The healthcare business is very time-sensitive. From patients appointments and timely administration of medicines to scheduling tests and ensuring adherence to a diet plan, everything needs to go according to a predetermined schedule. That is why it makes eminent sense for this sector to consider leveraging the power of a meetings scheduler. Fortunately, there is a large number of meetings scheduler like Schedule.cc that the healthcare industry can use to its tremendous advantage.

This Tweet makes that amply clear.

.@CMSGov’s #BlueButton 2.0 apps provide you w/ new & improved ways to manage & improve your #healthcare. Need to make an appointment or connect w/ your healthcare provider? The apps can do that! Check them out here: https://t.co/EHxkZVzHGq

— Administrator Seema Verma (@SeemaCMS) April 16, 2019

That being stated, one does need to choose the app that one intends to use for this purpose with care. Choosing the meeting planner for the healthcare business requires that we take a few important things into consideration. Let's look at what these might be.

5 Tips to Help Choose A Meeting Planner

1. Effortless and Seamless Scheduling of Meetings/Appointments

There is no point in using an appointment scheduling app that involves too much sending and receiving of mails. It should rather be effortless and intuitive. You should be able to perform your daily scheduling activities with utmost convenience- the more effortless, the better. If the application can be accessed through a variety of mobile devices running on iOS or Android as well as on different web browsers, you would be able to seamlessly schedule your meetings and appointments from anywhere.

2. Can Schedule Time for Large Groups of People

A large healthcare facility often needs to schedule time for a very large number of staff, many of whom like ambulance drivers work remotely. Your meetings and appointment scheduling software should be able to take care of the time management of all such people very efficiently.

There is a lot that a well-stacked scheduling app can help accomplish in healthcare organizations that have a large staff. This encompasses functions like, issue tracking, action item tracking, time tracking and timesheets, collaboration tools, resource management, portfolio management, and even ideas management.

3. Compatibility with Gmail, Google Calendar, Microsoft Calendar, and Associated Apps

Gmail and Google Calendar are universally used tools and a meeting planner software being used by a healthcare facility would be certainly an asset if it can sync with these tools, Then there's a huge user base that uses Microsoft calendar and Microsoft apps who would like their meeting app to tie in with those.

Most of a healthcare business’s daily tasks are organized via meeting planners spread across myriad devices. It is critically important that all appointments and tasks are easily visible and kept updated across all devices like notebooks, smartphones, and tabs. If scheduling apps are compatible across multiple platforms, it makes things so much easier for businesses with a large number of employees.

An ideal meeting planner for such a situation would perform across desktop, iOS, and Apple displaying hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual views connecting them with digital calendars like Google, Apple, and Outlook. Additionally, it could feature the ability to not just customize the look of the calendar but also seamlessly integrate it with business tools like sales and marketing platforms, video conferencing, and so on.

It could also allow calendar and even sharing at the individual level. The calendar could, for instance, be embedded on one’s website allowing for convenient customer scheduling.

4. Affordability

Not all healthcare facilities are large and elaborate affairs that require a very feature-rich meeting app. Quite a few of these are quite small who would like to use a meeting app that is quite functional yet does not cost too much. Among the better-known free meeting planner apps are Square Appointments, Acuity Scheduling, 10to8, Appointy, MeetFox, SimplyBook, Appointlet, and so on.

Of course, free apps are not the only way open to healthcare facilities and some of them may want to use resources that offer more, specifically from a healthcare industry point of view. Insta by Practo for example is a customized hospital and clinical management software that helps a hospital or clinic to seamlessly and flawlessly run their clinical, financial, and operational processes. It is great at things like appointment scheduling, patient registration, ADT (admission discharge and transfer). Bed Management and Patient Communication.

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5. Special Characteristics

Healthcare facilities possess unique scheduling needs that an online meetings scheduler must be attuned to. This is particularly true of facilities that are based at multiple locations and cater to a large number of staff and patients. The choice of the scheduling software should be able to meet these special requirements of the healthcare center.

6. Security

Considering the fact that the healthcare sector has to conform to HIPAA compliance, the security being offered by the meeting planner has to be out of the top drawer. The best ones provide the latest security measures to ensure top-grade security to all the confidential information being handled by the app.

Advantages of Meeting Planners to the Healthcare Industry

1. Enhance Patient Bookings

More patients equal more revenue for a healthcare facility. A digital meetings scheduler can simplify the booking process for the patients. A client facing customizable scheduling tool can greatly enhance patient bookings. One can share one’s work calendar with the patients and the available time slots, which are constantly updated in real-time. This enables the patients to conveniently select a time slot that suits them best. Using such a system ensures that instances of double booking are avoided and there are fewer no-shows.

2. Empowering Patients

Nothing aggravates a patient more than waiting to be attended to at a medical facility. Deploying scheduling technology can help speed up the process and provide better outcomes to patients.

It does that by promoting smooth and seamless communication between healthcare providers and receivers. Furthermore, it enables healthcare staff to work more intimately with their patients and provide them with better insight into their condition. This proves to be a very empowering experience for patients, who are now able to make very informed choices about what works best for them.

3. Meeting Planners Help Grow Healthcare Business

One of the most significant causes for the loss of patients in the healthcare sector is an account of missed appointments leading to poor health outcomes. This is equally true of hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, dentists, chiropractors, and so on. By smoothing out that process meeting planner apps are able to give a leg up to a business, by enhancing the number of patients treated. That apart, timely treatment leads to better outcomes leading to more customer referrals.

According to Johan Stevens, CEO, Keas, "The irony of reducing waste and improving the health of the employer-sponsored population - for over 100 million Americans - is that it's not a health problem, but rather a marketing and IT problem.”

The Importance of Appointment Scheduling can Hardly be Underestimated.

Let’s Look at the Main Reasons as to Why that is

1. Enhancement of Staff Productivity

The traditional way of making phone calls to confirm medical appointments is a very cumbersome and inefficient process.

You can better utilize the time of your staff by putting in place an automated scheduling software that will enable patients to set up appointments, as well as receive reminders, leaving them free to take care of more pressing matters with the help of best appointment scheduling solution for the healthcare indusutry available.

2. More Efficient Front Office

Phone call scheduling ties down your front office from carrying out their principal duties efficiently. They tend to get distracted leading to errors that may prove to be costly for business. There are so many important functions like greeting patients, attending to their queries and helping the patients with processing their forms that are impacted by constantly having to attend to calls. An efficient appointment scheduling system sets them free to focus on their core duties.

3. Improved Patient Satisfaction

improving the match between the resources available and the patients’ requirements a good scheduling system reduces wait time for patients leading to improved outcomes for patients, which in turn leads to increased patient satisfaction levels.

4. Monetary Advantage

The fact that using a meeting planner helps healthcare facilities optimize their level of services and eliminate wastage of time is something that leads to monetary savings which can only augur well for their bottom line.

5. 24x7 Service

The fact that you can use an automated meeting planner round the clock works wonderfully well in the healthcare scenario where a patient may require care at any given time. This again contributes towards enhancing the goodwill for a healthcare facility.

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6. Centralization of Systems

Quite a few of the specialist healthcare appointment scheduling systems not only carry out better patient management but also benefit from being able to centrally manage patient health records. That contributes greatly to enhancing patient outcomes

Hospitals, clinics, and all manner of healthcare centers are looking at digitizing their meeting/ appointment planning systems in a major way across the world. No longer is it a question of whether, but when all of them make the move. The healthcare centres that lag behind in this will greatly lag behind in their business as well.

Going beyond merely the business aspect of it and looking at the societal one the digitization of appointment planning has to be the priority number one in the pandemic times that we are living in. At a time when millions of people are undergoing active medical treatment, and millions of others are being tested, the sheer logistics of setting up all those appointments would be a nightmare but for the help that digital tools are rendering in making the operations involved manageable.

The same can be said about the greatest logistical challenge ever faced by mankind, vaccinating almost the entire population of planet Earth. One is looking at billions of possible appointments here! Choosing the right kind of meeting/appointment scheduling software for that massive exercise are sure going to take some doing.

Of course, COVID-19 is not the only healthcare issue facing mankind. The scope of the deployment of appointment planners is therefore gargantuan. Choosing the best possible tool out of the large number that is available out there has to be done with great care. The tips and suggestions mentioned in this article can be a great help in arriving at that decision.

Conclusion

The fact that these tools are not prohibitively expensive, yet provide a host of cutting edge solutions to the logistical and marketing issues faced by healthcare facilities across the scale makes these eminently practical and deployable. Going forward, one can reasonably expect that practically the entire healthcare sector should be using these digital tools sooner and later.

The advantages that accrue from doing so are way too big for there to be any hesitation and doing so. The fact that we are all undergoing an unprecedented technological revolution that is transforming every aspect of our lives will help speed up this process. With internet and smartphone penetration increasing the way that it is both healthcare practitioners and patients will find it increasingly easy to adopt these tools. It's a win-win situation for both with the former being able to provide better care and the latter would enjoy a greater say in decisions that impact their own health and well-being.