Home Forums Discussions General Discussion Scheduling Patients - Amount of time

Hey everyone just a general feeler. How long do you schedule appointments for your patients? We currently have been using 45min for new patients and 30min for established ones, but with that amount of time and a cancellation or two we can not see enough patients to make the practice as successful as the doctors want. Just wondering what others do?

Another question. What do you do for cancellations? We seem to have quite a few. I am thinking because there is no real penalty for rescheduling. What are your policy's and how do you enforce them without scary your patients away?

Thanks for any advise?

Ben

We have each patient sign to acknowlede receipt of a general policy statement. This statement discusses late cancellation and no show fees. We bill them.

I am curious what you all are billing for no shows. We are not billing for cancelations, but do request 24 hrs notice - which we rarely get. I do bill for DNKA, first gets a phone call, second one gets a letter and fee, third gets a D/C.

I wish our office could bill for no-shows. We see mainly medicaid patients. Despite phone calls reminding patients of appointments, many seem to forget to come in.

Our office calls the day before and reminds patients of appointments. We have all different times for appointments.
Coughs, colds, ST get 10 - 15 min slots, New pts. get 1/2 hour.(we ask new pts to come in 1/2 hr early to fill out paperwork) Physicals get 1/2 hour, Sports CE's 15-20 mins. We never use a 45 min slot. We schedule procedures at the end of morning and last appt. of the afternoon so not to put our schedule behind since you never know how long a procedure will take.

As for billing patients for N/S and cancellations. We send a warning letter after 2 N/S or last minute cancellations and discharge on the 3rd one. We do charge a few patients $50 for N/S if they are a problem but it is better just to discharge and get rid of them we find they typically continue the behavior.

Unfortunately, there isn't a fool proof way to prevent N/S that we have thought of yet. But generally we seem to fill up the schedule with a walk in or work in appt.
Good Luck!

I wish there was a better GUI for the schedule. Presently an hour visit will show 4x 15 min repeats of their name.

Thank you all so much for the info! I think we will change our new patient visit to 30min, we can get more patients in.

I am just too too familiar with the mindset of most (but not all) medicaid recipients. Lets say the "typical" recipient. They probably dont really forget. but you cant prove it.

Marty,

How do you schedule and "make it" with Medicaid patients? Here in MI we get around $42 for a 99214. Do you only do 15min appointments?

I do 20 min new patients and 10 minute f/u or post-ops. There are a few new patients that we schedule for 40 minutes such as cancer patients and very complex ones that I know are coming. It's really not enough time but with the Medicaid no-shows and no-shows in general, I run on-time 90-95% of the time.

I don't think you can make it with Medicaid patients scheduled for 45 minutes. They pay zilch.

Does AC allow for 10minute increment appointments? Can it be customized that way?

Absolutely. I actually like 5 minute increments but it made some many slots and patients name showing up 5 times was driving me crazy. You can adjust that under the admin options, scheduling, and then set appointment types. The increments can be adjusted there

Tackling scheduling is on my to-do list. We're a general pediatrics practice. Appointments fall into basically 2 categories: check-ups and sick. We have two "providers" to get 2 columns on the AC scheduler. Increment is set to 15 mins. Checkups and new patients get 30 mins in one column and sick visits get 15 mins in the other column. However, we put check-ups in the sick column too esp when newborns want an appointment pretty soon after discharge. We use to have 15 min slots for check-ups but that led to too many check-ups scheduled per day. With 30 min slots, not enough patients per day. We have 95% medicaid patient roster, so we do need to see a lot of patients everyday to make it.

A provider can have 2 columns?