3 Ways to Improve OBGYN Patient Communications

Patients expect timely and personalized communication from their healthcare providers, especially when they’re preparing for major life changes related to their health, like having a baby. By implementing the right strategies and tools, you can significantly enhance your OBGYN patient communications, leading to reduced no-shows and improved patient preparedness. 

See how you can take your patient communication software like  recalls, appointment reminders and messages to the next level to boost patient satisfaction.

1. Patient Recalls

Patient recalls are a powerful tool for minimizing lapsed patients and maximizing physician schedules, without overburdening your staff. By leveraging automated patient recalls, you can ensure that your practice stays top-of-mind for your patients’ next appointments. 

For OBGYN practices, patient recalls are particularly crucial for ensuring patients are maintaining their annual well-woman exams, which include essential screenings such as pap smears, breast exams, and pelvic exams. These preventive care visits are vital for detecting potential health issues early on and maintaining optimal reproductive health.

By implementing an OBGYN patient communication software that offers customizable recall cadences, based on appointment type, you  can effectively communicate with existing patients, encouraging them to book their next appointment and fulfill ongoing health needs at optimal times. Leveraging automated patient recalls not only helps maintain a steady flow of patients but also increases the lifetime value of each patient by ensuring they receive consistent care. As you weigh your options, here’s what you need to know about patient recall software to ensure you can reduce lapsed patients.

2. Patient Appointment Reminders

No-shows can be a significant challenge for OBGYN practices, leading to lost revenue and inefficient use of staff time. If you are looking to drastically drop your no-show rates, but your current reminders strategy isn’t as effective as you hoped, it may be time to consider other options for OBGYN patient communication software. It’s important to look for smart appointment reminders solutions that are proven to drop no-show rates. 

Here is a customizable appointment reminder approach OBGYN practices use to drop their no-show rates and improve patient satisfaction. Find a solution that offers these features and use these steps to drop your no-show rate! 

Custom Automation Rules: Quickly configure and automate your appointment reminders by  location, doctor or appointment type/service and more! Set it up once, and let the software run in the background. By taking this hands-off approach you can ensure you’re sending accurate reminders to patients, notifying them of their upcoming appointments, without over burdening your staff.

Adjustable Arrival Time Settings: Adjust the arrival time settings in your patient reminder messages to ensure patients arrive at your practice at the most optimal times. Smart solutions allow you to do this based on appointment service!

Smart Cadences: Customize your reminder cadence, sending additional reminders via email, text, or voice as you see fit. Create a reminder cadence based on appointment type, provider and more — all to ensure your patients get their much needed “heads up.” 

Quick Appointment Confirmation/Modification: Enable patients to easily confirm or modify their appointment through a link in the reminder message. Offering this convenience to patients enable them to take ownership of their healthcare needs, while helping you save staff time.With this feature, if a patient has to cancel or reschedule for whatever reason, they can do it right from their reminder, instead of just opting to no-show altogether — helping you maximize schedules and fill any gaps ahead of time, rather than incur a loss of realized revenue from that appointment slot.

Streamline Patient Check-In: Add patient pre-check links to your appointment reminders to enable patients to get ahead of registration, medical history and clinical intake questionnaires! By enabling patients to complete these forms ahead of time, digitally, you can drop check-in times and get your OBGYN patients back to their provider sooner, while dropping front desk and clinical staff workloads.

By implementing an OBGYN patient communication software that enables you to take advantage of this working appointment reminder strategy you can not only improve patient satisfaction, but also staff and provider satisfaction as well. Use this reminder strategy to optimize schedules, increase realized revenue and reduce staff workloads. 

3. Patient Messaging Software

Keeping patients informed about key administrative updates is essential for maintaining a strong patient-provider relationship. Smart patient messaging software makes it happen!

Consider how you can leverage smartOBGYN patient communication software to reduce staff burdens around urgent needs, and avoid your staff having to call every patient on the schedule. Here’s how these automated communication tools can benefit your practice:

Urgent Communications: Notify patients when their provider is out unexpectedly or send urgent office closure notifications, keeping them informed and reducing confusion. Send one message, with the push of a button, to all patients or target specific patient groups as needed. Saving your staff the hassle of calling on multiple patients.

One-to-Many or Specific Audiences: Send messages to specific patient groups based on appointment service, date, status, provider, location, and more, allowing for targeted communication. Or send out automatic all-patient messages, depending on your administrative communication needs.

Time Saving: Save staff hours every day by automating these urgent patient communications, freeing up time for other critical tasks.

By leveraging a smart patient messaging tool, your OBGYN practice can significantly improve patient satisfaction by providing timely, relevant information. Patients appreciate being kept informed about important updates and changes that may affect their care.

Use OBGYN Patient Communication Software to Boost Revenue

Good patient communication is one of the most impactful ways healthcare practices can gain new patients, reduce no-shows and increase profits. How do you know your communications are working or if there’s opportunity to improve patient and staff satisfaction?

See three ways you can use OBGYN patient communication software to boost practice profitability and efficiency. Take these steps to meet the demands of your patient base!

Download the quick guide here.