Ease your patient's scheduling pain using appointment booking software

If you've ever had to schedule a doctor's appointment, you know the drill. You call the office and hope to god that they have an opening at a time that works for you. If not, you schedule an appointment and then try to remember to cancel or reschedule it. It's a pain. But what if there was a way to make the process easier? What if there was software that allowed patients to book their own appointments?

If you manage a medical practice, you know how important it is to keep track of appointments. Not only do you need to make sure that patients are seen in a timely manner, but you also want to be able to offer them the best possible care. That's where appointment booking software comes in.

This type of software can help you keep track of all your appointments in one place, as well as remind patients of their upcoming appointments. This can help reduce the number of no-shows and ensure that everyone gets the care they need.

What's more, appointment booking software can help you streamline your scheduling process so that it takes less time and effort. This can free up your staff to focus on other tasks, such as providing patient care.

Appointment booking software can help Practices save time and money by reducing the number of missed appointments. Overall, using appointment booking software can have a positive impact on your medical practice.

As you know not everyone is comfortable using an email address. Think about people in the informal sectors, retired professionals who are not net savvy. For them, it will be friction if they are asked to book appointments using only an email address.

A mobile number has come to be widely accepted as a mode of customer identification in the mobile-first digital world. The flexibility to book an appointment using a mobile number or email address without the back and forth reduces the booking friction for the customers and makes the process much simpler for everyone involved.

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The features of appointment booking software to look for

When you’re running a medical practice, it’s important to have appointment booking software that can make your life easier. Here are some of the features you should look for in an appointment booking software:

1. The ability to schedule appointments quickly and easily.
2. The flexibility to book appointments using a mobile number or email address without the back and forth.
3. A user-friendly interface that patients and doctors can both use.
4. Integrations with other software programs that your medical practice uses.
5. A system that sends SMS/WhatsApp/Email reminders to both patients and doctors about upcoming appointments.
6. The ability to track no-shows and cancellations.
7. Detailed reporting features so you can see how your appointment booking system is performing.
8. Flexible pricing options to fit your budget.

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tRecommended Appointment Booking Software for medical practice

We think Leadmonk is the truly versatile appointment scheduling software available in the market for the following reasons:

• Reduce booking friction by giving the flexibility to your patients to self-schedule online/in-person appointments using their mobile number or email address for consultations without the back-and-forth messages or emails.
• Patients can schedule or reschedule appointments easily online 24/7.
• Minimize no-shows with the help of automated email, SMS, and WhatsApp notifications/reminders.
• Provision to make each event type behave as a standalone calendar for free-busy availability check instead of checking the connected calendar. This avoids the need to have multiple Leadmonk user accounts or multiple calendars. This is helpful for a multi-specialty clinic.
• Give multiple meeting location options such as Google Meet, Zoom, MS Teams, and Physical location to patients. At the time of appointment booking, the patient can choose his/her preferred location.
• It integrates natively with G-Suite, Google Calendar, Google Meet, Outlook, Office365 Calendar, MS Teams, Zoom, and other popular business apps to support your business in a wide range of prospect and patient scheduling scenarios.
• Automatic time zone detection and lead time setting for appointment booking,
• Collect payments using Stripe.
• Collect required details using custom intake forms at the time of appointment booking.

Pricing

• Basic Plan: Free-forever plan when you just want the basics
• Professional Plan - $8/user/month (annual plan) - When you need advanced scheduling features

Follow the below steps in Leadmonk to set up your multi-specialty clinic’s booking page where appointments are managed centrally and not by individual doctors:

1. Create an event type for each of the specialist doctors visiting the clinic.
2. Customize each event type by adding the doctor's details [name, specialization, experience in years, etc.], updating the doctor's availability [using availability profile], appointment duration, and appointment mode [online/in-person].
3. Add invitee questions to the event type [if required] to collect the details you want from patients as part of the appointment booking.
4. Add email/SMS/WhatsApp reminders to the event type to reduce no-shows.

Publish your booking page wherever clients find you - Embed Leadmonk on your website or Add Leadmonk to your emails, text messages, WhatsApp, or social media profiles.

You can easily see the appointment history of a patient in Leadmonk – you can filter appointments by name/email address/mobile number/appointment type. You can also export appointments to an excel file for further analysis.

Below is one sample booking page created for a multi-specialty clinic.

As you can see here, patients can see the Doctor’s name and specialization to book appointments directly from the booking page.

Here each doctor’s availability is independent of other doctors’ availability and appointments are booked per doctor (i.e. @event type level) based on his/her availability (connected calendar is not referred for free/busy check as the connected calendar is at the clinic level and not at the appointment type level). No double booking happens at the doctor [@ event type] level here.

Followed the below steps to create the above sample booking page:

1. Created event types for each doctor visiting the clinic. Customized each event type by adding the doctor's details, appointment duration, and appointment mode [online/in-person].
2. Created availability profiles with the doctor’s name [for easy identification] and maintained his/her availability in that profile for consultation. Then specified this availability profile in the relevant event types created earlier.
3. In the “Availability Preferences” section of the event type, the “Standalone” option was selected. This option lets the event type behave as a standalone calendar for free-busy availability checks while showing open appointment slots to the patients. In this case, a connected google calendar is used to just add appointments to the calendar and not for availability checks.

• As patients generally book appointments using their mobile number, I chose “Mobile Number” as the invitee preference to book an appointment. In one event type, I choose the “Mobile number or Email” option and in another one, I chose the “Mobile number and Email” option [mainly for representation purposes.].

• I added SMS/WhatsApp reminders to the event type to reduce no-shows. You can make use of workflow also to manage invitee notifications.

You can clone the event type to quickly create new ones with minimal changes such as name, description, and availability profile.

You can add a Leadmonk booking page to your website [using the “Add to Website” option in the Leadmonk] to let your clients book directly from your webpage. A booking/scheduling page can be added to the website through the embed inline option or as a floating button to the website that opens a popup.