IMPACT OF A SEVEN-DAY REMINDER ON APPOINTMENT NON-ATTENDANCE

Appointment non-attendance, a patient’s failure to show up for an appointment or failure to cancel 24 hours in advance, has a negative impact on medical office revenue. Late cancellations also make it difficult to fill in vacant time slot. The aim of this project was to reduce non-attendance rate, using a seven-day automated appointment reminder system at an endocrine clinic in southern California. The Plan-Do-Study-Act model provided the framework used to examine the change in the non-attendance rate over a two distinct timeframes. A pre-post evaluation design was used: pre-intervention, data gathered from the two-day reminder system, and post-intervention data gathered from the seven-day reminder system. Overall, the post-intervention resulted in a 2.3% reduction in non-attendance, a 0.6% increase in appointment attendance, and a 1.2% reduction of scheduled patients who chronically missed three to five scheduled appointments. The same result did not occur among the Vietnamese-speaking patients. Improvements in appointment attendance resulted in an estimated gain of six to nine thousand dollars in revenue. Post-intervention data suggested language used for the automated reminder might be an important factor to consider. Three recommendations were proposed: 1) review McLean et al. (2016) strategies to optimize a reminder system, 2) flag individuals who chronically miss appointments, and 3) select an automated appointment-reminder system that includes the Vietnamese language.