⋅ Blog ⋅

Solving the Healthcare Nightmare of No-Shows

According to recent surveys from The Annals of Family Medicine almost 1 out of every 2 patients skip their appointments.

According to the facts in USA, here are some of the reasons why:

In fact, almost 1 out of 4 patients don’t show up unless they are effectively reminded about the appointment.
Long hospital wait times: According to the Washington Post, In cities, the average doctor wait-time is 18.5 days.
Poor medical literacy — meaning that patients have limited understanding of what’s important for their health — as well as language barriers, anxiety, and logistical problems.
49 million adult patients skipped recommended care because of its high costs. Costing healthcare industry around $10B per year. *
In the US alone, 3.6 million people miss or delay appointments due to transportation issues. Be it a broken-down car or faulty public transportation, people may miss appointments despite their best intentions. Costing the healthcare industry $750M per year. (or $125K per hospital cost?)

How are these realities harming the Healthcare industry?

Quite often, hospitals do not know exactly what their no-show rate is. Thus, they have a hard time calculating their financial losses accurately. However,

No-shows Cost the healthcare industry $150 Billion according to Forbes.
David Kaplan, vice chairman of administration at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, calculates that surgeons lose up to 500 dollars per missed visit.
A new study by athenahealth looked at more than a million patients over a two-and-a-half year period and found that those who failed to keep just one appointment with their primary care doctor were 70% more likely not to return within 18 months.

In the end, the biggest victim of a missed appointment is the hospital.

The MEDRICS platform resolves these issues through:

You will be able to interact / connect with the patient via their smartphone to accomplish the following benefits:

Easy appointment booking and rescheduling features help hospitals manage appointment slots more efficiently avoiding costly no shows as well as lowering outpatient waiting times.
The smart waiting list features offers your patients earlier available slots allowing them to get their care sooner. Resulting in lower wait times and a better patient experience.
Automated smart appointment reminders eliminate the challenge of reminding patients about the importance of their attending their scheduled appointment.
Warning patients about the current traffic and weather conditions that effect their arrival time, eliminates no-shows due to transportation problems.
Confirming insurance coverage upfront for the patients will avoid no-shows due to high cost concerns of patients.

Learn more about our Medrics solution.

While this platform is immediately available to you, here are 3 primary things you can implement immediately in the interim before your scheduled appointment to speak with us:

One way of making people remember about their appointments is by setting up reminder calls. An SMS notification can go a long way and is not hard to set up, but there are more effective alternatives.
Studies show that live calls are more efficient than recorded messages in helping patients remember to follow up on their appointments. The percentage of patients who are likely to forget about their appointments is 17.3% for recorded messages and 13.6% for live calls.
Give the patient a personal call the day before.