We’ve discussed the importance of shortening the time from patient call to appointment in order to improve the rate at which patients show up for appointments. Without requiring you to read the whole article, let me give you a quick summary. The prime opportunity to get to show up for a new patient appointment comes within the first 7 days after the call. After the first 7 days, the chances for a patient to show up fall off and after 14 days, the show up percentage drops precipitously.
As some evidence of this, I’d like to present the case of an office in a city that shall remain nameless, but is within spitting distance of the happiest place on earth. In 2013, the office had patients showing up at a nice rate: 72%. In other words, of every 10 patients that made a new patient appointment, more than 7 of them actually showed up for that appointment. On average, patients waited 10 days from the time of call to their appointment. Not a bad rate at all.
In February of this year, things changed. The show up rate fell from 72% to 50%. The average wait time from call to appointment ballooned to 25 days. Of the 148 consultations appointed, 98 of those patients had to wait at least 3 weeks for an appointment. In this “now” society, 3 weeks leaves plenty of time for a patient to find another option or to fill up their schedule so that a new patient consultation gets pushed back. Clearly, a result of the drop in show up rate, new patient closings fell off as well. What happened?
First and foremost, the office got busier. New patient contracts were pretty strong and the total active patient base almost doubled within the year. Second, shortening the time period between call and consultation became less of a priority than it had been in the past. This is a relatively new issue for us so we are investigating exactly why this is not a priority, but my guess is that the office feels a responsibility to the existing patients to get them properly scheduled (the known, paying patients) and the new patients (the unknown and not yet paying), get shuffled to the back of the line. And that’s not a bad or wrong sentiment, but it does prevent growth.
So what does an office do? You don’t want to inconvenience or compromise the care of your existing patients. You can’t just cram patients into a busy existing day. No one gets treated properly in those cases. And you can’t simply tack on a few hours at the end of the day that day. Families need to be cared for and plans have been made.
Here’s where you and your team have to be flexible. Try this. Designate a day or two each week in which you might potentially have excess consultation appointments. Certain staff should make themselves available on those days. Since the day is known, you’ll know a couple of days in advance whether or not you are going to have extra consult appointments on those days. You’ll still get patients in the door within that week, staff can be available on those days and you won’t have to risk extra overtime with people sitting around with nothing to do. This extra time could be scheduled at the end of each day so as not to disrupt the normal schedule of patients. Or, it could be interspersed with
Now, what happens if you block out that time for potential consults and just 1 patient is available to fill that space? Here’s where you need to be smart and review your schedule on a regular basis. Maybe you can move that appointment into an open spot within the normal day or piggyback it on to the last regular appointment of the day. But this is why you should regularly review the schedule for holes and idle time.
What about overtime pay? If I have a staff that is already running full time, opening up this extra time will result in a bigger increase in cost. Let’s do the math on this. Let’s say that you open up for 1 extra hour of consult time with 4 staff (probably on the high side) with an average hourly rate of $20 per hour (again, probably on the high side). At the standard overtime rate of 1.5 times the standard hourly rate (i.e. $30 per hour), you have additional cost of $120 ($30 per hour times 1 hour times 4 people). If you sign one contract in that time for $4,000, the potential 50% profit on that contract will more than make up for the overtime.
Now, there’s a bit of a risk-reward here. The risk is that no patients show up and you are out the $120 of pay per consult hour that you would not have spent otherwise. OR, that patient would have shown up anyway at a normal hour at normal rates and you unnecessarily spent money for an extra contract. On the other hand, the reward is that the patient would not have come in without that opportunity to come in early and you signed a contract that you would not have signed otherwise. And given the much higher probability that a patient will show up if he or she can be see within a week of the call, you are not taking a wild gamble, but a calculated risk to grow your business where others would have feared to go.
Who can help you to track that interval, let you know when it is becoming problematic and how to solve the problem for your particular practice? My Practice Engine, that’s who. E-mail us for more information.
No comments:
Post a Comment