A nice little PDF from Elizabeth Woodcock here on reducing no-show appointments. It’s written for MD’s, but equally applicable to any alternative medical business. A few other resources worth checking out there, too.
Here’s the dilemma, as submitted by a CAM doc:
“I had a new patient call looking for an appointment as soon as possible. My new patient visits are an hour long, and even though I wasn’t even close to fully booked that week, I couldn’t see the patient until the following week. My book was full of 15 and 30 minute gaps in between visits.”
I call these gaps “islands” and they can bring a busy practice to its knees. The problem is widespread among CAM practices – my feeling is that it’s a bad habit that practitioners fall into when they first start out. On startup, you need a little time between patients to chart, get prepared, de-stress. And the time is generally available, because you’re not that busy yet. So you (and your staff) fall into the habit of leaving little gaps between patients.
A doctor once told me this great piece of wisdom: “Don’t set any office hours you don’t want to keep forever.”
It’s tempting when you start up to open weekends, nights, early mornings – anything that will get new patients in the door. Although offering this flexibility to your clients seems like a good idea, it presents a few challenges:
It’s hard on you
Working all those hours is a lot of…well, work. It means you’re seeing patients all the time (if your practice is booked solid), or you’re at the office all the time, but not generating revenue. If you’ve got friends or a family – hell, even if you’ve got a parakeet – it becomes draining. You have no life. And if, like most CAM practitioners, you promote life balance as a means of creating health, then you’re not practicing what you preach.
It’s very common for alternative health care practitioners to work on a “cash or check” only basis. There are several compelling reasons to consider other options.
The usual resistance to accepting Visa, Mastercard and the like is the cost. You pay a monthly fee for the account, plus a percentage of the transaction. For the new CAM grad, or struggling startup, (or anyone, really) every outgoing dollar hurts, and it’s easy to put the credit/debit issue on hold for “another day”.
