01
Reminders are done by phone
Someone at reception spends the last hour calling the next day's appointments. It is cheap to automate and you notice it in the first week. But there is a catch, and it is below: most people set it up wrong.
Home / Clinics and healthcare groups
Private clinics and healthcare groups · Canary IslandsThe last hour of the day goes on calling tomorrow's appointments.
And the ones who don't pick up are exactly the ones who don't show the next day. Every empty slot costs what that consultation costs, and on top of that it costs the reception hour spent dialling.
1 ha day at reception, just phoning
250 ha year, counting working days
5 minper patient to print, sign, scan and upload
2 to 4weeks of work for the first part
What I come across
Groups that have grown faster than they have got organised.
Two, four or ten centres with the same old software and procedures set up when there was only one.
02
Consent is signed on paper
It gets printed, signed, scanned, uploaded to the patient record, and the paper is kept in a filing cabinet just in case. Three steps and a cupboard. What pays off here isn't the five minutes: it is no longer having a cupboard full of health data.
03
The same five questions, fifty times a day
Opening hours, the price of the first consultation, whether a certain insurer is accepted, how to get there. An assistant with the clinic's information can answer that, and anything that needs clinical judgement still goes through a person. Always.
250 ha year of the person who should be looking after whoever walks through the door. An hour a day, every day.
The reminder trap.
Almost everyone automates them and forgets about the reply. If the patient answers «I can't make it», someone has to read it and move the appointment. A reminder that doesn't listen to the reply doesn't reduce no-shows: it just spreads them around differently, and it annoys people on top.
I say this before selling anything because it is the difference between this working and you switching it off in three months.
Before and after
This is how it ends up, at a glance.
Today
1 h a day phoning
After
Reading the replies
What's left isn't phoning: it is dealing with the ones who say they can't come, who are the ones who really were going to leave the slot empty.
Health data: done properly or not at all.
Health is a special category under the GDPR, and that makes any project longer. I don't present it as a problem: it is what rules out the cheap supplier who would upload the medical records to wherever.
Before we start we define what data leaves the clinic, what never leaves and which providers are used. When needed, models hosted on your own infrastructure or on European servers are used, and it is all written down.
Under the hood, this is process automation for the reminders and applied artificial intelligence for the usual questions.
When I'll tell you no.
- If you are a one-person practice with a relaxed diary. There the hour on the phone doesn't exist and there is nothing to win back.
- If nobody is going to read the patients' replies. I would rather not set it up than set it up for you to switch off.
- If the practice management software won't let anything in or out. It can be done, but it gets much more expensive and that needs saying up front.
Fifteen minutes
I'll tell you whether it can be fixed and what it would cost.
Video or phone call, free and with no obligation. I reply myself, within 24 hours. If I see it isn't worth it, I tell you just the same.
Or put it in writing with the 10-minute X-ray and I reply within 48 hours.