How neglected patient recalls can impact your practice
When your patient leaves their appointment, how can you ensure they’ll book their next check-up?
Is it the responsibility of the patient or the practitioner when a patient misses their scheduled appointment, or if they don’t book a check-up within six months? If they don’t re-book within this time-frame, they are then added to an accumulating lag of treatment and care that could – and should – have been provided by your practice.
In an ideal world, your patient recall lag is zero.
What does this mean?
Having no recall lag means that every patient responds to their recall, and attends their scheduled follow-up appointment without delay. Perfect, right? But the reality of recall lag is that it can take months for patients to respond to these patient recalls – or they don’t receive them on time because your admin staff are too busy with other tasks!
Because of this, patients might not even book their check-up until months after their scheduled recall.
Factors such as front desk staff struggling to complete increasing recall tasks, further accumulates the recall lag, which can have a drastic impact on your practice monthly revenue.
Statistically, every month of recall lag is a 13% drop in patient recall revenue.
Patient recall effectiveness drives your revenue
Many practitioners neglect the business analytics side of practice management, because they see prioritising patient health outcomes as a separate and more valuable objective.
However, addressing your practice’s performance as a business is fundamental to improving health outcomes for your patients.
Improves health outcomes with an effective patient recall strategy
By striving for zero recall lag, your practice achieves both business and health-oriented objectives:
- More appointments: effective recalls increase the number of bookings, which ultimately drives monthly practice revenue.
- Maintained health: when patients attend their follow-ups, on time, they are receiving better health outcomes than if they were neglected by your recall system.
7 steps to minimise recall lag
1. Routinely check your patient’s contact details
People often change their phone number, email, and their address, but rarely contact you to update these details.Every time a patient contacts your practice, they should be asked to confirm their contact details.
This prevents recall lag from calling patients with outdated information.
Ensure your staff ask patients to provide more than one contact method, such as an email address and a phone number, but also specify how they prefer to be contacted.
2. Schedule recall dates for each patient
Each patient should have a set recall date. This means that whenever a patient’s recall is completed, another recall should be scheduled for a later date. This will also stagger your recalls, so your admin team isn’t juggling ‘batches’ of appointment reminders alongside customer service tasks.
With this simple procedure in place, patients won’t get lost in the system – and you increase the chance of contacting them at the right time!
3. Pre-book your patients
The best time to book a patient is when they’re leaving their appointment. Ensure your front desk team are always scheduling a follow-up with your patient after their appointment.
4. Make it easy for patients to respond and book
This means allowing patients to respond to your recalls via text message and email. Online booking is also a huge indicator of recall effectiveness, as patients are increasingly seeking health services online.
By making it as convenient as possible to get in touch, your practice will receive more positive responses to patient recalls!
5. Have a structured patient recall process
Bring your team together and create an integrated recall process for every staff member to follow. Embedding this in your practice management ensures consistency, and your whole team will understand the importance of recalls!
6. Use multiple communication methods
This is crucial to increasing recall effectiveness. Research has shown that patients are far more likely to respond to three types of appointment reminder – such as a letter, a text message or email, and a phone call.
7. Don’t give up!
Consistency is key. Keep calling patients at regular intervals – they will get back to you!