Healthcare professionals and receptionists deal with patient no-shows on a regular basis. This is a major problem for them because patient no-shows do not only cause the medical office to incur unwarranted expenses but also disrupts a healthcare provider’s schedule as well as the daily flow of patients.

The fact is hospitals totally depend on scheduled appointments – the more appointments, the bigger the output and higher the profit.

But when a patient skips his appointment, the office receptionist would have to contact him to see if there’s a need to make another appointment or if they are just running late.

Now what if all patients conducted themselves that way? Certainly, a hospital will not survive with such negligent patients.

To solve this problem, many doctors have chosen to charge those patients who seem to tend to forget their appointments, but such a drastic measure is sure to be risky. In fact, depending on where the health center is located and what type of patients it serves, in terms of social status, charging for missed appointments might either educate patients to respect the healthcare provider and administrative receptionist’s hard work or prompt everyone to switch to another, more flexible, medical clinic.

Those are risks you certainly don’t want to take.

Now though, there is an effective and affordable solution to decrease the rate of patient no-shows and most doctors who took advantage of it are now profiting from this very useful and practical software.

This practical solution is an efficient medical software system known as automatic medical secretary. The system lets users streamline their everyday workload while giving patients a lot of useful services like online sign-ups as new patients and appointment scheduling, online medical forms, mobile phone synchronization, among others.

The virtual medical receptionist is capable of placing calls, sending SMS messages and e-mails to patients to remind them of their scheduled appointments. This aspect of the system is very vital in view of the fact that most patients forget about their appointments.

The backup administrative secretary has been designed with the medical practitioner and office secretary’s needs in mind. You can imagine how stressful it can be when dozens of patients approach your desk asking “Where is the doctor?”, “How long am I supposed to wait to be seen by the doctor?”, while the phone keeps ringing and piles of health records need to be updated as soon as possible.

Oftentimes, to solve this problem, doctors hire extra manpower just to meet all the needs of patients. However, as a medical practice grows, the number of registered patients also increases and hiring extra medical assistants might not be the best solution.

In such cases, all you need is some extra help and the backup front desk receptionist has been created for precisely for this purpose. Whenever a patient creates an appointment, the automated front desk receptionist will automatically update its own database and in the future appointment reminders will be sent by phone, SMS or email, depending on the options chosen by the patient.

So doing, they will be more likely to show up for their appointment and the front desk receptionist will be able to dedicate her time to more productive tasks.

AssistMedic has been providing automated front desk assistant services to medical businesses in different countries for several years. Check out their backup medical receptionist that can be easily integrated with any medical website.

Tags: Business, health, Health Care, Health Industy, Healthcare, medical assistant, Medical Receptionist, medicine, outsourcing