Every industry has its core concepts for effectiveness, income, and customer satisfaction. In real estate, it’s “location, location, location.” In sales, it’s “always be closing.” In therapy it comes down to “Always Be Scheduling.”
A full schedule keeps income steady, employees busy, and patients progressing towards positive outcomes. The key to a full schedule is good communication with therapists and patients and occasionally looking for more opportunities to fill the calendar.
In this post we’ll cover:
- Why schedules end up empty
- Schedule Templates
- Missing in Action Report
- Scripts Fulfilled Report
- Reminder Calls
- Marketing
Why Are Schedules Empty?
If keeping the schedule full is so important, why is it so difficult? Because in service industries like therapy, life happens. The lives of therapists, receptionists, and patients all play a role in keeping the schedule populated.
The problem of empty schedules generally falls into four categories: provider availability, unallocated time slots, patient cancellations, and client base.
While it might be tempting to blame the patient, many empty schedules are actually the result of poor organization and communication. A receptionist can’t fill a slot they don’t know is available. Providers and office managers are the first line of defense against schedule gaps. They own the responsibility for clearly communicating availability and changes to availability.
Empty time slots are a monster of their own. It’s easy to assume there just aren’t enough patients and immediately jump into a marketing campaign. But there are other possibilities worth considering:
- Are all your current patients scheduled? A therapist might have over 100 patients in a month, and it’s easy for some to fall through the cracks.
- Could certain patients benefit from additional visits within their script? For example, a patient initially seen once a week may be open to twice a week as they progress.
Patient cancellations aren’t the biggest reason for open schedules, but they’re certainly the most frustrating. Communicating with patients early and often is the best defense. A confirmation the day before greatly increases turnout, and if a cancellation happens, there’s still time to fill the opening from a waitlist.
Finally, every practice needs a steady flow of new patients to keep the schedule healthy. Lack of referrals is rarely the only cause of downtime, but sending occasional reminders to local care networks, family practices, and hospitals that you’re open for business can meaningfully boost numbers.
Scheduling Templates
QuickEMR provides several tools to keep your schedule running smoothly. Our schedule templates offer dynamic, flexible, and customizable availability.
- Set a default template for the year.
- Override that template for summer months or vacation coverage.
- When the vacation template ends, the schedule automatically reverts to the default template.
- Onboarding a new provider? End the old default template and clone it forward with the new provider built in.
Additional adjustments can be made directly on the daily schedule:
- Block normally open times for meetings.
- Open blocked times if a therapist has extra availability or is picking up some extra shifts.
- Hold openings for new patients who don’t yet have a case set up.
Step one toward a consistently full schedule is complete.
Missing in Action Report
Now it’s time to fill those open slots.
A typical process looks like this: you receive a referral, call the patient, and set up an evaluation. After the evaluation, the provider recommends two visits a week for eight weeks, consistent with the authorization and script. You schedule Mondays and Wednesdays at 2:00 p.m. and everything looks great until it doesn’t.
Maybe the patient changes jobs, cancels future appointments, and promises to call back when things settle down. A week or two passes. That’s where the Missing in Action (MIA) Report shines. It identifies patients who are active but haven’t made it onto the schedule.
A quick call from their favorite receptionist could be all it takes to get them back on track. And it has the excellent benefit of filling that pesky schedule gap.
Scripts Fulfilled Report
Once those lost patients are recovered it’s time to see if any patient has fallen short of their potential. Occasionally a therapist may schedule less visits than a referring physician. This could be a difference in opinion, an intentional reduction to see some progress before ramping up, or an oversight.
In some of these cases it means that patient, and your schedule would benefit from a few more visits. Use the Scripts fulfilled report to see the patients not scheduled to their full potential and discuss with the therapist which of these can be ramped up.
Reminder Calls & The Waitlist
Cancellations are an inevitable side effect of… having patients.
Setting up automated reminder calls can yield an ROI of over 1500%. These reminders, combined with the early feedback you receive from a diligent patient needing to cancel give an excellent opportunity to fill the gaps. Consider a patient cancels after a reminder, now you have time to pull from the waitlist. If the cancelling patient still needs treatment they’re placed on the waitlist for later in the week (or even later the same day).
These cancellations that are normally a source of frustration due to lost therapy time become floating stop gaps that can fill in future holes.
Marketing
The final step is marketing. If patient volume is light, it’s time to be proactive. Use the referrals report to identify providers most likely to send new patients, then strengthen those relationships with a fruit basket or a discounted rate for future referrals.
Collect permission to send marketing texts and emails from every patient that comes in. Now the marketing system can be used to run promotions during slower seasons like summer or winter holidays. This might encourage cash-pay customers to return for another round of therapy or remind past patients with a new concern to request your services again.
Check out how QuickEMR addresses each of these scheduling challenges by signing up for a demo today!