If you work in the medical field, you probably already know that it is going to be the medical appointment scheduling that is essentially going to be the lifeblood of your entire practice. This is because in order to ensure that you have a constant stream of revenue coming in, it is going to be completely dependent upon how many patients it is that you are going to be seeing on a daily basis. What this means, is that how you have set up your daily medical appointment scheduling is going to have a huge impact on your entire business.
As the person who Is in charge of doing all of the scheduling for the entire medical practice and office, you are going to need to be able to maximize the daily schedule in just about every way that is humanly possible. This is going to help lead you to a much better time management, as well as much less stress on the practice.
Here are some simple tips (read article for more) that you can start utilizing as soon as today in order to help you run your medical appointment scheduling much better.
Always be Sure That You Start on Time
If you have scheduled the very first appointment of the day at 8:00 am and they don’t actually see the physician until 30 minutes later at 8:30 am, it is going to cause a huge ripple effect that is going to continue pushing back appointments throughout the remainder of the day. This is not good and is something that you definitely want to avoid from happening as much as possible. With that being said, when it does come time for you to start doing appointments for the day, try to recognize the fact that all of the pre-visit work that takes place at the front office and/or clinical intake are going to need to take that into consideration.
By simply giving your first appointment that was scheduled for 8 am an arrival time of 7:40 am so that they can get all of that paperwork stuff done, the patient will then be ready to get their appointment started on time at 8 am.
Always be Sure to Plan for Seasonality
When it comes to your patients, it is going to be best if you get to know them and whatever their seasonal needs may be. For example, if you are in a pediatric practice, you are more than likely going to get many more wellness visits during the beginning of the school year as all of the children are getting ready to go back to school. At the same time, there are other practices who have discovered that they get busier at the end of the year, after all of the deductibles have been met.
Create a Timeline
In order to schedule the correct number of patients, you are going to need to figure out how many days and hours the doctor is planning on working each and every week. Once you have done this, you can easily fill up their scheduled with the correct number of patients.