Mundane as it may seem, patient scheduling is a crucial part of practice management that directly impacts both the patient and staff experience. It influences different performance metrics, including patient satisfaction and staff burnout and retention rate.

While scheduling trends and best practices have remained relatively unchanged in the past few years, the pandemic has introduced drastic changes to the healthcare landscape and reshaped how patients and practices approach scheduling. That’s why it’s more important now than ever to reevaluate your scheduling workflow and find ways to optimize it for the post-COVID era.

If you don’t want to get left behind, you have no other choice but to adapt. To help you navigate the future of patient scheduling, here are five easy steps you can take to schedule patients effectively in the face of shifting patient demands and expectations.

1. Digitize & Automate Your Scheduling Workflow

Paper-based scheduling is already a thing of the past. It only leads to poor time management and revenue losses. Digitizing patient scheduling will give way to a more efficient and convenient appointment booking process for both your patients and staff. With automation, you can streamline your scheduling workflow, reduce cancellations and no-shows, and ultimately improve efficiency across the different areas of your practice.

Although automated scheduling offers immense benefits to your practice, choosing the wrong system can do more harm than good. Practice management solutions like billrMD automate every stage of your scheduling workflow, from plotting time slots and confirming bookings to sending appointment reminders and checking billing-related information. billrMD's scheduling automation feature is anchored on the idea of empowering you to get more things done without the extra work. That's why we’ve integrated billing into our scheduling tools to create a streamlined process from start to finish.

2. Integrate Your Scheduling and Billing Workflows

Certain workflows within your practice often run in tangent with each other, like patient scheduling and medical billing. Integrating different workflows into one cohesive process can improve your practice’s overall efficiency and free up time for you and your staff to focus on other tasks.

With billrMD, you can perform billing-related tasks while on the scheduling window for a faster, more convenient multi-tasking experience. Gain quick access to insurance details, payments, and other patient documentation with each appointment. Everything you need to complete multiple processes simultaneously is on the same screen.

When you don’t have to switch between different systems to perform various functions, you can save time and money while ensuring a seamless transition between workflows. With billrMD, you can rest assured that you’re getting more than just a scheduling system — it’s a practice management, medical billing, and scheduling automation platform all rolled into one.

3. Send Text or Email Confirmation and Reminders

Due to the accelerated adoption of digital technology in healthcare, improving the different stages of appointment scheduling is easier than ever. This is especially true with appointment confirmation messages and reminders.

Since most patients book their appointments weeks or months in advance, it’s pretty common for them to forget about their scheduled visits or make other overlapping plans. Canceled appointments cost providers approximately $150 billion every year, not to mention the potential adverse effects missed visits have on your patients’ overall well-being.

One way to help your patients stay on top of their scheduled visits is to send them reminders on or a day before their appointment. Doing so can go a long way in reducing cancellations and no-show rates.

billrMD comes with an automated appointment confirmation and reminder feature that allows you to send appointment-related messages via email, text, or voice message. You and your staff won’t have to do any heavy lifting either because you can use built-in templates and pre-set the date and time you want to send out the reminders.

4. Implement an Online Booking Option

People today are accustomed to the speed and convenience of online transactions. That’s why it’s not surprising that patients expect the same experience when acquiring medical services — including booking appointments.

While many patients still prefer human interaction when scheduling their visits, online booking is becoming increasingly popular, especially to the younger and more tech-savvy demographic. So to maximize your reach and accommodate patients across the demographic spectrum, it’s best to provide phone and online booking options.

One of the many advantages of having an online booking system is that it allows patients to schedule appointments beyond clinic hours. It’s essential to provide your patients with more convenient options because, on top of the quality of care, patients also consider convenience and flexibility when choosing a provider.

5. Modernize Patient Scheduling With the Right Software

Software plays a crucial role in optimizing your scheduling process for the post-COVID era. Industry experts predict the medical scheduling software market to reach $612.5 million by 2026. Since digital technology is becoming increasingly fundamental in healthcare, it only makes sense to integrate digital capabilities into your administrative workflows.

Even before the pandemic and healthcare digital revolution, billrMD's creators were helping practices across the country improve patient scheduling. With cutting-edge features like the different calendar view options, resource tracking, non-clinical events, drag and drop functionality, billing integration, and automated appointment reminders, billrMD continues to free providers and clinical staff members from stress and burnout.

You can never downplay the impact of well-rounded software on your day-to-day operations. When you have a practice management platform as intuitive as billrMD, you can transform even the most complex processes, like patient scheduling, into straightforward and convenient tasks.