By NCMIC
No-shows and cancellations are no doubt a pet peeve at your practice. They wreak havoc on schedules, negatively impact productivity and can cost you money.
Most no-shows and cancellations are the result of one of the following:
- Busy lives. Packed work, social and extracurricular schedules can make it easy to space off an appointment.
- Financial concerns. Money may be tight, causing patients to worry about the affordability of the appointment.
- Dissatisfaction. Perhaps the patient wasn’t happy with their last appointment.
Whatever reason, it’s better to tackle the problem than ignore it since missed appointments affect not only that patient, but also office staff and other patients.
Helpful Strategies
Eliminating no-shows and cancellations entirely isn’t practical, but you can minimize them.
- Encourage patients to choose their appointments on days and times that work best for them.
- Send reminders using whichever method is most convenient for them. Options include texts, automated voice messages, personal calls from staff, and emails. Don’t hesitate to offer more than one method.
- Consider the timing of your reminders. If you only send one reminder and it goes out too far in advance, you’re ripe for a no-show. If you send a reminder well in advance, send another one closer to the actual day.
- Patients may be more likely to miss their appointment if they had to wait too long in the past. When your practice is running behind schedule, inform the patient as soon as possible. Depending on the situation, you may choose to offer the opportunity to reschedule. They may choose not to, especially if they took time off work for the visit, but they will appreciate you giving them the option.
- If you know or suspect that a cancellation or no-show is financially driven, discuss payment options. The patient may be relieved to hear that you are willing to work with them.
When It Happens
Despite your best efforts, you’ll always have patients who continue to cancel or no-show. For these patients, you can try a special set of strategies.
- First of all, make sure the patient understands that first and foremost, you are concerned about their overall health. Express your concern and the importance of follow-up, especially if the visit is part of an ongoing monitoring or urgent situation.
- Each time an appointment is missed or canceled without explanation, reach out to determine the reason and offer to reschedule the visit.
- Explain the importance of calling if they are running late or need to reschedule or cancel the next appointment. They may not realize how their unexplained absence affects other patients who need your attention.
- Make sure they have your phone number readily available and properly labeled in their phone.
- Ask if there is something you can do to help them remember the appointment. Do they need you to change the method or frequency of contact?
- Document all your efforts to reschedule.
- Periodically audit your no-shows and cancellations to see if there is a pattern. Are there more on a certain day of the week or time of day? If several occur the day following a holiday, consider reminding patients right before and after the holiday so it’s fresh in their mind.
- If there is a common reason for missed appointments, be ready to research. For example, if many patients cite dissatisfaction, you’ll need to get to the root of the problem. More reminders won’t help.
Office Protocol
Don’t wait until a no-show or cancellation situation gets out of hand to decide what steps to take. Have a plan ready for instances like the following:
- If you have a particular patient (or a few) who habitually cancel at the last minute, you may want to consider double-booking that appointment time.
- Determine the number of no-shows and cancellations a patient can have before you have a conversation with the patient to address the issue.
- Have a clear policy about if and when you bill for missed appointments.
- Discuss when you’d consider dismissing a patient for noncompliance, as a last resort. (Hopefully it will never come to that.)
Unfortunately, no-shows and cancellations are part of running a practice. But the more you can do to avoid them, the better for everyone.