Why Can’t I Just Book the Appointment?
It’s a question that can be particularly frustrating to patients. They did all the upfront research to find and seek treatment for their issue – shouldn’t it be just a simple click to schedule and book an appointment with a provider?
This may be news to a lot of providers, but most medical practices’ websites aren’t set up with patients in mind. If they were, appointment booking would be front and center, but it’s not. Why?
It’s an offline operations issue, manifesting online.
Most clinic site experiences are designed instead to manage the intake process of appointments by making it easier for the support staff to handle/manage insurance approvals. Clinics have to pre-qualify patients in order to determine if patients are even eligible for treatment with their current insurance. This high-touch process often requires several steps and can include phone calls, emails, and starts to cause backlogs.
How does this manifest on a clinic website? Vague contact forms that force the patient to guess (and sometimes lie) just to see if they’re eligible to see the provider. This serves no one well – not the patient and certainly not the provider.
This isn’t as much of an issue when you’re a Primary Care or Urgent Care provider. At Innovative Care, we gave these patients direct access to our appointment booking engine (including the scheduler and a choice of their provider).
For specialty care, this is an entirely different issue though. Not everyone who requests care is going to need it, and you need some sort of a bar for patients to clear so your practice isn’t overwhelmed dealing with unqualified patients.
How Do You, the Provider/Clinic, Solve For This?
- Figure out and evaluate your ideal patient intake flow. Are you referring patients out, or having patients being referred in to your clinic? Figuring this out can allow you to adjust your processes accordingly (and make life a lot easier for patients). Spell it out if you’re a specialist that requires additional steps to book with.
- Determine how patients are finding you absent from referrals. Are they coming from a Google search, a video, or even a billboard? Segmenting them efficiently can reduce strain on your operation – and ideally, your adjustments to creative can allow you to make sure you’re attracting the right kind of pre-qualified patient.
- List the insurances that you accept with comprehensive detail. Most patients won’t even bother to send in a form or make an appointment if they know upfront you’re not going to take their insurance. Insurance companies won’t make this easy – they change plans frequently, have similar sounding nomenclature, and overall make it pretty frustrating to keep updated for your clinic.
- Beef up your FAQs and make them easily accessible or adjacent to your appointment form. Laying out your evaluation criteria for an appointment in black and white can make things a lot simpler and prevent any issues or frustration.
- Remember that you’re a service and you will be graded. Quality care is the bare minimum you need to provide; those are table stakes. But if you dig into any clinic’s one-star reviews? They will highlight issues in your clinics’ service/operations – not necessarily your quality of care.