How an Online PT Patient Scheduling System Can Transform Your Practice
Scheduling patients requires patience and precision if you want to ensure that your days are full and productive. That’s one of the reasons we built a robust patient portal into HENO — to give our clients the tools they need to schedule patients efficiently.
By using a patient scheduling system, your practice can improve not only your efficiency but also your client experience. Using online patient scheduling systems is one of the best ways to streamline your practice. Here’s what you need to know.
Online Scheduling Empowers Patients
One of the barriers to patients keeping PT appointments is that they have no agency in choosing appointment times or even in calling to make an appointment. They must call during your office hours and choose from the appointment slots you offer them.
Using an online patient portal like HENO provides patients with the opportunity to schedule appointments at their convenience, 24 hours a day. They can choose from all available appointments. That means they’re more likely to keep the appointment than they might be if they had to call your office to schedule it.
Patient Scheduling Systems Help Your Staff
Your staff’s time is important and it costs you money. Whether you’re talking about a full-time, salaried employee or a part-timer, you pay the people you employ for their time.
When you use an online patient scheduling system such as a patient portal, you give your staff more time to take care of the other tasks that need done including administrative work and helping patients. We’ve noticed that it can take up to 8 minutes or more to schedule a single appointment over the phone. By allowing patients to schedule online, you can free your staff to handle other aspects of their jobs.
Patient Scheduling Systems Collect Information
Collecting data about your patients is both necessary and helpful, but when you do it manually, it can also be time consuming. Using a patient portal means that you can collect information in a variety of ways that can help your practice.
For example, you can:
- Encourage or require patients to complete intake paperwork online prior to their first appointment with you, including a detailed medical history and insurance information.
- Specify data you want to collect, including the most popular appointment times and the percentage of patients who use your patient portal.
The data you collect about patient scheduling can help you do a better job of managing your schedule. For example, you might decide to eliminate some appointment times and add others to maximize your efficiency and profits.
Patients Can Pay Online
Another task that can take a lot of time is collecting patient copays and payments. While this isn’t technically a scheduling issue, it’s related and using an online PT patient scheduling system can help streamline the process.
HENO’s patient portal makes it possible for patients to pay their copays and fees online. We included integrated credit card payments that simplify the payment process and keep it affordable for you and your practice. By empowering patients to make payments in advance of their appointments, you’ll save your staff time that can be used in other ways.
Your Patient Scheduling System Can Maintain a Waiting List
It can be frustrating to have patients cancel appointments. When that happens, your staff may need to spend their valuable time calling patients who have requested earlier appointment slots to try to fill in the cancellation.
With an online patient portal such as HENO, you can allow patients to request a spot on the waiting list and receive automatic notifications of available time slots. Since the process of filling open time slots can be quite time-consuming, using an online scheduling system can help both your patients and staff.
Patients Prefer Online Scheduling
Today’s patients greatly prefer to have access to their healthcare providers online. They expect to be able to obtain services even when your practice is closed — and they’re likely to choose providers that make that possible.
When you have a flexible patient portal like the one we built into HENO, you can use it to provide an array of services to your patients. They can schedule and reschedule appointments, fill out paperwork, make payments, and even communicate directly with you and your staff.
In fact, patient portals can be useful in attracting new patients. Once patients know you have a portal they may choose your practice over others who don’t have one.
Using an online PT patient scheduling system can help your practice be more efficient and attract new patients. And, by saving your staff time, you’ll be able to accept more patients and increase your profits.
Ready to see how HENO’s patient scheduling system can transform your practice? Click here to schedule your free demo today!
