Ben Brewer: “No-show rates seem to be related to my capacity to give appointments. Even a short wait for a visit increases the odds that a patient won’t come in. To overcome that problem, we try to schedule appointments on the same day whenever possible. It helps attendance if patients don’t have time to reconsider.”
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We did a study of this at our office to determine time savings for patients by having same day surgery (specifically tooth extractions in an Oral Surgery office). The assumption is that it will decrease you’re no follow through rate (eg. if you’re doing the procedure same day as consult more people will have the procedure done assuming that some don’t follow through due to disorganization or whatever). We discovered that about 5.5% of people don’t follow through regardless. I have no idea why the numbers came out the way they did but the datamine involved thousands of patients. I posted it at my blog under Same Day Surgery
Dang right. Get ‘em in before they get better on their own.
badda bing
Being able to get them in quickly also cuts way back on your late-night calls. My patients don’t call at 3-AM because they know they can get in that morning. So they tough it out a couple hours. When I’m on call for other FP’s in my area, some of which are community outreach clinics, they have the 2-week wait for the acute visit. Sure enough, I get the 3-AM calls from their patients.
So it’s win-win for patients, for me, and for that matter, for the insurance company that doesn’t have to pay for the ER visit.
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