We talk to lots of practices who realize once they start digging that they have quite a few patients slipping through the cracks, yet most have never tracked it or even done the analysis to see. For some patients, these missing appointments could have real impacts on their health and recovery. But as a healthcare provider, your team already spends too much time on essential paperwork and billing processes. It’s a balancing act, understanding how much time to spend on patient communications and scheduling — a time intensive process that can deliver more patient visits and increasing revenues — but also takes staff away from spending one-on-one time with patients that are actually in your office today.
The leading national provider of minimally invasive procedures for the relief of chronic and acute pain, the National Spine & Pain Center (NSPC), serves more than a million patient visits each year with 120 locations and more than 750 medical professionals. The healthcare provider has been building a strong brand for more than 30 years and a network of caring, compassionate and hard working health professionals.
Last year, NSPC asked Vital Interaction for help reducing administrative costs and improving results in patient rescheduling. NSPC understood that patients who visit a provider once or twice but don’t reschedule important follow-up visits are missing out on vital care and the provider is missing out on vital revenue opportunities. Vital Interaction and NSPC worked together to deliver more than $1M in lost revenue through the simple and cost-effective automation of patient communications and rescheduling processes. Together, we helped reduce the staff time needed to follow-up with these important patients, giving them more time to spend on pressing in-person patient needs.
To find out what type of messages delivered the best patient engagement, we designed and implemented three test cases for NSPC:
- Round 1 – 25,000 patients who had visited NSPC in the past received a voice message detailing the services provided by NSPC. In response, 1,040 patients scheduled a future appointment, generating $104,000 in return-on-investment (ROI).
- Round 2 – 23,000 patients received voice messages that sought to improve engagement with personalized pre-recorded content from their provider, combined with targeted list curation from our team and a second, follow-up sent as an automated text message that included a link to rescheduling appointment information. As a result, 3,100 patients scheduled appointments, generating $310,000 in ROI.
- Round 3 – 75,000 patients received a personalized voicemail message, as well as follow-up email and text messages. 10,700 patients scheduled appointments, generating a ROI of more than $1M.
Working with NSPC, we learned that reaching out to patients who don’t schedule or reschedule appointments is an important revenue generator. Using a combination of personalized, automated communications to patients via email, text messaging and voice messaging providers like NSPC can help capture more than 40% of patients with minimal staff time needed. For NSPC, we helped generate more than $1M in ROI with personalized provider messages and automated patient follow-ups. With a mix of voice, text and email contact we generated successful follow-ups with some patients who hadn’t visited the practice in three years or more — showing that it’s never too late to re-engage with patients.