Advanced Receptionist Systems Should Allow For Automated Appointment Reminders

Medical practitioners and medical secretaries often contend with no-show patients. This poses a big problem because patients who miss their appointments literally affect a healthcare provider's timetable, slow down the entire medical billing process and also disrupts the regular influx of patients.

Every medical practice, in fact, relies on appointment scheduling: many appointments mean major productivity, thus better profits.

However, when a patient fails to come as scheduled, the medical assistant would have to make a follow up call just to check if the patient has run into something to cause the delay or if there is a need to cancel and reschedule.

Now what if all patients conducted themselves that way? Certainly, a hospital will not survive with such negligent patients.

To solve this problem, many healthcare providers have chosen to charge those patients who seem to tend to forget their appointments, but such a drastic measure is sure to be risky. In fact, depending on where the hospital is located and what type of patients it serves, in terms of social status, charging for missed appointments might either educate patients to respect the healthcare professional and administrative receptionist's hard work or prompt everyone to switch to another, more flexible, medical clinic.

Are you willing to take that risk?

The good thing is, there is a wonderful and cost efficient answer to considerably lessen the ratio of no show patients and a lot of doctors are already reaping the rewards brought forth by this great software.

The solution is called the virtual office receptionist, a medical software system which enables its user to streamline their daily workload while offering patients a number of useful up-to-date services, including online patient sign-up and web-based appointment scheduling, medical web forms, synchronization with mobile devices and not only.

The automated medical receptionist is capable of placing calls, sending SMS messages and e-mails to patients to remind them of their scheduled appointments. This aspect of the system is very vital in view of the fact that most patients forget about their appointments.

The automatic front desk receptionist was designed especially to act as an able helper of medical practitioners and receptionists. Just think how hard it must be for an administrative secretary to contend with dozens of walk-in patients with different demands and likewise answer phone inquiries or appointment requests from other patients. On top of that, the a medical secretary has to maintain medical records and other paperwork.

Quite a few doctors have to hire additional medical assistants just to cover the demands of patients. As the practice grows, however, so does the patient count, and two or five medical assistants might not be enough.

The virtual front desk secretary was practically created for the purpose of providing help. When a patient creates an appointment, the system routinely enters the appointment info into its database and conveys reminders whichever way the patient chooses – by phone, SMS or e-mail.

On the whole, patients will be reminded of their upcoming appointments and the front desk secretary will focus on more useful tasks.

AssistMedic is a provider of automated medical secretary services to medical businesses worldwide for several years. See their virtual office receptionist that can remind patients of appointments.