A pertinent appointment issue that most healthcare providers struggle with is no-shows and late arrivals from their patients. These problems ultimately lead to scheduling gaps, lost revenue, and inefficient practice. Studies reveal that missed doctor appointments cost the US economy a whopping $150 billion, and now doctors are resorting to no-show fees in an attempt to curb the problem. However, punishing the patient has proven relatively ineffective in the long run. 

You can effectively reduce patient no-show and late arrival rates through timely patient communication before their appointment. This is where automated appointment reminders and confirmation tools such as Apptoto come in. Apptoto allows you to easily and conveniently set up customized appointment reminders for your healthcare practice to achieve over 90% of patient show-ups on scheduled appointments. This blog focuses on what Apptoto does and how it’s easy to add to an existing enterprise system. 

What is Apptoto?

Apptoto is an automated appointment messaging and reminder service that helps get clients to show up on time and prepared for their appointments. The service sends interactive and customizable appointment reminders and confirmation requests via texts, email, or voice call for existing appointments. The tool extracts contacts from any calendar and automatically sends appointment reminders and confirmations. Apptoto helps enhance revenue, reduce manual tasks and streamline your client communication process.

How Apptoto works

Apptoto offers several key features, including automated reminders, messaging, scheduling, reporting, and database administration. Apart from enabling your practice to create and send multilingual messages to clients, it also allows you to configure reminders based on your preferred contact method with your customers. The service works through the following steps:

  1. Connection to calendar: The service first establishes a connection to your calendar. You can initiate the process by connecting your appointment calendar schedule to Apptoto to allow the service to sync data.
  2. Extraction of information: Apptoto will extract appointment information automatically from your calendar and address book.
  3. Creation of reminder messages: Once you turn on your auto messages in Apptoto, the tool leverages existing templates to create customized reminder messages. 
  4. Sending of reminders: The service sends reminders to your clients via text, email, voice calls, or a combination of any of those. Your clients are duly reminded of their upcoming appointments promptly and securely.
  5. Updating of the calendar: Apptoto then receives client responses and automatically updates your calendar with real-time appointment status.
  6. Continued communication process: the tool carries on two-way business email or text conversations to ensure a continued communication process with your clients before and after their appointment.

Apptoto integrations

Apptoto offers cloud-based hosting, which enables IT resources to be retrieved through web-based tools and applications. With this service, you won’t have to buy other additional hardware services or equipment to enjoy its benefits. Typically, Apptoto facilitates integration with multiple third-party applications to function within the user’s existing workflow and calendar. Specifically, it integrates with the following platforms:

  • iCloud
  • Clio
  • Google Calendar
  • Office 365
  • Outlook, among others.

Apptoto pros and cons

Pros

  • Schedule appointments and send follow-ups
  • Easy and flexible to use, an excellent appointment reminder system
  • Easy to configure multiple message types

Cons 

  • The user interface is not updated 

Apptoto pricing 

Apptoto is available through a subscription-based pricing model. Subscriptions are typically offered on a monthly basis. The following are the pricing details of this service:

  • Free Trial: Available (No Credit Card required)
  • Starter plan: $29/month
  • Plus plan: $59/month
  • Professional: $99/month
  • Group: $249/month

Apptoto offers prompt customer support via email, phone, live chat, and documentation.

Why you should use Apptoto in your medical practice

Providing automated reminders can have several benefits for your patients and your practice. Here are a few benefits of using Apptoto:

Enhanced patient outcome: As a healthcare practitioner, one of your foremost goals is to help your patient improve their overall quality of life. Using automated message reminders can significantly improve patient outcomes. Apptoto reminds patients of their upcoming appointments to enhance their show-up rates and reduce missed or canceled appointments. This translates to constant continued care to guarantee desired outcomes.

Reduces cancellation and no-show-up rates: Studies show by sending reminders one to two days before a scheduled appointment, the cancellation and no-show rates reduce by 16%. Apptoto helps place patients’ appointments at the forefront of their minds, thus enhancing show-up rates. 

Decreased outreach costs: In the absence of automated messaging tools, your front desk staff spends a lot of time and resources calling patients to remind them of upcoming appointments instead of focusing on other crucial tasks such as insurance verifications, patient questions, or patient intake forms. This result in decreased productivity and added costs. Using automated message reminders translates to decreased costs related to overtime payments for your overwhelmed staff.

Optimize your patient appointments with the right tools

Scheduling a meeting with your patients might be easy. However, getting them to honor those appointments is not a walk in the park. If your practice operates on an appointment basis, investing in an appointment management system like Apptoto is an effective way to reduce no-show-ups and increase revenue for your practice. Apptoto adapts to your current workflow, helping enhance patient communication, improve outcomes and boost your profits. If you have further questions or need help integrating Apptoto, contact us today.

Posted by Virginia K. Stockstill

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