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The Introduction Of Medical Scheduling Software Can Add Significantly More Time For Patient Care

By Marla C. Travis


With the advent of medical scheduling software, missed appointments, overbooking errors, double booking entries, missed reminders, etc. have disappeared almost completely. When using paper based appointment systems the chances of making mistakes are just too likely. And for those businesses like medical practices where revenue and costs must be carefully maintained to show a profit, paper based appointment systems have not only become outdated but a severe liability as well.

Coordinating the scheduling of patient appointments with physician schedules is the most fundamental activity of any medical practice. It's the same whether the office be large or small or whether the scheduling is done for small clinics or large hospitals. Medical personnel must be able to quickly and efficiently match patient activity to busy health professionals who may have to divide their time between offices, hospitals and clinics. Poorly managed appointment systems are not only directly responsible for significant monetary losses across North America but also for causing dissatisfaction among patients.

Medical scheduling software has made it easier for medical professionals to manage diverse schedules and to accommodate divergent time constraints so that both the medical professional's time as well as the patient's time is managed smoothly, seamlessly and efficiently. In addition, unlike paper based systems, critical patient information is just a click away. For example, if a medical staff member wanted to look at appointment trends over a series of weeks or years in a single report it could be done with just a few clicks of a mouse but it wouldn't be so easy if scheduling data was maintained in paper format. Reports on insurance coverage and patient requests can also be easily called up. Finally, because records are stored within computer databases a medical office has the ability to protect patient information through the use of permissions so that only designated staff members would have the ability to see the information.

Medical scheduling software is not just limited to arranging appointments but can also be used to gather and view related data by staff members when formulating scheduling decisions about the patient. Some of the reporting attributes include the capability to view reports to assist with managing cancellations, rescheduling and no-shows. Additionally, there are various tools available within the software to assist medical staff members in setting follow-up appointments and for organizing and viewing information in customized formats.

A natural outgrowth of this type of time management application is online medical scheduling software. What this means for patients is that they can actually go online and make their own appointments through special websites made available to them through the medical practice's website thus freeing the medical staff from administrative tasks for patient care tasks. Online software is an effective way of freeing up medical staff to concentrate on what they were trained to do by transferring the day to day operation and maintenance of the software to a central online host which would take over more mundane duties like backing up data and storing it safely and securely.

There's no doubt that medical scheduling software is a huge boon to medical offices throughout the country and gives both the medical practitioner and his or her patients many options for efficiency and satisfaction.




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