Improve Scheduled to Attendance Rate for Medical Marketing

A major lever in financial gain for your practice…

One of the most ignored opportunities in elective healthcare practices for increasing profits is the optimization of the patient consultation schedule. Whether it’s due to not pulling our heads out of the weeds in the hectic day-to-day operations of a practice, or making assumptions about the doctor’s desires, there is almost always financial opportunity cost found in the consult schedule. If you want to add more money to your bottom line, you should consistently optimize your consult schedule.

“Optimizing your consultation schedule based on increased hours or change of days and times can add $100,000’s to your bottom line each year.”

New Patient Scheduled to Attendance Rate – For pure new patient marketing generated consultations (non-referrals) the appropriate goal for our scheduled to attendance rate is 70%. For every 10 consultations you schedule from marketing leads, 7 should show up for his or her appointment. This assumes no use of a credit card in the process (and you’re not in South Florida – the worst attendance rates in the country generally at 55% on average).

Business Days Between Point of Scheduling and Date of Consult – For pure new patient marketing generated consultations (non-referrals) the appropriate goal for our scheduled to attendance rate is 70%. For every 10 consultations you schedule from marketing leads, 7 should show up for his or her appointment. This assumes no use of a credit card in the process (and you’re not in South Florida – the worst attendance rates in the country generally at 55% on average).

Opportunities to Improve Scheduled to Attendance Rate

• Number of Hours Available – As a rule of thumb, we like to see practices have between 15-20 hours available per week for consultations. This allows the average practice to keep their days between point of scheduling and date of appointment at less than 10 days.
• Overbook – If you’re scheduled to attendance rate is 70%, overbook by 30%. If you have 10 consults in a day on your present schedule, over book to 13 to compensate for the predictable no-show/reschedule. Spread these evenly through the period available and you should be able to keep consumers satisfied with reasonable wait times.
• Cancellation Fees vs. Consult Fees – IF your practice is fortunate enough to consistently be booked out in FULL 6 weeks or so throughout the year, you should implement a “cancellation fee”. The consumer’s card is only charged IF they no show or re-schedule 24 hours or less from his or her appointment. The minute you bring a credit card into the scheduling process, you will IMMEDIATELY decrease significantly your “lead to schedule rate” by 20-30%. Make sure you know your math on the end result to appointments if you choose to bring a credit card into the process. As your business grows this will become important!
• Call Future Appointments and Move Them Forward – Another good tactic is to review your schedule daily for available space based on cancellations and call future appointments to see if they can come in earlier. It is a bit time consuming for staff, but if done consistently can incrementally improve attendance rates and profits.

These solutions need to be altered over time as your practice grows and you meet your personal financial and practice goals. The more mature and successful a practice, the more control the owner can take in how they spend their time. At the end of the day, if you monitor your attendance rate at 70% or better, along with keeping your average days from call to date of consultation to less than 2 weeks, you will be utilizing your schedule as a profit generating lever in your patient acquisition process.

Written by Jason Tuschman, CEO & Co-Founder of RSI, The #1 Patient Acquisition Platform in the Elective Healthcare Industry.