’d be surprised at how people react when they get to leave a few hours early one day without it impacting their paycheck or vacation balance.

• Tickets to movies or sporting events: Whether tickets to the local movie theatre or a local sports event, experience-related incentives often pique the interest of staff members.

If you have a staff with widely diverse interests, you may want to offer them a choice of one of the three things mentioned.

Finally, if you need to motivate a team, it’s best to combine a team experience and a personal touch. Suppose the front office, nursing staff, and providers all work together to accomplish a scheduling improvement goal. Buy the team lunch one day to celebrate as a unit and distribute personal incentives to each team member. You’ll foster team unity and be able to celebrate as a team while giving each person something to take home.

Tools to Boost Patient Scheduling Efficiency

In previous sections of this article, we learned how to calculate your practice’s scheduling efficiency, how to approach scheduling from a revenue perspective, and how to incentivize staff to increase efficiency.

Here we explore how technology can help you automate best practices to boost efficiency. These procedures can be done without technology, of course, but they tend to be highly labor intensive.

Without the aid of technology, measuring and boosting patient scheduling efficiency is very laborious.

Tools to improve appointment booking

Several technologies are available that can streamline how patients request appointments:

• Text message appointment requests: Have you considered giving your patients the ability to request an appointment using a text message?

  • Patient texts the office “I would like an appointment next Tuesday. Got anything at 3 PM or later?”

  • Office staff investigates and determines what options are available.

  • Office staff places a quick phone call to the patient to confirm time and gather any necessary insurance or contact information.

• Online appointment requests: Most good practice management and medical scheduling software enables online appointment requests. The office receives the request via secure message and coordinates with the patient for the right time.

• Appointment scheduling hotline: If your practice has a phone system that requires patients to press #1, and then #3, and finally #4 to get to the scheduling folks, consider creating a direct phone number that goes to the scheduler. Most modern phone systems will give you the tools to do this very quickly at little or no cost.

Tools to Improve No-Show Rates

Improving no-call, no-show rates will reduce the number of wasted appointment slots and increase your revenue opportunities. Here are some tools to assist with that:

• Appointment reminders: Good scheduling technology automates the process of sending email, text message, and/or voice-based reminders to patients about their upcoming appointment.

• Eligibility verification: If patients know their insurance will cover the visit, they may be more likely to keep their appointment. Use electronic eligibility verification to understand a patient’s coverage for the appointment’s date of service, and let the patient know he or she will be covered. Few practices take this step, but it can help limit no-show risk.

• Automated letters to patients: Once an appointment is booked, use technology to send paperwork or direct patients to online self-service tools to give them the information they need to be ready for their appointment. Practices that do this the best include insurance information, consent forms, and even directions to their office using these automated tools.

Tools to Help Your Scheduling Staff

A recent medical appointment scheduling software guide points out 10 of the most critical technology features. Among those that will help you and your scheduling team become better at scheduling are the following.

• “First available” scheduling look-up: If you have a goal in place or an incentive program to have zero unused appointment slots, a tool that will immediately take your staff members to the first available option will help them instantly see open slots they need to fill.

• Double booking: One of the best ways to hedge your bets against no-show and cancellations is creating a policy around double-booking. Good scheduling technology will allow you to double book patients and even govern which staff members have authorization to double book.

To view the eight other critical technology capabilities to make scheduling staff efficient, read the full scheduling guide available at PracticeSuite.com , at www.practicesuite.com/appointment-scheduling-software-calculator/ .