SMS Text Message Reminders

In this release, we introduce a feature that’s been on the drawing board for a while.  You can now send appointment reminders to your customers on their cell phones as well as sending email.  With this feature, we’ve also added the ability to send multiple reminders for an appointment (say an email a day before, a text message an hour before).  Our “add-a-reminder” feature has also been enhanced to be more user-friendly.  Schedule an appointment and check it out!

Portugese, Spanish, and Russian Translations (Beta)

We’ve had some requests for Web Appointments Now to be translated into other languages, so we’ve given it our best shot with Portugese, Spanish, and Russian.  You can select the language in the upper right-hand corner of every web page on the site.  With this feature, we’ve also added the ability to set the currency that you want to use for your services, available on the account administration panel.

Now, unfortunately we at Web Appointments Now aren’t actually fluent in any of the languages we’ve translated into, so we probably made some mistakes.  Please contact us with corrections if you’ve got them and we’ll get them corrected right away.

Where to now?

We at WebAppointmentsNow are constantly looking for ways to make the site more useful to you.  Some ideas we’re currently considering:

• Customer Relationship Management – With this feature, you’d be able to email your customers from within the website, send newsletters, and see the whole history of interaction with your customers all in one place.
• E-Commerce – This feature would allow you to accept payments over the web for your services.  You would still be able to accept payments in person, of course.  We would also provide basic QuickBooks integration with this feature.
• New Languages – Maybe you have a large Vietnamese customer base.  Or Korean.  Or someone else we left out of our first internationalization attempt.  Let us know, and we’ll get right to work on a new translation!
• Employee Scheduling – This feature would integrate with Web Appointments Now and let you set up your employees’ work schedules to make sure you’ve got coverage.  You’d be able to see all the employees working at a particular location and make adjustments to all their schedules from one place.
• Telephone Scheduling and Reminders – This feature would allow you to sent automated voice reminders to your clients as well as allow them to schedule appointments over the phone via a voice response system (they would still be able to call your receptionist as well, of course!).
• Mobile Version – This would be a version of the site optimized for smart phones such as Apple’s iPhone and would be focused on viewing and editing upcoming appointments.

We would love to hear feedback from you on which features you’d like to see first.  (You probably have things you want that we haven’t even considered yet!)  Let us know and we’ll get right on it.  Please also contact us (or comment below) if you’ve got any feedback at all about the website.  We love to hear from you!

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Author: Andy Press

If medical appointment no-shows affect the bottom line of your medical practice, or even if they are only a minor inconvenience that can add stress to your environment of “controlled chaos” that you already maintain; using an automated, or virtual, appointment reminder service can significantly increase the productivity and the patient satisfaction of your medical practice. Not only will using an appointment reminder service save you money by way of reducing empty patient time-slots, but also by decreasing the amount of time that your front desk medical receptionist spends on the phone to reschedule these missed appointments. By using these time and money saving services, you will help control the loss of income because of patient no-shows and work to improve your overall patient and staff satisfaction. The only question is: why haven’t you employed the use of an appointment reminder service yet?

Common to medical and dental practices, patients’ appointments are usually scheduled weeks or sometimes even months in advance. Taking this into consideration, without a proper appointment reminder practice in place, many patients’ appointments will be missed simply due to forgetting about the far off appointment. While many medical practices staff attempt to call or send postcards to remind patients of their scheduled appointments, sometimes these appointment reminders are missed by the scheduled patient because of messages not received or the reminder postcard getting discarded or misplaced before it was read.

Any one of life’s circumstances can cause a patient to forget about their scheduled medical appointment, thus it is a necessary measure for medical practices to have some form of appointment reminder method in place, even if the patient’s appointment is only a week away. However, having your front desk medical receptionist handle each and every appointment reminder call can cut into his or her overall efficiency by having them perform these mundane, but absolutely necessary, appointment reminder calls when they could be focusing on other patients’ needs.

Relying on your medical receptionist to perform every patient appointment reminder call is really counter-productive and almost cost prohibitive when considering that these reminder calls could be automated and outsourced affordably; thus allowing your medical staff to focus on more important needs.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of acquiring appointment reminder services from a 3rd party company, you might assume that it would be a costly practice. In cases where you look to outsource the appointment reminder services to a group of qualified appointment reminder personnel, this might be the case. However, because of the advancement of new technologies, automated medical receptionist that can make appointment reminder have proven to be a cost effective and patient friendly solution for the needs of any profession where appointments are necessary. Using an automated medical receptionist to make appointment reminder calls will not only slash patient no-shows, it will reduce the workload of your current office staff so that they can perform their jobs more effectively as well.

By using an automated medical receptionist to make appointment reminder calls, you will help to increase the productivity of your medical practice by reducing no-show related stress and reducing the costs accrued by these missed appointments. All things considered, a virtual appointment reminder service will, in most cases, more than pay for itself within the very first month of acquiring these time and money saving services. Not only will this increase the bottom line of your medical practice, these appointment reminder services will increase your patient and office staff satisfaction as well.

About the Author:

Top writer Andy Press writes frequently about Medical Receptionist and Medical Practices Efficiency. The author focuses on topics about Virtual Receptionists and Automated Online Medical Scheduler. Additional resources and articles written by Andy Press related to Patient Appointment Reminder are accessible on line.

Article Source: ArticlesBase.com – How Would an Appointment Reminder Service Benefit your Medical Practice?

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