There are three types of patient calls that all sounds somewhat similar. They are recalls, reminder calls and reactivation calls. Today I'd like to talk about the most valuable one, the reminder call. Every therapist should be calling every patient the day before their appointment to remind them of that appointment. It's just a real quick call that says, "This is Jennifer at Dr. Mary's office. I was just calling you to remind you of your appointment tomorrow at 3:30." Not making reminder calls can literally cost you thousands of dollars a year. If you collect $100 per session and you fail to call and remind your patients of their appointment the following day, and one out of six Miss their appointment, you've just lost $25,000 this year. You see there are approximately 250 working days any year and if you lose $100 each day you've lost $25,000 in the year. Now even if my statistics are a bit exaggerated and you would only miss one out of 12 visits, you would still lose well over $12,000 in the year. That $12,000 comes off your salary because your overhead stays exactly the same whether the patient shows up or not.
Most therapists do a good job of making reminder calls, but if you're going to fall down in any areas I would suggest it use these two areas. First, you just get tired (or should I say lazy) and blow off calling tomorrow's patients. It happens to the best of us. You must be vigilant and call before every single workday. The second thing we do that makes our reminder calls less effective is call more than one day before the appointment. Pretty much by definition the reminder call is a call is made "the day before" the patient's appointment to remind them of the appointment.
Now here's the definition of quote the day before." The... Day... Before. It can't be two or three or even four days before. Let me give you an example, if the Fourth of July falls on Monday, it does very little good to remind patients on Friday, July 1, of their appointment next Tuesday. A vast majority of patients will forget you ever called when four days, including a holiday have lapsed. In that case, in our office, we would literally call the evening of July 4 to remind them of their appointment on Tuesday, July 5. That also means that we call our patients with Monday appointments on Sunday evening.
Every therapist has to decide how to handle their recall system. Even if calling the day before only makes me an extra $5000 a year, it's worth it. It's the little extras like proper reminder calls that make the difference between a mediocre practice and a great practice.
David Kats is the owner of Therapist Consultants, a business consulting firm which helps psychotherapists build their practices. He can be reached a davidjkats@gmail.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_J_Kats
Posted in: 
.jpg)
0 comments:
Post a Comment