by Vinitha Ramnathan

For the past year and a half, the healthcare world has been turned on its nose after having been confronted with and battled to overcome unprecedented obstacles presented by the pandemic. But through a combination of determination, innovation, and unceasing effort, healthcare providers have prevailed in continuing to extend care to patients.

When COVID blew up in March 2020 and interrupted care delivery, providers responded by offering telehealth visits to patients when it wasn’t safe to come to the doctor’s office. Then, when the complexities of distributing vast quantities of vaccine to the public seemed insurmountable, practices rallied with plans and strategies to get vaccines in arms and educate the vaccine hesitant. Now, with vaccination rates steadily climbing nationwide and patients feeling safe about returning for care, providers are determined to forge ahead toward recovery.

However, it’s abundantly clear that health systems and medical practices haven’t emerged unscathed from the pandemic’s aftermath. In addition to the huge revenue blow they’ve suffered, providers are finding their appointment workflows—already frustratingly disjointed prior to COVID—are largely broken and ineffective. Staff labor long hours on phones in a largely futile attempt to remind patients about scheduled visits, convey pre-visit instructions, and arrange follow-up care. Yet since 80 percent of people don’t answer phone calls from unrecognized numbers and 20 percent delete their voicemails, staff find themselves in an endless work loop of being unable to connect with patients.

Telehealth has been one of the more encouraging stories to come out of the coronavirus crisis. It filled a vital need for practices to resume care and proved popular and convenient for patients. Yet its arrival also complicated appointment logistics and workflows. The urgency to stand up telehealth quickly required practices to throw together short-term stopgap workflows which are still being used. This created a situation where providers are relying on multiple manually administered appointment workflows which are time-consuming and inefficient for staff and confusing for patients.

Patient communication, already problematic before the pandemic, became even more inoperable during COVID. When patients urgently needed information about provider closures, postponements, and safety protocols, they either couldn’t get the answers fast enough or get the right information. Patient satisfaction with healthcare communication dropped 7 percent and 83 percent of patients said poor communication was the worst part of the patient experience in 2020.

Yet it comes as no surprise to healthcare that the greatest source of disruption to appointment workflows is neither new and nor was it initiated by the pandemic. No-shows and late cancellations are perennial headaches that contribute to a sizable portion of appointment slots going unfilled. No-show rates average between 10 and 30 percent, which hits practices in the wallet to the tune of $150,000 to $300,000 per year per provider. To make any substantial progress here, providers need to create an appointment workflow that drives more meaningful engagement with patients to minimize disruptions.

To truly connect with patients, providers need to view the appointment as more than the actual visit and instead as a series of interactions across the patient journey. A single, more refined appointment workflow enables more effective patient interaction before, during, and after a visit, whether it’s virtual or in-person. The three key elements of a “perfect appointment workflow” are:

Hanging up the phone
Adopting a text-first approach
Taking advantage of automation

Patients lead busy lives, and they don’t want to be bothered by provider phone calls. Patients’ desire for phone calls dipped 14 percent during the pandemic and 60 percent of patients say they won’t wait on hold for more than one minute. As mentioned, phone calls bog down the appointment workflow, making it more difficult for staff to interact with patients and decreasing the chances they’ll connect.

In contrast, text messaging isn’t just for personal or consumer interaction anymore. Patients demand more text communication with their providers because it is fast, convenient, and accessible. Response rate for texts is 209 percent higher than it is for phone calls and nearly 80 percent of patients want to receive texts from providers. In a recent patient communication preference study, more than one-third of patients said they would consider switching providers to get more modern communication like texting. A text-first approach seamlessly supports a perfect appointment workflow, and helps ensure that patients receive and respond to visit reminders and similar workflow messaging.

Finally, a text-first patient engagement platform lets providers automate most of the routine and mundane communication tasks such as visit reminders, pre-visit instructions, intake forms, follow-up surveys, and recall notifications. Automation allows providers to reach more patients more effectively while freeing up staff to focus their attention on in-office patients. Eighty-four percent of patients want more automated communication with their providers. Automated communication streamlines the appointment workflow process so providers can connect more efficiently at every stage of the patient experience.

In today’s post-pandemic climate, providers must persistently innovate their approach to patient engagement and how they minimize disruption to fill appointment schedules and bolster recovery efforts. Those who are nimble and open to evolving technology trends and workflow best practices will be better positioned to enhance the patient experience and recoup revenue.

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