Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Reminding patients they are due for physicals?

Hi Everyone,

I was wondering if there is an easy way in Amazing Charts to remind patients they are due for a follow up or a physical. Is there a way to send the patient an email reminder automatically in Amazing Charts?

If there is not a way to do this in Amazing Charts, I would love to hear how everyone else has this setup in their practice.

Thanks in advance.

There is no way to do the emails automatically. You would need some fairly good 3rd party software for that.

I suppose you could use the reminder system, where you just set a reminder for two weeks prior to their appointment. That is about the only way I know of. Maybe someone else does it differently.

90% of my patients leave the office with another appointment scheduled. Either for follow up or for their annual exam. Even when they say they need to "check their schedule". We just tell them we will go ahead and put them down for such and such date and if they cannot make it that day they should call and reschedule. This way we have a record if they cancel or reschedule. For those that refuse to make an appointment or cancel it and not reschedule the staff puts them in their reminder boxes for 2 weeks. They then call them and remind them to reschedule. This works most of the time. The remaining patients we generally catch when we run a search report monthly for all patients not seen within a year.

We do the same Leslie mentioned, but automatically call pts who are scheduled for annuall appts a month to the date of the appointment. We have tried other methods, and we found this results in the fewest rescheduled appointments. We also have a very strict same day/ no show cancellation policy. If we do not have the request to reschedule the annual exams, or initial office visit, we charge double the missed appointment fee. We have them sign this policy when they establish as a new patient, as well as remind them the firt time they are called for the appointment reminder. We went to many no shows, to maybe two or three a month, if that.

That's awesome. Do you have a lot of private insurance patients?

No, primarily we have Medicare/ BCBS. We were told in the beginning that we could not charge Medicare/Medicaid patients an out of pocket fee. Turns out, we can so long as its an applicable standard to all our patients, with clear notification to the patients before the charges can be incurred.

Even when a patient calls the same day to cancel, we do remind them, if we do so, they will be responsible for the fee, and 9 times out of ten, the appointment is kept to avoid the charge. When its a real emergency, obviously, we do not charge the fee.
Its really interesting to hear the excuses, most often, people who feel they failed to meet the Dr's requirements by the "deadline" ie weight loss, better DM management, exercise, etc. A sympathetic ear, and a promise to ask the MD to take it a litte easy on the patient often works wonders.

We call all of our patients at least the day before their appointments to confirm. Physical get called 3-4 days prior to make sure they have had their labs and completed their patient questionnaire. we also charge No Show fees for confirmed patients who do not show. Our No Show rate is very low. But a lot of physicals people still arrive without having completed their paperwork.

Increase the no show rate. Our physical no show rate is double the standard appt no show. It takes up double the time. When it was lower, we had a higher rate of no shows.