In recent weeks, Vital Interaction has released the first of several new tools to help your medical practice increase practice efficiency, reduce no-shows , boost patient engagement, and improve both the patient experience and patient satisfaction. It’s our mission to make your jobs easier and your practices run smoother.
To that end, we have a few more newly developed features to show you, including:
Two-step Automatic Cancellation for voice calls
Patient Chat via SMS
And substantial improvements to your Vital Interaction worklists
Tools Designed with Medical Practices Like Yours in Mind
We have made the development of these new tools, in particular, our chief focus because we know that canceling and rescheduling patients usually requires far more steps for your staff than you would like.
For example, in many cases, front office and/or scheduling staff might have to complete the following steps to successfully cancel or reschedule patients:
Identify patients needing to cancel, and call all of them one by one.
Verify with each patient that he or she meant to cancel in the first place.
Try to reschedule them while they’re currently on the phone.
If finding a good time to reschedule right then isn’t possible, possibly add them to a list to be rescheduled later.
And the truth is most medical practice staff don’t have the time to do all of these steps consistently. And yet, if your office isn’t, it’s inevitable that some patients are falling through the cracks. Because of this, medical practices are having to choose between missing a few patients and spending hours of valuable staff time.
It’s our goal to shrink those long hours down to just a few simple clicks. That’s why we continually add more automated features to the Vital Interaction system that give you the power to do more in less time.
Features Designed to Simply Medical Practice Workflows
Let’s take a look at a more detailed breakdown of our two newest tools and some important Vital Interaction system updates. Vital Interaction users can now message a patient directly from the Appointment Worklist—this is by far our biggest and most exciting announcement.
You can now select a patient from any list—the appointments list, your patient waitlist, and even the referrals list—and send him or her a text message directly from the list. System users now also have the option to send patients consent forms (if you need to exchange any PHI). Rescheduling is easier and faster than ever!
We have created Two-step Automatic Cancellations for voice calls—if you aren’t familiar with the other Two-Step Cancellation tools we have to offer, this feature offers a way to automatically verify the validity of a cancellation request without having to make hundreds of manual calls—and without receiving false positives .
While developing this feature for text and email was pretty straightforward, it was a challenge to create an easy-to-use verification method for the telephone—but one well worth taking on. A number of Vital Interaction customers wanted to see this feature made a reality—and so we set out to do just that.
Now, when patients receive a reminder call, they have the option to cancel their appointments automatically by simply dialing in their date of birth.
You can now sort reports by the appointment date as well as the date the request was received—much like with two-step cancellation via phone, refining our reports to easily sort content/fields was a common request as well.
Vital Interaction users can now distinguish between the date a patient requested a cancellation and their original appointment date. This update allows you to filter out long-term cancellations—like those made six months in advance—so you can focus on them when the date gets closer.
The worklist now remembers your filter preferences—when you log on, do you like to only see the folks you haven't worked on yet, only for the current week, and nothing else?
Good news: It will still look like that the next time you log in, too!
We’ve added better organizational tools based on actual customer feedback—we now have two markers for you: One to display the status of an appointment (i.e., pending or complete) and another to show the outcome of your efforts (i.e., rescheduled or canceled). Some of these markers change automatically, depending on the level of your integration.
Click here to schedule a demo, and we will be happy to show these tools to anyone in your office!