If you are consistently encountering inefficiency problems in your medical practice, which may include the many occurrences of your staff double-booking appointments, patients complaining that it’s very difficult to call your office to make appointments, or patients not showing up for their appointments; here’s a question that you should be asking yourself: why aren’t you using an online doctor appointment scheduler yet? When you are using one, you can be sure that all of the above problems will be a thing of the past. However, you need to make sure that the online doctor appointment scheduling system that you choose have the following features.

Self-service booking for patients

When you have an online doctor appointment scheduler in place, you are giving your patients the freedom to make appointments at the time most convenient to them. The system runs 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, it means your patients can make the booking at anytime. They are not bound by regular business hours. Booking for an appointment is as easy as a click a mouse button. Given that most people are very busy during the day with their office work, allowing them to make a booking all through the night and day will certainly be something they appreciate. You also don’t have to worry about patients being booked on the same time slot, because the system will make sure that each slot can only be booked by one patient.

Google calendar synchronization

You can easily synchronize the appointment schedule with your Google calendar. This means you can have the schedule with you everywhere you are, as long as you have your smartphone with you, such as the iPhone, Android or BlackBerry. If your patients make some sudden changes to their appointments, you will know it in no time at all.

HIPAA compliant

A good online appointment scheduling system should be HIPAA compliant. It’s the security standard for doctors in the US and Canada. A system that is HIPAA compliant will ensure that all information exchanged between patients and the doctors are secure and kept confidential. When you have a secure system, patients will be more inclined to trust your medical service.

Patient reminder

One of the features of an online doctor appointment scheduler is the patient reminder feature. Basically, it’s a system that can remind patients about their appointments prior to their visit. The system can either call patients on their landline number or cell phone, or send text and e-mail messages. This is a more reliable solution rather than having your staff doing it manually one by one. The number one reason of patients missing their appointments is because they simply forgot about them in the first place. So when you have an automated patient reminder, you can be sure that it will cut down the number of patient no-shows in your medical practice.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, having an online doctor appointment scheduling system in place can mean the difference between a successful medical practice and a less than successful one. There’s really no doubt of how an appointment scheduler can improve the performance of your medical practice.

Author Bio: AngelSpeech Inc. has been providing reliable and dependable modern medical answering services, like an online doctor appointment scheduler and an online patient reminder, for doctors in the US and Canada since 2006. Visit the website for more information.

Category: Medical Business
Keywords: doctor appointment scheduler,online appointment scheduler,online doctor appointment scheduling