Digital Minute: System Wide Appointment Reminders

By Walter Reiling, MD, system chief medical information officer, Premier Health; and Mandy Via, system director of access, referral management, and telehealth, Premier Health

Earlier this year, prioritized efforts began to decrease no-shows and cancellations as part of the ambulatory access pillar of the 2024 Operations Excellence Strategic Plan. This work focused on improving communication methods and messaging cadence for improved patient experience and operational efficiencies. 

Reducing no-shows and cancellations is essential for both patient outcomes and the efficient operations of our organization. When patients skip appointments, they miss valuable opportunities for early diagnosis, timely treatment, and preventive care, potentially leading to increasing severity of health conditions that are more difficult and expensive to treat later. In many cases, these missed appointments can cause a cascading effect, impacting the patient and the health care system.

The system-wide appointment reminders team focused on creating standardization and a systemized communication approach for appointment reminders.  During this time, we worked to align messaging content and cadence with MyChart for patients to experience continuity of message delivery.  Through rigorous planning and a pilot phase, we were able to migrate to a single messaging platform while scaling to the system. The team continues to work on strategies to enhance messaging as the technology evolves. 

We know our patients each have unique communication preferences, and we respect those by encouraging patients to tailor their communication preferences in MyChart to ensure that we are communicating in the manner that they prefer. 

While we are still early in this journey, we’ve identified that year-to-date, we’ve decreased no-shows across the organization by 34,980 minutes, or just over 24 days in totality.  This number reflects the work of the team to drive results by decreasing no-shows and cancellations.  Additionally, the data reflects the many other strategies that are taking place across our organization.

At Premier Health, we continue to serve our patients by leveraging technology to improve access while keeping our patients connected to care.  We will continue to innovate and serve our patients as technology evolves while supporting our patients' communication preferences by communicating through their preferred communication methods. 

Back to the November 2024 issue of Premier Pulse