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IT’S HOW YOU FILL YOUR SCHEDULE

THE RESULTS OF EFFECTIVE PRE-APPOINTING CAN BE PROFOUND

TO BUILD our practices effectively, we must continually analyze and adjust all our processes to ensure we maximize efficiency and profitability.

For example, it recently became clear to me that we need to better manage our scheduling of patients, even if our offices are always booked.

MANAGING YOUR SCHEDULE

Let me explain. I see patients three days per week — my schedule is full and booked up about a week in advance. Per many industry experts, this flow seems appropriate. Clearly, I do not need to add doctor time. I typically pre-appoint most patients, unless they request otherwise, and this has helped grow my schedule from day one of my practice.

However, some recent spot checks revealed that more than half of my patients seen in the last year had NOT been pre-appointed, and that my schedule was still full only because of new patients, not established patients, returning on time. As my new patient percentage has always been around 35% or higher each month, that didn’t bother me. What should have bothered me were established patients not returning on schedule for their annual exams.

PRE-APPOINTMENT: A BIG DEAL

“Big deal,” you might say. The schedule is full, and we aren’t booked out too far in advance. Yet, by tracking the numbers, the results of failing to effectively pre-appoint became profound:

• With EHR, it takes about 30 seconds to one minute to pre-appoint a patient at checkout. The time the staff spends pre-appointing that patient a week or more later (which is what we are doing now to catch up) is about five minutes once we review notes and prepare scheduling information. (For more information, see “One Challenge for the New Year,” December 2014 OM.) Throughout a week, then, pre-appointing at checkout saves us about four hours. This adds up to thousands of dollars of staff time throughout the course of the year.

• If a contact lens wearer can’t get into your office for two more weeks because you forgot to pre-appoint him or her, and then runs out of the supply of contact lenses (oops!), your staff now must scramble to either get trial lenses so the patient can get by until his or her exam or figure out whether selling a small supply would be better. Pre-appointing saves this drain on staff time and pay. Additionally, we potentially lessen the patient’s experience at our office by making it seem like we are disorganized in anticipating the patient’s vision needs.

• If patients visit your office every 18 months (because they are relied upon to schedule themselves once you remind them they are due) vs. every 12 months, this means they have a little more than three exams in a five-year time frame instead of five in five years. That’s another loss of thousands of dollars throughout the course of time.

• My staff has found it’s far less time consuming to confirm or reschedule a pre-appointed patient vs. having that patient schedule on their own. The result: more recall notices, calls and again, valuable staff time.

REFORM YOUR OFFICE

You can pull more revenue numbers from failing to effectively scheduling your patients on an annual return basis. Check to make sure staff is doing this properly. I know now I could probably add an extra doctor/patient day per week at my office and STILL be booked out a week. OM

GINA M. WESLEY O.D., M.S., F.A.A.O. practices at Complete Eye Care of Medina, a Vision Source practice, which she opened in 2008. She was honored as Minnesota’s Optometrist of the Year in 2011. Email drwesley@cecofmedina.com, or visit tinyurl.com/OMcomment to comment on this article.