Pick up your pen and paper. Crunch the numbers. How many patients have you lost this year? Keep in mind that your numbers will vary based on some variables like specialty, rate of deaths in your department or profession.

Would an appointment confirmation service be a way of attracting new patients? Or possibly revamping the reception area. Instead of focusing on new patients, first, come up with novel ways to maintain the current patients. By managing and controlling the resources you have, you can make your current patients feel happy and appreciated.

Share the love

We live in a technologically charged world. Use the positive reviews, thank you notes, and other positive remarks on your website.  Show the world how someone in a nearby state or country is appreciating your world-class health care service. This will relatively kill two birds with one stone. Not only will you be able to maintain your current patients but also lure your prospective patients.

Listen keenly to patient needs and wants

Talk less and listen more. This has always been the key to effective communication but few put it into action. Using simple gestures like making eye contact and facing your patient, make go a long way to making your patient feel appreciated.

Mastering these basics will make your patient feel more important and heard. There can side benefits like knowing your patient’s concerns and unsaid problems. You can develop an action plan to your organization in areas you should improve and ignore feedback you can’t control.

Thinking probabilistically

We all know that no matter how we dread the future is upon us. If you are asking yourself,” Where do I envision my organization in five years?” and don’t have action steps to get there, those five years will for sure come to be. It is best to have an action plan and constant review of what worked and did not work over a chosen period. Design the practice you want rather than being reactive to environmental stimuli.

Now that you know your path, take your clients/patients with you. As you develop new material or procedures, partner with your patients to make feel part of the journey.

Automation and Delegation

You can automate the process of remembering appointments. Our conscious mind is limited to 40 bits of information per second. It is important to know that our short-term memory is unreliable. It can be unforgivably painful to forget to remind a patient about an appointment. It is necessary to take advantage of this weakness and employ the use of apps and appointment reminder services.  

Automation is much faster, cheaper, and convenient than making phone calls. Phone calls take a long time because of the long negotiation period and poor network connection in remote areas. Using any appointment confirmation service will gratify your existing customers because of your reliable and on-time reminders.

Flexibility

If you want to thrive and survive in the health care industry, you should be able to cater for people’s crazy lives and schedules. Today, it is common for a patient to have more than a job. Believe that there is always room to change his or her appointment for a later time. It is important to treasure your customer and communicate the necessary tweaks made to his or her appointments. This is heavily tied to the use of an appointment service.