The Importance of Reminder Systems in the Healthcare Industry

Reminder systems in the healthcare industry serve a crucial role for managing appointments and helping patients avail timely treatment. Missed appointments can impact upon the health of patients and their final treatment outcome and also leads to inefficiency in resource usage and allocation for the healthcare provider.

An automated reminder system can help patients increase their rates of preventive screening tests. The Health care providers can increase their potential to improve patient safety and can have a significant impact on preventive services such as cervical and breast cancer, and colon cancer screening. As of today most health care providers have successfully adopted an electronic health record (EHR) system but are still struggling to manage pre-emptive or preventive treatment which can be significantly improved by choosing a system that can enhance the tracking and reminder process.

The Automated Reminder System

Incepta helped develop an automated Reminder Management system for a leading healthcare provider in Canada. The system plugs into the exiting Appointment Scheduling application and makes automated calls to patients via cloud based IVR system, tracks the responses and updates the appointment system with the data received.

The call process is repeated for patients from whom no response has been received or has made an invalid selection. The data is updated back into the appointment scheduler system. This process goes on till all data is synced and up-to-date or a new batch of appointments are received.

The automated reminder system does not require any additional modification to existing systems or workflow. It connects directly with the existing applications and updates the data real-time thus removing the time and effort require to update re-scheduling data manually. The system is flexible to be added with other add-on features like text reminders or connecting with other third party calendar and scheduling cloud softwares.

The RMS application was build on DOT NET Framework that could automatically import csv list of callers and perform data sanitization before creating a caller list queue and connecting with the Truilio Cloud VOIP platform to make calls.

The call process is repeated for patients from whom no response has been received or has made an invalid selection. The data is updated back into the appointment scheduler system. This process goes on till all data is synced and up-to-date or a new batch of appointments are received.

Reminder System Automation and its Benefits for the Healthcare Provider

Another key benefit from the point of view of the healthcare provider is the time and cost savings required to follow-up on missed appointments. On an average a tele-caller has to spend close to 4-6 hrs a day to call and update appointment schedules which can cost nearly CAD 1600 and above monthly on an average. An automated reminder system driven by a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) process can not only make the process more productive and efficient but can cut down costs as much as 90%. This can bring tremendous benefits not only to the provider but also for the patients.