Bridging the Gap: Integrating Appointment Reminders with Patient Reactivation

In a world where your patients’ attention is constantly diverted by outside responsibilities and obligations, it’s no surprise that some medical appointments get missed. While most patients don’t intentionally miss appointments, they often fail to realize how even one absence negatively impacts their health outcomes and their practice’s bottom line. In some cases, these patients never book another appointment and slip right through the cracks of their busy practice. Though following through with attending the appointments and avoiding inactivity ultimately comes down to the patient, healthcare practices have the unique responsibility of implementing effective engagement strategies to promote compliance with both their active and inactive patients. This blog explores how integrating reminders for appointments with effective patient reactivation strategies can enhance customer retention efforts and ultimately, bridge the gap in patient care. 

The Limitations of Appointment Reminders

In today’s modern healthcare industry, implementing automated appointment reminders has become more of a necessity than a mere luxury. With no-show and cancellation rates trending close to 30 percent nationwide, these missed appointments cost the healthcare industry billions of dollars every year. One study even estimates that practices lose $200 per no-show. Any healthcare professional could tell you from personal experience that missed appointments are costly for everyone involved, often resulting in diminished health outcomes for the patients and reduced revenue and efficiency for the practice. For this reason, appointment reminder software has become a staple in modern healthcare practices for streamlining patient communication and ensuring patients show up for their appointments. 

While appointment reminders play an important role as the first line of defense for combatting missed appointments and retaining customers, some patients still manage to slip through the cracks. This attrition could be for many reasons, including general forgetfulness, health literacy, socioeconomic factors, availability, and more; on the other hand, some practices have ineffective patient reminder systems and still rely on manual staff calls to notify of upcoming visits, despite the process being time-consuming and outdated compared to automated outreach. Healthcare professionals know that some attrition is a natural byproduct of running a successful practice; however, many practices don’t employ effective strategies to win back their lost patients, resulting in decreased patient compliance and diminished returns. 

The Power of Patient Reactivation

Often confused with patient appointment reminders or recalls, patient reactivation is the process of identifying patients lost or overdue from needed care and employing strategic, targeted outreach to bring them back for treatment. Though inactive patient characteristics can differ between specialties, patients are considered “lost” when they’ve been absent from treatment past the recommended return date for their diagnosis and have no pending appointment or recall scheduled to bring them back. Patient reactivation is the last step in the retention process and acts as the “safety net” for if your initial retention efforts fail. 

Every successful practice has patients that have slipped through the cracks; in fact, Brevium estimates that 25 percent of practices’ patients are overdue for essential care, amounting to around 1,000 to 2,000 patients per provider. Though your patients may have fallen out of compliance, patient reactivation is the tool that ensures they don’t stay missing from treatment. Reactivating lost patients represents a huge area of opportunity for patients and practices alike:

How Patient Reactivation Benefits Patients:

• Enhances compliance with needed treatment, leading to enhanced patient health outcomes and greater quality of life.
• Increases patient satisfaction and improves the overall healthcare experience.
• Aims to prevent chronic disease or disability.
• Engages patients to actively participate in their healthcare and collaborate with their care providers to craft a treatment plan unique to the patient. 

How Patient Reactivation Benefits Practices: 

• Boosts ROI and organizational bottom line, allowing practices to efficiently access an untapped revenue stream while expending less resources. 
• Drives organic practice growth more than any other engagement process.
• Encourages patient loyalty and repeat business, leading to enhanced growth.
• Cheaper to reactivate lost patients than market to new customers. 
• Fuels greater appointment volume, resulting in optimized provider schedules and no money left on the table.

Best Strategies for Effective Patient Reactivation

Successfully reactivating your overdue patients requires a comprehensive and strategic approach that goes beyond appointment reminders and recalls. In this section, we’ll discuss the best strategies for effective patient reactivation and later, pinpoint where automated appointment reminders fall in the patient lifecycle:

Patient Segmentation

Patient segmentation is an essential step in your patient reactivation campaign, as the process allows your practice to tailor engagement efforts around its highest-priority patients. Reactivating patients at random or attempting to re-engage them all at once gets you nowhere; rather, practices should craft their reactivation campaigns around the patient segments that will help them reach their goals. Here are three common ways Brevium customers segment patients to drive practice growth, optimize scheduling and improve patient health outcomes:

• Utilizing ICD-10 and CPT codes to target patients with diagnoses or conditions that will likely lead to surgical procedures. 
• Reactivating patients to fill slots in a specific doctor or location’s schedule.
• Prioritizing high-risk patients with threatening conditions (i.e. cancer). 

Personalized Patient Care & Communication

Personalized communication is all about leveraging your patient’s unique data (i.e. medical history, communication preferences, demographics, lifestyle factors) to tailor messages and outreach to their individual needs. When patients feel like just another number, even the smallest inconvenience could mean losing their business to a competitor. Rather than sending generic reactivation messages, practices should be intentional with how they communicate with their patients and what information they include. Using clear, consistent language and tone across your communications, address your patient’s specific reason for lapsing along with the provider and location requesting their return. Further, personalized communication also means meeting patients where they’re at by using their preferred outreach methods. Consider investing in digital reactivation tools like Brevium that allow you to customize communications to your inactive patients and send these messages through varied communication channels; after all, your patient messaging strategy could be the difference between a failed contact attempt and a scheduled appointment.  

Automated Patient Outreach with Live Staff Calls

Technological breakthroughs and advanced digital tools have revolutionized the healthcare industry in recent years, having become a staple in helping healthcare practices automate patient communication and streamline time-consuming tasks. Automated patient outreach is essentially a nonnegotiable tool for practices looking to send timely, relevant communications to patients on a larger scale without overwhelming staff. However, Brevium finds that the most successful patient reactivation strategies not only include automated outreach, but also live staff calls; in fact, not only are staff calls are the single most effective contact method for returning lost patients to your practice, but they also maintain effectiveness over subsequent uses. 

Multi-Channel Communication

Brevium’s 2019 ALOHA study found that text messaging and emails were the two least effective patient reactivation methods, yet many practices exclusively use these channels expecting to yield successful returns. Because of factors like patient demographics or outdated data, many patients don’t have text-friendly phone numbers or reachable emails; in fact, Brevium’s research concludes that 30 percent of overdue patients remain uncontacted when practices use text and email as the only communication methods. However, texts and emails can be highly effective when used in tandem with outreach methods that have a higher reachability (i.e. staff calls, autocalls, postcards, letters). Not only will reaching out four to five times using multiple contact methods potentially increase patient reactivation rates by 81 percent, but Brevium also found that using even three different outreach channels in your communication strategy will reach more than 95 percent of your lost and overdue patients. 

Leverage Data Analytics to Refine Strategy

From the very first contact sent, your practice generates data that is invaluable for the success of your patient reactivation campaign. While the data in its raw form can be overwhelming, investing in a software solution to track certain metrics and compile reports is crucial for spotting trends, identifying weak spots and determining the overall effectiveness of your reactivation strategy. This insight is imperative for making educated decisions on how to adjust your reactivation campaign and fuel greater returns. Here are the main metrics practices should track to measure the success of a patient reactivation campaign: 

• Contacts sent
• Communication channels used
• Appointments scheduled
• Appointments kept
• Total revenue generated
• ROI
• Patient conversion rate

Integrating Appointment Reminders with Patient Reactivation Strategies in the Patient Lifecycle

So, you’ve successfully used these patient reactivation strategies to get patients back on your schedule. Now what? This step is where patient appointment reminders come back into the picture. Implementing an effective patient reminder system will keep your patients engaged until their appointment and reduces the risk of no-shows or cancellations. With Brevium, the reminder technology adopts a multifaceted approach to patient engagement that ensures patients are returned to your practice for their scheduled appointments. Using strategies similar to patient reactivation, the software implements the following features to proactively engage patients and keep your practice and their appointments top-of-mind: 

• Tracks patient communication preference to ensure patients receive appointment reminders through the channels they prefer. Brevium offers autocalls, text/SMS, emails, and postcard reminder options to accommodate a wide range of communication preferences. 
• Customized templates that allow practices to personalize their patient appointment reminders to include appointment type or reason, care provider, and treatment location. Brevium keeps consistent tone and language in all its messaging, so patients know exactly who the message is from and what is required of them. 
• Advanced reporting tools that provide valuable insights into the types of reminders sent, the effectiveness of each engagement type, patient responses and feedback, and patient status. Essentially, Brevium uses these key metrics to let practices know who is being contacted and if they are keeping their appointments. 
• Sends multiple reminders on multiple days at different times to guarantee patients see at least one reminder.  

Bridging the Gap with Brevium

Effective patient retention is the lifeline of any successful medical practice; after all, most of a practice’s business is made up of loyal, repeat customers. However, allowing patients to fall off the treatment cycle not only interferes with the effectiveness of their care plan, but also impedes retention efforts and hinders practice growth. Brevium’s unique patient reactivation software was developed with the sole purpose of bridging this gap in patient care, using its patented technology to go beyond failed retention efforts and strategically re-engage your thousands of patients who never responded to your appointment reminders and recalls. Here are five key ways Brevium’s inimitable technology mends the patient care gap and drives greater returns: 

1. Data-Driven Patient Reactivation: Brevium’s reactivation strategy isn’t arbitrary or random, but rather a strategic process backed and refined by data and research. By integrating Brevium’s patented, data-driven reactivation technology with their practice management systems, practices can access the best tools to effectively reactivate overdue patients and fill their schedules with the highest-priority cases—all while streamlining tedious workflows and optimizing practice performance. Here are the main ways Brevium uses data-driven strategies to ensure a successful patient reactivation campaign:
   • Implements automated patient outreach with optional live caller program.
   • Contacts patients multiple times through varied communication channels over an extended period (i.e. staff calls, autocalls, text/SMS, email, postcards, and letters), increasing patient reactivation rates by 81 percent. 
   • Prioritizes patients based on disease state and insurance acceptance, ensuring optimal scheduling and patient care.
   • Utilizes advanced reporting tools to give insight into the overall success of a patient reactivation campaign. The software offers in-depth, detailed reports on important reactivation metrics including contacts sent, utilized outreach channels, appointments booked and kept, revenue generated, ROI, and patient conversion rate. Essentially, Brevium customers can generate reports on almost any step of the patient reactivation process, empowering these practices with actionable, data-backed insight for informed decision-making.

2. Maximizes Revenue Potential: Customers often report experiencing greater patient returns with Brevium than any other specialty software; in fact, it’s common for Brevium customers to see a 25x ROI for their patient reactivation efforts—meaning they receive $25 in return for every $1 paid to Brevium. One of the most common ways Brevium customers use the software to generate revenue and fuel practice growth is by prioritizing patients who likely need additional visits and procedures to address their conditions. Brevium’s technology accomplishes this feat by using ICD-10 and CPT codes to mine your practice management system for high-risk and high-value patients—allowing your practice to focus reactivation efforts on the highest-priority patients. 

3. Improves Patient Care: Using proven patient reactivation strategies, Brevium helps practices re-engage their inactive patients to once again become active participants in their own healthcare journeys. Brevium understands how noncompliance negatively affects patients, often leading to worsened patient disease states, reduced quality of life and increased need for reactive medical treatments in the future. For this reason, Brevium prioritizes patient disease state to help practices identify and target high-risk patients in need of essential preventative care. Brevium customers often see patients schedule from the very first day they go live with the software. Brevium’s unrivaled ability to identify, engage and reactivate at-risk patients is paramount for improving patient compliance, giving practices the best tools to enhance health outcomes and deliver higher quality care. 

4. Optimizes Practice Scheduling and Performance: Practices can optimize scheduling through Brevium’s Busyness Report—a report that simplifies practice scheduling metrics and provider “busyness” to help organizations make logical, data-driven decisions for increased growth and profitability. This patient scheduling tool is invaluable for practices looking to bridge the gap in patient care, as it helps practices know where they can accommodate more patients without overwhelming the providers and staff. Linking to your practice management system, the Busyness Report provides metrics on:
   • Weekly appointment volume by provider
   • New patient ratio
   • No-show rates
   • Average time between booking and appointment
   • Overscheduling statistics
   • Appointments per hour

• 5. Consolidates Reminders, Recalls and Reactivations: Perhaps one of the biggest ways Brevium bridges the care gap is by consolidating patient engagement tools onto one system. Rather than jumping between platforms for appointment reminders, recalls and patient reactivation, Brevium offers a comprehensive solution that takes a proactive approach with your patients, encouraging them to attend scheduled appointments or book visits when they’re due. This strategic approach helps your patients stay committed to their treatment plans and engages them well before they become inactive. If your patients fail to respond to your reminder and recall attempts, Brevium’s patented reactivation tools act as a “safety net” to ensure your patients don’t remain out of compliance. 

Patient retention is vital for both the wellness of your patients and the financial health of your medical business. While appointment reminders are essential for retaining an active patient base, a more comprehensive engagement strategy that includes patient reactivation is needed to catch those that have slipped through the cracks. As the care providers, it’s a practice’s responsibility to remember their patients and remind them of the impact that regular, continual care could have on their quality of life. With effective patient reactivation strategies, you prioritize your patients’ care and keep them compliant with treatment vital to boosting health outcomes. By integrating patient appointment reminders with these reactivation strategies, practices can close the gap in patient care and keep patients consistent with their treatment plans. Through Brevium’s patented patient reactivation technology, practices can consolidate their appointment reminder, recall and reactivation efforts to one system—ultimately, acting as your partner in growth as you drive greater returns and deliver exceptional care experiences.