Appointment Reminder Services

Some appointment setting software packages feature built-in confirmation and reminder options, while others don’t. If your software does not provide this function or if you want to provide it independently from an appointment-setting package, you can use a separate reminder service. Forget-Me-Not, from Professional Teledata, is one such service. This is how it works

“This is Dr. Smith’s office calling to confirm the appointment for Greg, on Monday, May 27th, at 2:00 PM. To confirm this appointment press 1, to hear this message again press 2, to leave a message, press 3.”

Dentists, doctors, stylists, and therapists know missed appointments are missed revenue. Keeping track of appointments is only half of the scheduling problem – finding out whether the customer will show up is another! Traditional methods of confirming scheduled appointments are only marginally effective. Mailed reminders are often discarded with junk mail or are forgotten by the appointment date. Making confirmation calls during regular business hours usually means reaching voice mail or answering machines.

Forget-Me-Not is a service that calls your clients’ patients or customers to remind them of their upcoming appointments. This is done with an interactive voice response (IVR) system, which delivers pre-recorded announcements and has the additional capability to track responses, record messages, and track outbound call attempts.

Forget-Me-Not provides a program that extracts the daily confirmation list from your clients’ scheduling software and sends it to the Forget-Me-Not system by a secure Internet link. This system then calls your clients’ patients in the evenings to confirm their appointments, posts the results to your clients’ account on the Forget-Me-Not website, and sends them an email listing their confirmations. If a patient leaves a message, clients can click on the highlighted message button to play it.

All account configuration is done through your clients’ Web account. All Forget-Me-Not recordings, including the company’s library of more than 3,000 first names, are recorded by a professional female voice-over artist. Forget-Me-Not is a hosted service and is available for a low monthly fee. There is no equipment to buy, install, or maintain.

[From Connection MagazineJan/Feb 2003]