There’s nothing more disheartening than when a patient doesn’t show up for their appointment – and more frustrating than that is when you aren’t notified in advance of their non-attendance to allow you to fill the slot back up with another appointment of a waiting patient.
Not only do non-attendances interrupt your staff’s workflow, it also negatively impacts on your business’s time and causes you to suffer a accumulative financial loss. According to data from the NHS published in 2019, over 15 million GP appointments are missed on average each year, accounting for over £210 million in losses resulting from non-attendances. Therefore, looking for ways to reduce non-attendance rates at your dental practise is vital to ensure that any unnecessary losses taken by the business are kept to a minimum, or if otherwise are caused by unavoidable circumstances.
Based on studies conducted by King’s College London examining the effectiveness of reminder notifications to improve attendance rates across the healthcare industry, patients were 23% more likely to attend their appointments when receiving a reminder notification prior to the day of their appointment compared to patients who did not receive a reminder at all. More importantly to highlight, it was also noted that attendance rates also improved with increasing reminder notifications.
To increase frequency of appointment notifications without an increase in expenditure on SMS costs, easily integrable dental appointment management software like DenChat can help you to achieve exactly just that.
DenChat uses widely known mobile phone apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and WebChat to improve patient communication by up to 2,500% – sending real-time appointment notifications to your patient using an intelligent, highly-rated AI chatbot that can be linked up to your internal patient management system.
With the ability to reduce non-attendance rates by 25% compared to the conventional single 1-way text notification, DenChat’s 2-way communication channel relies on confirmation of attendance from the patient themselves to decrease likelihood of “no-shows”. This standard practise of requiring patients to confirm of their attendance in advance also allows last minute appointment allocations to be made in place of those that are recently cancelled, reducing risk of potential losses taken by the clinic.
If you’re interested in using DenChat to improve the quality of your schedule management services at your dental clinic, contact us directly for more information about the software and how it can benefit you and your team.
