Over the past decade, there have been tremendous technological advances throughout the health care sector. New applications and practice management solutions are being introduced every day to improve efficiencies in the practice environment.

So why has patient communication lagged behind? If you analyze the marketplace, you will find that prior to Patient Prompt®, there were two approaches to the solution. The first is hardware-based applications that require upfront costs and tie up office telephone lines.  The second, more advanced approach, involves a variety of web based solutions with very little ability for customization to meet the needs of most practices. In most cases, both technologies require the practice to create and upload a file each day with patients to call, and in both systems the results are available the following day via a call report.

Further problems involve robotic sounding appointment reminders as well as frequent patient hang-ups due to the fact that most services are not able to distinguish a human voice from an answering machine reliably and effectively. As a result, many automated appointment reminder systems are ineffective and generally cause more problems then they solve.

Since 2004, Patient Prompt® has been analyzing the way practices communicate with their patients. Our goal was to understand the role that automated appointment reminder technology could play in improving patient communication, creating efficiencies, and generating or recovering revenue in today’s challenging practice environment.

The analysis focused on three key areas:

Effectiveness, Ease of Use and Return on Investment.

The results were not what we expected.  Traditional automated appointment reminder services do not work. In some practice environments, they can actually have a negative impact.

Patient Prompt® analyzed over a million patient reminders and surveyed enterprise level practices in a variety of specialties over a six year period. With their findings, they have developed new ground breaking technologies to address the needs of today’s busy practices, such as:

 “Seamless Two-Way Technology™”:  Providing practices with a fully automated patient communication tool that eliminates the daily file upload by integrating directly with their existing scheduling system.  This allows practices to confirm patient appointments by voice, text and email, with the results posted automatically into their scheduling software moments after the confirmation takes place.

(((Smart Calling Technology)))™:  Designed to reduce the number of attempts necessary to confirm patient appointments, and….

“Best Practice Calling Protocols” Designed to provide practices with the most effective, revenue generating, appointment reminders in the industry.

Working from the premise that no two practices are alike, Patient Prompt® also developed a cost-effective, reliable, customized approach to ensure practices are provided with a completely tailored solution that will exceed their patient communication needs. This unparalleled level of customization, coupled with the most advanced patient communication technology in the industry, has resulted in a 97% success rate in reaching and confirming patient appointments.

For a more in depth look at how patient communication has evolved and how Patient Prompt’s® advanced, proprietary technology can benefit your busy practice, click here