As an independent pediatrician in private practice, you know patient recalls are essential for meeting quality benchmarks as well as revenue generation. Patient recalls in pediatrics enable preventative care and screening, contributing to customer retention and revenues.
While sick visits focus on one illness, well-child visits include:
- The whole body
- The child's development
- Immunization
- Screening
- Laboratory tests
These visits generate significantly more revenue than the visits for a specific complaint.
Preventative care is essential for your practice to score well on performance measures such as the Patient-Centered Medical Home (PCMH) Recognition. Well-child visits are an indispensable part of pediatric care, often uncovering developmental, orthopedic, hearing, vision, or abuse issues.
Reminders about vaccination improve the uptake of vaccines and protect children against diseases. Providing these valuable services helps customer retention and improves your bottom line.
Patient Recalls Enhance Patient Engagement
Patient engagement is valuable for the wellbeing of your practice and depends on:
- Good communication
- Patient education
- Shared decision-making
- Improving access by leveraging technology
Parents of a sick child are often too anxious to respond to these efforts; they work far better during well-child visits.
Reaching out to patients to schedule visits makes them feel cared for and improves their loyalty to your practice. Such visits provide parents the opportunity to get answers to their concerns about their child, reducing the likelihood of their turning to unreliable and harmful information.
Scheduling Benefits
Sick child visits can't be predicted and are often urgent in nature. Well-child patient recall visits can be planned, allowing you to fill up your vacant appointment slots. Concentrating on patient recalls and well-child visits ensures you have few or no gaps in your schedule.
You can also avoid the rush for well-child visits just before school begins every year. Spreading them out over the summer frees your schedule, allowing you the luxury of unhurried, detailed evaluations.
7 Ways to Recall Patients
1. Good Old-Fashioned Phone Calls. A direct phone call remains one of the best ways to get patients on your appointment book. People may see phone calls as annoying, but most parents welcome calls from their pediatrician, especially when they're reminders about needed care.
These calls will take up staff time, and you may need to employ a part-time employee specifically for this purpose. However, the additional visits booked will pay for the staff expenses many times over.
2. Electronic Notifications. Your email program will let you automate email reminders, sending out recall visit reminders at your chosen dates and times. Your pediatric electronic health record (pediatric EHR) may have a patient portal that includes messaging. You can also use text messages with patients who opt-in for it.
3. Letters and Flyers. Personalized snail mail letters to each patient effectively communicate the need for a visit. Each letter can have age-appropriate information about the child's needs and what will be done at the visit.
You can also suggest that parents write down their questions so that no concerns are left out during the visit. These letters are also a useful opportunity to inform your patients about additional or new services at your clinic.
4. The Doctor in the Examination Room. No patient should leave the clinic without their next appointment. Whether they've come for a sick child visit or a well-child one, you should always tell them when the child needs to be assessed next. Doctors are more effective than other staff in getting patients to make the next appointment while in the clinic.
5. Staff Sensitization. Train every patient-facing staff member and those who answer phones to check if a patient is due for a well-child visit. Each time a patient calls the clinic or visits for any reason, their next well-visit should be scheduled.
6. Meet Your Patients' Scheduling Needs. Parents appreciate convenient appointments for well-child visits. Consider adding after-hours time slots exclusively for scheduled well-child visits. You needn't work longer hours. You can often find a pediatrician looking for part-time work.
7. Patient Retention. As children grow older, they may switch to a different clinician without informing you. You can prevent this by talking to parents of older children and offering to switch their care to another clinician in your clinic.
Preparing for Your Patient Recall Effort
You won't be able to handle your entire patient list all at once, so select who to contact first. Patients with severe chronic conditions and those who are long overdue for a well-child visit could come first. Your pediatric EHR is a valuable resource. Use it to generate lists of children with specific diagnoses, at-risk children, those with monitoring needs, and so on.
You should also consider contacting patients with the best-paying insurance early. You can use the revenue to hire additional staff and pediatricians for your patient recall plan.
You'll need room in your schedule to accommodate the additional visits generated. Extending your hours and employing additional clinicians may be necessary. Planning far ahead is key as older children need an annual visit. And opening your schedule a year ahead lets them schedule their next appointment before leaving.
Patient recall is a valuable part of pediatric practice management. You'll need to switch your strategy from time to time — for example, phone calls one year to emails the next — as people stop paying attention to repetitive reminders. The options for an effective patient recall strategy are plentiful, and including them in your clinic's workflow will increase quality of care, patient satisfaction, and your revenues.
