15.3 Discussion on Reminders for Support

As a member of the Henry Schein One team we all have a huge part to play in helping practices understand that certain actions and activities have a huge impact on their business outcomes.
Outside of the Business Services team we should understand why a practice should follow our best practice recommendations.
Reminders are sent to patients who already have an appointment booked to remind them to attend their appointment, a task that should not be confused with recalls, which are sent to patients who don't have an appointment booked to prompt them to make an appointment. Try and avoid calling them 'recall reminders' – it just created confusion!
A request to change a practices appointment reminders for our help desk is a common one, adjusting the time durations and what they send happen frequently. The first thing to understand is why they want to change their appointment reminders

Cost, sending too many SMS
Too many / too few communications to patients
Lots of failed to attends (FTA)
Lots of short notice cancellations (SNC)

Whilst it is really easy for us to follow their change request it would resonate with our goal as working as a consultancy style business to dig a bit deeper.
Only 37% of practice reported to us that they have a failure to attend rate lower than 2% of their patients. Over 15% said it was over 6% failure to attend rate!
Cost
I usually find this objection is quite easy to help the practice understand. A practice owner may see their SMS bill come in at the end of the month and see their biggest outgoing to us is their SMS costs. This may lead the practice to want to reduce their out goings – understandably.
We see so many practices only have a reminder that is being sent to the patient 2 days before their appointment with nothing else. This is too late for those patients you are booking 6 months in advance, people's diaries change. We need to give patients the maximum opportunity to rebook their appointment if they can no longer make it.
If we can help the practice reduce their failed to attend rate by just 1 patient a month that will cover the cost for their SMS bill for the entire month. For the cost of 2 SMS per patient, it is always worth sending out their reminders a head of time and multiple of them.
Typically a dentist will operate at $400-600 per hour – those two SMS and one email we send can save the practice on average of $500 per hour we reduce. Practices employing this strategy have reduced FTAs from the average of 4.3% to 2.5% and if this is combined with an automated text reply system, which mentally commits the patient to the appointment, results improve even further, taking FTAs to 1.3%. FTAs suck the lifeblood out of practices and leave no time for remedial action.
Too Many Communications
The practice may have had comments from their patients that they are getting too many communications. This is most likely a vocal minority and warps their view on their patient base. We would normally suggest approaching this with a little patient education to let them know about their appointment reminder system when they book their appointment. Advising the patient they will need to reply with a key word and what will happen usually helps with this comment. It is also important to ensure the 'appointment catchup' setting is turned off in the exact reminder settings.
Lots of Failed to Attends
If a practice is having a challenge with people not arriving for their appointments and are trying to reduce the number of people not arriving they may contact us to change their current configuration. In these scenarios we were be trying to educate them into the research we have done, what are best practice recommendation is how much it could help. They be interested in having a health check with one of the business services team members.