What Can Schedgehog Do for My Practice Profitability?
One of the primary revenue drains in any practice is vacant appointment times. According to the Medical Group Management Association even physicians with busy practices and long wait lists lose 12% of their available appointment times daily, due to patients that don't show up, or cancel at the last minute.
A 2008 Athena Health white paper found that 40% of appointments scheduled more than 20 days prior get canceled or are no-shows. That rate drops to 7% for day-of appointments. Given that Americans wait an average of 20 days between making an appointment and seeing a doctor according to a 2009 Merritt Hawkins survey, it is no wonder that even physicians with busy practices face this last minute, daily drain on their income.
Thankfully with the Internet and the recent emergence of Health 2.0, physicians now have access to online tools that make tackling these problems both easy and cost effective. Several online applications exist today that remind patients of their upcoming appointments, streamline appointment scheduling, and help increase doctors' visibility among new patients browsing the web. Schedgehog is a unique application that makes it simple to fill missed and cancelled last minute appointments by making the appointments visible to new and existing patients in your geographical region as they become available.
What Makes Schedgehog a Success for Your Business?
The first thing you need to do as a Schedgehog subscriber is to get the word to your existing patient base about your participation in this exciting new service. Let your patients know you signed up for Schedgehog in the interest of making life easier and better for them. Let them know that you are the first provider in your area to offer this new technology and they should think of Schedgehog as a free value-added service for patients of your practice that few, if any of your competitors offer. Tell them to let their friends and family know about it too so you expose it to a new patient population as well. Once your patients know you are providing them a free service that will enable them to take advantage of your services at their convenience, the word will spread in your community, and you will begin to fill missed or cancelled appointments with new business as well. Parallel to that, the marketing department at Schedgehog.com will actively promote the website through internet and social media in your general area and attempt to generate PR to increase the number of subscribers in your area.
I understand, but is it worth paying $39 per month?
Lets look at the numbers. Figures vary, but most physicians we polled conservatively estimate an average net revenue per patient of $80. The average physician sees somewhere between 22-25 patients per day*, or 23.5 patients per day. Taking the Athena Health white paper statistics and assuming physicians deal with 7% day-of cancelled or no-show appointments at the least, most physicians have 1.7 cancellations a day. This means the average physician loses $136 in net revenue per day which translates to $32,640 lost revenue per year per doctor minimum!
If Schedgehog is successful in filling just one of those cancelled or no-show appointments per month, it is worth more than twice the monthly subscription cost of $39 to the average practice.
Physicians are working harder than ever to generate even a small increase in their income these days. For $390 per year per physician Schedgehog can plug up a $32,640 per physician drain on your practice and at the same time enable you to offer a value-added service of convenience to your patients who value your time and would love a chance to be able to see you without having to wait 2 weeks or more. What does this mean to larger practices with 10 physicians or more? You do the math.
*http://healthcareers.about.com/od/physiciancareers/p/FamilyPractice.htm
How Does Schedgehog Work?
Your office subscribes to Schedgehog.com and our technicians provide your receptionist with a Skype video tutorial on how to use the simple and intuitive browser-based application. The video tutorial is also available for reference on our site and on our YouTube channel.
Your receptionist at your primary care practice gets a call at 11:00 a.m. that your 12:30 patient needed to reschedule due to a family emergency, creating an opening in your schedule. She logs onto Schedgehog.com and signs in as a business user and enters the open appointment time.
Across town, Mrs. Delgado, a busy mother of two finished her grocery shopping at 9:30 a.m., ran to the post office at 10:00, dropped off some forms at her daughters elementary school at 10:30 and took her younger son to day care at 11:00. She had to pick up her son at daycare at 2:00, but realized she had 3 hours to kill. She really needed a physical, but hadn't bothered to schedule it ahead of time. She thought "Wouldn't it be great if my physician had an opening and I could get that done now, instead of wasting the next 3 hours?" Then she remembered hearing about this free mobile website that could help her find last minute available appointments. Sitting in the parking lot of her day care she logged into Schedgehog.com, saw, that her doctors practice was listed and had an available appointment and in 3 clicks she is on the phone with her doctors office, filling the 12:30 appointment slot.
All she had to do was (1) type in her zip code (2) select the type of physician she wanted to see and (3) click on the appointment she wanted, which called the receptionist.
Meanwhile, at 4:00 p.m. you have 3 openings the next day. Since the open appointments your receptionist enters also go to @Schedgehog, our twitter page, people who subscribe to twitter and are members of our Facebook page get instant notifications of all available appointments in their area. Your receptionist quickly fills all 3 spots and gets over 15 additional calls from people who saw the appointments in their twitter feeds and hoped to obtain a last minute appointment; a few of them you are able to squeeze in, generating additional revenue as well.
How Do We Implement Schedgehog?
Once you have subscribed to Schedgehog, you will be able to access your "media" section of the website. The media section is only accessible by paid accounts. Within the media section we have provided content you can use to promote your participation with Schedgehog to your patients. The first and most important content we provide is the introduction letter. We suggest you cut-and-paste the letter, making any modifications you wish, on your practice letterhead and mail it your patient mailing list. This will inform your patients, what Schedgehog.com is, that you are participating, and inform them how the free application can be downloaded on their mobile device. We will send you a Schedgehog Participating Practice front desk plaque to display, and provide you logos and links for your practice website and social media sites such as Facebook to advertise your participation. You can use the suggested PR release for you to send to your local media outlets, and we encourage you to advertise your participation in your area as well through whatever means you currently use and find effective. As the word spreads, Schedgehog.com becomes a more valuable tool. Don't expect much of a response in the first 3-6 months, as this is the amount of time it takes for any mobile application to gain followers. Be sure to tweet it to your twitter connections, discuss it on your Facebook page, post a link to the sign-in page on your website, have your receptionists tell people about it when they come in and discuss it with your nurses and in the examination room. Schedgehog.com is successful when there is a buzz about it in your office, so appoint a staff member to help create that buzz.