Or do you depend on them to get through your day? Appointments are gold, and where you have more demand than capacity it is very wasteful when a gap arises that would have been gleefully ‘claimed’ by many other customers.

The longer the interval between the day a booking is made and the date of the appointment, the more likely it is that the patient will forget to turn up.

Reducing delay is therefore one way of decreasing DNAs.

Here are some ideas for handling DNAs that were offerred in an Access breakout at Learning Workshop 1 in Melbourne during November:

• Confirming by phone call the day before. Some practices reserved this for particular appointments (especially longer appointments).
• Confirming by SMS – which can be automated in some practice systems (Genie and possibly others).
• Sending accounts to patients who fail to show. Some practices sent a warning letter for the first strike. Fees ranged from $10 to $60.
• Using the Video Store approach – add an extra fee to their next appointment if they had previously missed an appointment.
• One practice found that new patients in particular were a problem.
• New patients were booked to see the practice nurse 15 minutes before their scheduled appt with the doctor (the PN used this time to add clinical information to their newly created record). If they did not turn up with the nurse, another patient on a special quick response ‘orange’ waiting list would be called to step into the breach.

And here is the…

Idea of the Week!

Patients who did not attend an appointment were sent an account – but they were let know that the amount collected was donated to Medecins sans Frontieres.

Does your practice have ideas to share on DNAs?

Tags: practice management