Your radiology practice needs to maximize appointment volumes, and mammography is no exception. When patients schedule online, that relieves your facility of resources needed to answer phones ultimately reducing your operating costs, helps patients own more of their medical experience, and improves the ease of access into your imaging clinic. Below are some best practices currently in use at our most highest performing mammography clinics that can help you maximize your mammography volume.
Train your referring physicians
Referring physicians are the life blood to radiology practices. Yes, patients have the right to use any imaging service they choose for thier procedures, but typically patients will choose the location their PCP or other referring physician recommends. This could be for a number of reasons including those locations are quick to distribute results, those locations are less prone to error than other locations they’ve referred patients to in the past, those locations employ staff that are pleasant to their patients, and those locations are easy to access.
When it comes to ease of access, there is no better option than online scheduling. Our mammo clinics with the highest patient volume have spent time traveling to their referring physician clinics and training them on how to access the site for online scheduling. Typically what happens then is while the patient is still in the referring physician’s office, the patient books an appointment for a mammo procedure right there and then before they even walk out of the office. So to help improve your online scheduling mammo volume, try taking the time to meet with your referring providers and educate them and their staff about your online scheduling offering. Train them how to pull up your availability and ask them if they will assist patients to receive the care they need by helping them schedule their appointment while they are still in the office. Offer the referring provider marketing material they can hang in their office with QR codes to your online schedules so patients can be reminded to schedule their appointments and have an easy way of accessing your online availability.
Add your online scheduling link to your reminder letters
The reminder letters that are sent to patients is another fantastic tool that you as an mammography center have to reach your patients. Our top performing mammo clinics who have maximized their online scheduling volume have reached out to the Mammography Reporting System software vendor and asked the vendor to include both a link and a QR code in the header of the reminder letter template itself. In doing so, once patients receive their reminder letter they are instantly informed that rather than calling to book their appointment, they can simply go online to book, saving them time from calling and potentially waiting on hold.
Consider a multi-layered approach to reminders
When conducting my 2023 ARRT CEU’s, I came across an interesting read titled, “Challenges of the Underserved and Underscreened in Mammography” by Kathryn Faguy, MA, ELS wherein Faguy mentioned a study performed by Phillips, et. al. titled, “Improving breast and colon cancer screening rates: a comparison of letters, automated phone calls, or both.” In answer to his question of which reminder method improves screening rates the most, Phillips concluded that, “The combination of a letter plus phone calls nearly doubled the screening rate compared with either type of reminder alone.”
In addition to patient reminder letters, Carenet’s Patient Prompt product is capable of placing automated phone calls for you for at a low cost, and even sending out screening text reminders to patient cell phones complete with a link to schedule online. You would simply prepare a batch file containing the patient data (names, phone numbers, date of last exam, date for recommended screening, etc.) and then send that batch file over to our system on a daily basis. Patient Prompt will handle sending out the call or text on your behalf from there. An automated reminder call or reminder text in addition to your reminder letters, according to Phillips, will help you double your screening compliance rates. If interested in using Patient Prompt for screening reminders in addition to letters, please contact you Carenet Health Account Manager today.
Hand out business cards for online scheduling at check-in or discharge
At some point during the patients visit they are going to receive a stack of papers to take home. These may be copies of registration paperwork, a letter informing them of how to view their results, etc. If you do not have a business card size marketing material with a link and QR code to access your online availability for the patient’s next visit you are missing out on an opportunity to maximize your online scheduling volume. Most patients file this paperwork away and pull it back out again when booking their next appointment, or they put the card in their wallet for future reference. Our clinics who are maximizing their online scheduling volume hand out business card size marketing material paper clipped to the top of any paperwork they walk out the door with the day of their appointment.
Talk to patients during their visit about online scheduling
People don’t know what they don’t know. If people missed the fact that your mammo clinic offers online scheduling from their referring provider, from their reminder letter, and from the business card, your staff have an excellent opportunity to talk to patients and show them on an iPad or phone how to access online scheduling in the future and book their appointments online. This couple extra minutes of patient education could mean the difference in maximizing your online scheduling volume.
