How to Address the Rising Patient Employment Cancellation Problem

Appointment cancellations have been on the rise as patients continue to worry about being infected. Pick up a few of the most popular strategies for lessening these cancellations and meeting the needs of your patients.

Patients have been cancelling appointments since well before the outbreak of COVID-19 for a number of reasons. From financial issues and nerves to convenience and availability issues, there’s no shortage of reasons for last minute patient cancellations and delays. Now, however, there’s even more reason as fear of infection is a very real, very justifiable cause for concern and avoidance of a doctor’s appointment.

Many patients, despite being told facilities are now safe enough to warrant coming in for non-essential procedures, are still worried they might be at risk of infection, especially if the facility in question has been known to treat COVID cases.

How to Keep Patients From Cancelling Appointments

1.) Prepare Operations for the New Normal

It goes without saying that the healthcare space has changed forever. Preparing for the new status-quo will be essential in the coming years as hospitals fight to assure their patients they can be safely cared for in their facilities.

Many have begun implementing staggered appointment setting in which appointments need to be set further apart from one another so as to limit crowds and transmission opportunities. Additionally, staff will need to enhance infection control protocols with hardware such as medical tablets that are IP65 certified and optimized to stand up to multiple disinfections.

2.) Communicate What’s Being Done to Keep Patients Safe

Medical hardware use cases during a pandemic are proven and may assuage the fears of your staff, but it’s important to also inform your patient-base about these solutions that are being implemented. Infection anxiety is in the forefront of most, if not all, patients’ minds. Facilities need to address these pain points by educating them on all policies that have been enacted to limit patient and staff exposure. This can be done in a number of ways.

Patient-facing staff that deal with setting appointments, for example, can go through these procedures with patients over the phone as they set or even confirm their appointments.

If you want to make these procedures known even before the appointment setting process, you can also share them digitally through HIPAA compliant messaging with your patients or even through automated text messages.

Finally, you can also share your ongoing efforts to protect patients online by making a post on your facility’s site.

3.) Have a Clear Appointment Cancellation Policy

Patients need to understand that your staff’s time is valuable and that time they’ve set aside for an appointment is time that could have gone to a patient in greater need. Therefore, it’s recommended facilities create a widely-spread, easily understood appointment cancellation policy, one that emphasizes:

- A time-frame in which patients can cancel without penalization

- Penalties for a sudden appointment cancellation or no-show

- The process for rescheduling an appointment

Many facilities have also found it effective to appeal to their patients’ more empathetic sides in order to get across how important it is for them to cancel early.

Following this policy template, a simple disclaimer you can place in an email or text to a patient with an upcoming appointment could be:

“Please Note: We request at least a 24 hour notice to cancel appointments in order to avoid a $25 cancellation fee. We ask for this notice so we may have enough time to give your appointment slot to other patients who may need it should you not be able to make it. We appreciate your understanding.”

4.) Start Confirming Appointments

Confirming appointments will by no means completely eliminate patient cancellations or delays, but doing so can give patients one more chance to cancel early, allowing you to schedule a different patient.

Thankfully, the confirmation process can be entirely automated with messaging software such as Weave. With processes like these, all patients have to do is respond with a yes or no as to whether or not they can make it.

5.) Make Scheduling and Keeping Appointments Easier

More often than not, patients are cancelling appointments due to issues of convenience.

As a facility looking to address these concerns, investing in programs, such as telehealth, that make appointments easier to plan, schedule, and engage in can help raise appointment adherence numbers.

For those interested in investing in telehealth solutions, hardware such as medical tablets or battery powered medical monitors can provide staff with lightweight workstations that can be easily wheeled into secluded rooms where they can have remote appointments with their patients. Using these solutions for quick check ins, appointments, and especially triaging for symptoms can help make visits go by much quicker, making patients more likely to keep their appointments.

Addressing an Appointment Cancellation is About Cushioning the Blow

By taking the time to learn why patients cancel appointments and using those insights in your strategies to limit cancellations, your team can begin to see promising results even during these exceedingly trying times. For more information on how your team can get started in diminishing patient cancellations and delays, speak to an expert from Cybernet today.