Imagine this scenario: You send a patient a reminder message to confirm his appointment, and he opts to ‘cancel appointment.’ Your staff is then left with the task of cancelling the appointment in your practice management system.
Many readers don’t have to work very hard to imagine this. It’s a redundant step that many practices’ staffs must take every day when patients cancel their appointments.
But what if there were a way to automate this process and relieve your staff of this redundant step?
Recently, our team zeroed in on streamlining the appointment cancellation process via Greenway® PrimeSuite®, a practice management system used by many Vital Interaction™ customers.
Let’s take a look at the solution we’ve come up with—and how to get started with this feature today.
Automating Appointment Cancellations in Greenway® PrimeSuite®
Vital Interaction™’s new Automatic Cancellation feature enables patients to automatically cancel their appointments in Greenway® PrimeSuite®, with little to no action required of your practice.
This new feature will save your practice time—and money—in the long run by increasing efficiency and further automating the appointment confirmation process.
Even better: As with many of our features, the new Automatic Cancellation feature can be easily customized to perfectly meet both parties’ needs.
Read on for a look at how to configure the Automatic Cancellation feature in your integrated Vital Interaction™ and Greenway® PrimeSuite® systems.
How to Automate Appointment Cancellations in Greenway® PrimeSuite®
With our customers’ unique needs in mind, we created two distinct ways to utilize this new feature, depending on your practice’s preference:
Option 1: Have the patient cancel the appointment, and then have one of your schedulers log into Vital Interaction™. Once logged in, have the scheduler click on the Request Management tool, and confirm the cancellation. The appointment is now cancelled in Greenway® PrimeSuite®.
Option 2: Have the patient cancel the appointment, and Vital Interaction™ will cancel the appointment directly in Greenway®. This is the most automated option, relieving schedulers of any tasks associated with cancelling the appointment.
These options allow your practice to decide what makes the most sense for your workflow.
Reducing Erroneous Appointment Cancellation Requests in Greenway® PrimeSuite®
Some practices may be concerned about patients accidentally making false-positive ‘cancel appointment’ requests.
If this sounds like you, worry not—we’ve got a solution in place for this as well!
Rather than having patients respond ‘Y’ to confirm their appointment or ‘N’ to decline, we have included a link in reminder messages that requires patients to enter the simple details of their first name, last name, and date of birth to confirm their cancellation.
This confirmation process enables patients to also include the reason they cancelled if they wish. This gives schedulers more information on why appointments weren’t kept.
While this process takes slightly longer on the patient’s end, it will eliminate virtually all false-positive cancellation requests, further saving your practice time and money.
At Vital Interaction™, we know optimal patient communications coupled with streamlined processes are crucial for a practice to be successful. With this in mind, we continue to develop innovative features to help practices like yours increase patient satisfaction while improving the bottom line.
If you’re interested in the new automatic appointment cancellation feature for your practice but aren’t using Greenway PrimeSuite, contact us today to see what we can do to streamline your appointment cancellation process.
To learn more about configuring automatic appointment cancellations via your integrated Vital Interaction™ and Greenway® PrimeSuite® systems, call our support line or email Drew Butler, Vital Interaction™ Sales Development Manager.
At Vital Interaction™, we’re dedicated to helping you achieve the highest quality of patient communication while helping you reduce costs. Learn how we can partner with your practice by calling (512) 487-7625.