Patient Self-Scheduling, Online Medical Intake Forms, and Automated Appointment Reminders

What Healthcare is Learning from Uber and Netflix

Need a dinner reservation for Saturday night? Simply go to OpenTable and a few clicks later you’ve got a table—and the restaurant knows that it’s a special occasion and that you prefer to sit by the window.

Need a ride to the restaurant? Simple. Open the Uber app, request a car and you will know exactly where the car is and how long it will take to get there.

Want to watch a movie or binge watch your favorite show? Just stream it on Netflix.

Hungry after the movie and want a pizza? Order from Dominos online. In fact, 60% of their orders now come in that way.

Such changing customer relationships and technology are now starting to impact healthcare. With the shift in cost to the patient, those patients are making provider choices with more of a consumer mindset. Therefore, health systems need to provide positive, consistent patient experiences to retain their current patients and attract new ones. 

When patients have a pleasant experience, they perceive their actual care to be better.

When patients have a pleasant experience—ease of appointment scheduling, care update notifications, short wait time—they perceive their actual care to be better. The flip side is true, too: when patients have to wait, it’s hard to get appointments, or they’re not well-informed, they may perceive their care to be poor, regardless of the skill of their providers. 

Optimize your ambulatory care setting with patient self-scheduling and patient flow software. 

The new standard of consumer experience means that an easy, friction-free visit to any place of business is an expectation. 77% of patients think that the ability to book, change, or cancel appointments online is important, and they’ll make healthcare choices based on that and similar priorities. That’s where Community Scheduling & Workflow comes into play. TeleTracking’s proven operational solutions are expanding across the care continuum with a cloud-based solution that provides patient self-scheduling & workflow tools for ambulatory settings. 

As the experts in patient flow, capacity and access management, TeleTracking is now uniquely equipped to extend that know-how to ambulatory settings, putting a consumer-focused tool in the hands of a health system to help them drive their ambulatory business. The primary care physician is the front door of the healthcare system. If you have a positive experience there, you’re going to stay at that office—and within the overall health system if you need greater levels of care, or your care needs change. 

Create engaging patient experiences by meeting consumer expectation:

• A patient researches a provider through search, Yelp, Google reviews, etc. and schedules an appointment based on their preferences via mobile devices. 
• The patient then receives automated appointment reminders and delay notifications, along with online medical intake forms, filled out in advance of the appointment, so they won’t need to fill out any additional paperwork at the office. 
• If the patient needs to change the appointment, the patient can simply make the change via their phone or computer for a more convenient time. They can also confirm they’ll be arriving for their appointment by texting..  
• We all know how annoying it is to be stuck in the waiting room. The office can send notifications that there’s a delay, along with the estimated wait time. Queue management means the staff and patient have visibility into wait times and places in line at all times. 
• For urgent care settings, patients can actually get in line remotely, like with Yelp Nowait for restaurants, and receive a message that their turn is coming up, for just-in-time arrival.  

These features are designed to create an engaging patient experience, and engaged patients are more likely to come to their appointments on time and be prepared, so there are fewer delays and fewer no-shows.  

Engaged patients are more likely to show up for their appointments on time and prepared, so there are fewer delays and fewer no-shows.

That saves providers money and improves the experience for everyone. In addition, a reputation for a positive patient experience helps providers and health systems retain existing patients and attract new ones.

Real-time data shows how you can improve patient satisfaction across your health system

What does all of this mean for healthcare executives? As the healthcare model evolves and systems deliver increasingly complex care in the ambulatory setting, we’ll continue seeing new issues with silos, fragmentation, timely access, inefficiency, and visibility. Community Scheduling & Workflow addresses these issues with scheduling and workflow tools that improve patient engagement and maximize office efficiency. Reputation also matters, and that’s where the analytic capabilities and the transparency provided through things like post-appointment surveys can facilitate quick identification of issues that need to be addressed. The intuitive, user-friendly analytics and dashboards can also be used to drive strategic business decisions. 

In this ever-changing market, it’s more important than ever to have the right tools and the right approach, to be responsive to the needs of patients, and to provide them with a positive experience. By being forward-thinking and staying ahead of the curve, providers and health systems can utilize Community Scheduling & Workflow to meet their patient’s expectations for mobile convenience―the ability to communicate in the way they want, have control over the process, and receive real-time updates so they know exactly what’s going on when there’s a delay. 

Want to learn more? Click here to listen to our podcast, ‘Patient Experience Strategies Lead to Convenient Patient Care in an On-Demand World.’