NextPatient solutions: Patient Self-Scheduling, Interactive Reminders, Waitlist, Digital Check-In, Post-Visit Reviews
As a multi-specialty practice, Complete Health Partners provides comprehensive care for patients seeking urgent care, primary care, and sports medicine. Since becoming a NextPatient client in 2018, the practice has eliminated 95% of manual scheduling for front office staff, empowering patients to self-schedule online at any time and freeing staff to focus on higher-value patient care. Nathan Clark, Operations Specialist, shares how NextPatient’s seamless EHR integration with athenahealth helps the practice deliver measurable results and a win-win scenario for patients and staff alike.
What challenges led you to seek out NextPatient?
Our practice opened just a couple of years before the pandemic hit, and the phones just became completely untenable for scheduling. We needed something that would allow patients to self-schedule online and free up the front desk to help with check-in and answer patients’ questions.
What stood out to you about the implementation process?
Implementation set the tone for the ongoing customer support that NextPatient has been really stellar at providing. A lot of vendors set you up, and then you never see or hear from them again, and it's impossible to reach anyone. With NextPatient, we have a specific contact, a client success manager (CSM), who is our champion.
I was not at Complete Health Partners when we initially implemented NextPatient, but we’ve worked through many iterations of schedules where the changes that were made basically amounted to an implementation. For example, our office transitioned to being part of another medical practice, which essentially meant that our entire NextPatient setup had to be reconfigured. Other than announcing that we were part of a new practice, patients wouldn't have known because our CSM helped make the transition so seamless.
What specific features have been most valuable to your practice?
As a multidisciplinary practice with urgent care, primary care, and sports medicine, each discipline has its own separate needs, even though it's all one location. With NextPatient, we’re able to bifurcate our setup so that patients can queue for urgent care walk-in appointments, while also giving primary care patients the ability to pick the kind of appointment they need to schedule and the provider they want to schedule with.
Digital check-in has also been valuable. Outside of the occasional flu consent form or other ad hoc paperwork, 95% of our patients, if not more, never have to touch a piece of paper.
Complete Health Partners has really impressive results, like a 1% no-show rate across locations.
That's NextPatient. The no-show rate is as low as it is because NextPatient not only helps with the booking of the appointment, but they really drive the confirmation. Some systems just constantly remind the patient to the point of nagging. The nice thing with NextPatient is, if you confirm your appointment once, you don't get a message again. If you don't confirm, then you'll continue receiving reminders, and it helps drive patients toward either confirming appointments or canceling — but not no-showing. NextPatient provides a really good balance between those two approaches.
How has NextPatient impacted your team’s daily workflow?
Scheduling is essentially nonexistent in the office now because 95% of our patients are scheduling themselves online. We're seeing hundreds and hundreds of patients a week — that's at least 5 minutes per scheduled appointment. You're looking at hours and hours a week of labor that just isn't there because we have a platform that's letting patients schedule online.
Check-in and registration have also been greatly impacted. The ability to have all of the forms completed and signed before the patient even comes through the door makes the whole process of actually getting patients seen a lot faster. At the end of the day, that's the biggest thing any patient wants, more than any other metric: patients want to get in and get out in as little time as possible, and they want their problem solved. And NextPatient helps accomplish that.
Have there been any unexpected benefits?
One of the unexpected benefits is just the amount of reviews NextPatient drives. It drives everything toward leaving a Google review. For as small of a practice as we are, relative to others in the urgent care, primary care space, we have an excessive amount of reviews, and the majority of those are 5-star reviews. Being able to drive those results has been a great experience. Many vendors are trying to drive patients to leave a review, but I have not seen anyone else be as successful at it as NextPatient.
Was there a specific moment the value of NextPatient became clear to you?
For us, our aha moment was anytime there was a change. Anytime there is a snag or change that comes up, we have a direct contact with NextPatient in our CSM. And whatever the issue is, we're typically getting a response within the hour. Even if we need something super urgently, we have our CSM’s direct line, so we're on the phone and we're getting it fixed immediately. Beyond anything else, that's the biggest win with NextPatient.
What advice would you give to other practice leaders considering a similar solution?
My biggest piece of advice when it comes to choosing a scheduling and registration solution is that there are a lot of products with nice bells and whistles, but it’s really all about the results. Who is getting you the appointments? Who is helping you convert from website visit to appointment to the patient showing up to leaving a 5-star review? For all of the other solutions that we've seen, we've never seen anyone do it quite as well as NextPatient. And at the end of the day, that is what keeps a practice open.