3 Ways DearDoc Helps Healthcare Admins
3 Ways DearDoc Helps Healthcare Admins At DearDoc, we know that any healthcare admin is a force of nature. Your efforts keep your practice alive. You’ve probably had to find scrappy, innovative ways to do an unbelievably high amount of tasks with an unbelievably low amount of bandwidth and resources. We’re here to help. DearDoc is a solution designed to help the strong become stronger and the clever become cleverer. With DearDoc, you can modernize your admin operations to ultimately save you time by streamlining everyday processes and eliminating human errors. Reduce your Phone Time How much time do you waste sitting on the phone answering the same simple questions every day? According to Forbes, healthcare professionals waste over ⅔ of their time doing tedious paperwork, and most of that manual work falls onto the office managers. Everything from booking appointments to explaining insurance qualifications takes man-hours, but luckily, DearDoc’s AI Chat is designed to streamline those processes. The custom AI chat allows you to automate patient communication on your website and answer their common questions about business hours, locations, services offered, and even insurance information – any day, any time. Patients can even request an appointment. In 2021 alone, DearDoc’s AI chat helped 904,914 patients with their needs and saved 4.6 million admin minutes across our customer base. On average, each practice gained an average of 300 new patients through our AI Chat. Capture Missed Calls and Automate Patient Appointments Your patients hate to wait. A recent study shows that 60% of patients will hang up after 60 seconds of waiting on the phone, and they will likely never return to your practice again. During busy times, it’s extremely stressful for office admins to process all phone calls waiting in line. With our AI Autodialer, your office will be called automatically to connect you with the patient within 1 minute of receiving their information through your AI Chat. You can then book an appointment with them to avoid losing patients over missed calls, and your patient information will be organized online for your to track. This further minimizes your call time because patients will already be briefed on insurances, specialties, and more after being triaged by the AI Chat. Collect Payments Faster with Text-to-Pay 77% of healthcare providers say that collecting payments typically take more than a month. Stop chasing late payments and start optimizing your payment collection process to get paid sooner and collect easier. A tool like DearDoc’s Text-to-Pay is designed to help. The process makes it easy for admins to remind patients about late payments and it offers patients a flexible option to pay directly via text messages. In 2021, DearDoc customers collected 22% more in payments using Text-to-Pay. Conclusion DearDoc is the premier solution designed to help healthcare administrative teams succeed and work easier. Our AI chat feature makes responding to patient questions and requesting reviews easy, the appointment automation capabilities minimize missed calls, and the text-to
How to Avoid Patient No-Shows and Cancellations
With the fast-paced culture of modern society, it can be challenging to keep track of a busy schedule, especially when it comes to the healthcare industry. Doctor visits are a part of life that can’t be avoided to some degree, and considering the sensitive nature of people’s time and the work itself, it can sometimes be a logistical nightmare for medical providers to get every patient to show up on time. It could be a personal scheduling conflict or simply anxiety regarding the appointment itself, there are many reasons patients may cancel an appointment or no-show altogether. This article is going to provide insight and strategies into how you can reduce missed appointments and no-shows while ensuring the comfort and satisfaction of each patient. Why Patients Cancel Or No-Show Each patient’s individual schedule is unique and sometimes full of conflicting engagements, but overall, medical visits are known to take a fair amount of time out of the day, and wait times are something many people dread. Others feel increasing anxiety as the appointment date approaches, and they figure to themselves that they can handle this visit some time down the road. This can only cause more scheduling conflicts as missed appointments can put you on a waitlist depending on your healthcare needs. In the same vein, a cancellation is communicated between the patients and the medical practice, whereas no-show appointments are just that, the patient no-shows without contacting the practice. If you’re experiencing cancellations or no-shows specifically from returning patients, you should analyze your patient experience. They could have had a negative or neutral experience, which is causing anxiety around returning. Patient no-show rates can lead to more scheduling conflicts for the medical practice regarding other patients and can make daily operations more complicated than they have to be in addition to lost revenue. Another reason why a patient no-show may occur is that the patient knows there isn’t any consequence to not showing up for their scheduled appointment, so they may not think twice about it. There are quite a few solutions medical practices can implement into their policies that not only keep patient satisfaction consistent and efficient, but it helps patients to stay on top of their healthcare and show up on schedule. It’s always vital to understand each patient’s personal concerns and scheduling conflicts, but you should also have an organized system that helps to ensure a patient no-show doesn’t occur. How To Reduce No-Shows Or Cancellations Simply put, a few integrations into the policies and requirements of your missed appointments can ensure operations stay on track and patients get the healthcare they need. You can take a blended approach to reduce no-show rates from every angle while reducing the number of last-minute changes you have to manage. Communication is vital and you need to have a clear grasp of your available appointment slots so you don’t run into issues like rescheduling, double booking, and other logistical conflicts. Some of these include introducing requirements that have to be met for each appointment, and online integrations that make it easy for patients to schedule and manage their appointments. Having a scheduling system that offers consistent and unwavering results is vital for patient engagement and the overall efficiency of medical providers. Keep reading below to get a look at some of the most effective strategies to avoid a patient no-show. 1. Automated Reminders Sometimes no-shows occur because the patient entirely forgot about their scheduled appointment or missed their own reminder altogether. It never hurts to have a follow-up system in place that automatically reaches out to the patient via email or text message to remind them of their appointment. Using SMS is highly preferred by many as it’s quick, non-confrontational, and gives them something physically visual that they can keep on hand. It helps keep the appointment at the front of their mind with important information like their appointment time and the practice address. Of course, all of these interactions must follow HIPAA compliance, but an automated system like this can do wonders for both parties involved. There are many solutions available to implement a system like this, and DearDoc’s AI Chat is an excellent tool that helps you stay in touch with your patients to clarify questions and book appointments with automated appointment reminders. *DearDoc’s AI Chat is designed to make patient communication and appointment booking easier. Book a free demo to see how it can help your practice. 2. Phone Call Reminders A more direct approach would be to offer a reminder call for each patient ahead of their appointment to remind them of the date and time. This also makes a scheduled patient feel more inclined to confirm this with you directly, instead of leaving you to wonder to yourself. It also shows the patient that your practice is organized and that they’re more than ready to offer the primary care patients need. From another aspect, a phone call follow-up may be ignored if the person is at work or possibly doesn’t recognize the random number. This can lead to a patient no-show so it’s essential to have other methods in place, in case that doesn’t work out. 3. Creating A Cancellation And No-Show Policy This may be one of the most effective options for reducing cancellations, as the appointment policy can lay down the rules that each patient has to follow otherwise, there could be varying consequences. Each medical practice may have a unique structure to this policy but there are a few strategies that generally work across the board. One way to ensure existing and new patients show up for their appointments is to include no-show fees. No one wants to spend more money than they already have on their healthcare, and it’s an easy way to make sure that an appointment takes place. For planned cancellations, you can require notice within 24-72 hours prior to the patient’s appointment time. If you want to take it one step further, you can need that cancellation to be made over
Marketing for Doctors: The Do’s and Don’ts of Medical Marketing
It’s no secret that marketing is essential for any business – but this is especially true for doctors. In a highly competitive industry, patients have a lot of choices when it comes to choosing a healthcare provider. That’s why it’s so important for doctors to make sure they’re doing everything they can to market themselves effectively. But what exactly does effective marketing for doctors look like? In this post, we’d like to help shape your marketing efforts by sharing a few dos and don’ts for marketing your medical practice in this technological age. 1. Have a vision and strategy While it sounds obvious, most practices fail for lack of a vision and strategy. Start by defining what type of patients your practice serves. A clear vision and strategy ensure your target audience in a more personalized and authentic manner. The four main ways to define your target audience are behavior, demographics, geography, and psychographics. The more specific your target audience is, the better you can tailor your marketing campaigns to provoke a positive response. Next, answer a few introspective questions such as: · Where do you envision your practice in five years? · What form of marketing will get you there? · Who will be on the marketing team? What will their roles be? A good strategic medical marketing strategy will help you evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, prospects, and risks. It should not only focus on implementing laid-out plans but also track results. 2. Have a budget Now that you’ve established who your audience is and what strategy will reach them, you’ll need to set a realistic budget. Your budget will depend on the size of your practice and whether you have in-house or outsourced marketers. You can use the widespread rule of thumb for medical facilities and allocate between 2-5% of your gross revenues for marketing. Alternatively, you can wing it and use your gut to set the budget. If you are starting from scratch, a good way to nail down a budget is to consider how much your competition is spending and match or exceed their marketing efforts. 3. Make use of digital marketing materials The fast-paced technological landscape can make implementing an effective marketing strategy feel like shooting at a moving target. That’s why doctors tend to favor traditional marketing tactics like word-of-mouth, but there’s a huge opportunity with digital marketing that’s the now and future of healthcare marketing. Some of the most effective marketing materials include: · Having a website – About 85% of the households in the U.S. having a broadband internet subscription, it’s easy to see why you need a digital space. Having a professional, engaging, and intuitive website legitimizes your business and adds to your credibility. Byhaving a website, you have control over your brand’s perception as you can tell your own story. A good website should have details, such as your contact details, employees’ details and their qualifications, patient forms such as appointment schedules, and a chat plugin. Also, don’t neglect your website design – it should be responsive, clean, and user-friendly. · Social media marketing – Social media platforms provide you with an opportunity to interact with patients or your target audience in a fun and engaging manner. They also enable you to increase your brand awareness. Use quality images whenever possible and link the social media content back to your website. Always respond professionally and ask those with medical issues to either contact you privately or schedule an appointment. · Content marketing – Creating rich and patient-driven content is key to promoting your medical practice and building an online presence. Include published well-researched and referenced content on your blog, medical journal, or newsletter. The content should also be created with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind to garner organic search traffic. This means that the content should be skimmable, adequately organized with clear and descriptive headings, and contain keywords that are relevant to your target audience. Doing so will boost your practice’s search engine rankings, which can help to funnel more prospective patients to your practice website. · Video Marketing – You could also add a human touch to your content by creating short video content for common queries. These don’t have to be too “sales-ey” but could simply help to educate patients on conditions, treatments, or even how to make an appointment with your office. · Print media – For your online marketing campaign to be effective, you need to complement it with print media such as brochures and postcards. Traditional marketing tactics are not dead, and they can be quite effective when used correctly. · Email marketing – Although this form of marketing is not as personal as some of the others, it can be highly effective, especially if you have a large mailing list. You can use email marketing to send appointment reminders, special offers, or educational content. This marketing form is best suited to reenergize inactive patients and get them back in your office. · Google Business (Formerly known as Google My Business) – Google Business is a free business listing service provided by Google. Getting your business listed on Google Business can increase your visibility on Maps and Search, which can help you attract potential patients. Google auto-generates business listings based on information from your website and other online sources. So, your practice may already have a Google Business. If you do, claim the listing and update the information to ensure it is accurate. If your practice doesn’t yet have a Google Business, create one from scratch, verify your business, and set qor update your business information. Soon, your listing will appear in local search engine results and on Google Maps, displaying your business name, location, phone number, services, and other contact information. Yelp also hosts business listings, so consider claiming or creating a listing there. 4. Have a mobile-first mindset According to recent research, about97% of Americans own a cell phone, 85% of which are smartphones. As is the case with other industries, patients need access to