In any office, medical appointment reminders are a quick, simple and effective practice to reduce the percentage of missed appointments. To send them, just a message with a simple content with the essentials is enough: day, time and address. In addition, a contact method to cancel or modify the appointment must be included. Believe it or not, it is a courtesy detail that will make the patient feel cared for. Next we are going to talk to you in more detail about this strategy that you should take into account for your office.
Functionality of medical appointment reminders
One of the main objectives of medical appointment reminders is to guarantee attendance at the consultation. In other words, they are sent in order to optimize planning and avoid the classic forgetting of the appointment by the patient and also last-minute cancellations.
Likewise, another of the functions that this type of message has is to show closeness to the patient and that is that by receiving it, the patient improves their relationship with the medical service, since they feel cared for. That is why sending an SMS to patients through software is a good solution for any medical center.
What kind of appointment reminder messages are there?
Currently, the most used are emails and SMS, although it is also true that WhatsApp reminders have been gaining ground in recent years. But how should these types of messages be? Here we list it:
- Friendly and natural: for this, use short and direct phrases with the recipient’s data, since this gives the reminders a personal character.
- Contain precise information about the place and time of the appointment, the professional who will attend you and the reason for the consultation. The more personalized the message, the more trust it will generate.
- Clearly identify the sender: this is because the reader will read the message identified by the sender and will not open an anonymous one.
- Allow a confirmation or cancellation response: This serves to comply with the basic principle of communication in which a response is expected.
- Send it one or two days in advance.
Advantages of medical appointment reminders
Finally, we want to offer you a list of the advantages of medical appointment reminders, which can be summarized as follows:
- Improve the efficiency of your office.
- Digital messages are sent in bulk and reduce the costs of calls.
- Savings of human personnel for your business.
- They improve the health of patients.
- They are useful for remembering the application of vaccinations and managing chronic diseases.
- It is a service with 24/7 availability.
- Paper saving.
- Users do not consider it an intrusive medium.
And for you, what are the uses of medical appointment reminders?