How Online Scheduling Improves Patient Acquisition

With all due respect to House of the Dragon, the most high-stakes battle being waged at present is the fight for new patients among local rehab therapists. Sure, maybe there’s less chance of a gruesome death, but you’re still fighting for the future of your own house, and looking to rally people to your cause. And while you don’t have mythic beasts from Old Valyria to help in the art of persuasion, you have some tools at your disposal to convince patients to pledge themselves to your practice.

Online scheduling is a seemingly small tool that can play an outsized role in your efforts to attract a slew of new patients—especially direct-access patients. Here’s how adopting a better scheduling workflow can help you keep your calendar filled and your maesters—er, clinicians—busy.  

Improve your first impression.

It’s a well-worn saying, but nevertheless true: First impressions are everything. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a patient looking for a PT. They do a Google search after work for PTs in the area and land on your site—only to find that they need to wait until the morning to call during business hours. They use their break the next day to call your front desk, only to be left on hold while your staff is dealing with other patients. And when they’re finally able to get through, they have to figure out on the spot if the appointment on offer works with their schedule—without the chance to consult their calendar. 

If that’s the hassle required to schedule an appointment, that patient will be left to wonder how much of a headache the rest of their PT experience might be, and start to wonder if they should look elsewhere for care—or skip it entirely.  Online scheduling gives you the chance to show patients just how smoothly your practice runs and just how painless it can be for them to get the care they need—at least until it comes to actual treatment. (Unfortunately, there’s nothing to be done about that.) 

Don’t give patients the chance to rethink their decision.

There are a lot of times when the opportunity to sit with a decision does some good, like that time you thought about getting a tattoo of a band that ended up being a one-hit-wonder. (You’re still not sure why they didn’t make it.) Getting needed care shouldn’t be one of those instances for your patients — which is why you want to take a bulldozer to every potential barrier to them entering the front doors of your clinic. For a start, your website should make a compelling case for why a patient needs physical therapy, and why your practice is the one they should trust to provide it. But like any sale, you don’t want to give patients a reason to reconsider their decision. 

There are a few basic things you can do to ease them along the decision process — your locations(s), hours of operation, and the types of insurance you take are essential pieces of information a potential patient wants—but perhaps nothing is more important than giving them the ability to act on their decision at the moment. Think about it—every ad we see on our phones or computers provides us with a button we can click right then and there to buy the product on sale.  That’s because those companies know that the longer someone wants, the less likely they are to take action. 

Rehab therapy might not be exactly like other businesses, but you are selling a valuable service to a customer base that might not feel the same urgency to act in a day or even an hour. Offering easy, real-time online scheduling on your website will help you convert more of that traffic into actual appointments on the book—critical for practices trying to make the most of their marketing.      

Let your front office staff connect with patients.  

The human connection is an undeniable part of the healthcare experience — and it’s not just your providers who can offer it. Online scheduling and your website more broadly may be the digital aspect of a patient’s first impression, but your front office staff can be the more impactful initial touch point with patients as they walk in the door. 

Truth be told, we’ve all been on the end of a poor front office experience — a clipboard thrust in our hand, a finger directing us to the lobby area where we’re meant to fill out forms we don’t fully understand, a long wait til we’re summoned back to get treatment.  No practice is setting out to create a poor front office experience, but the demands placed on staff there can necessitate that they devote more of their attention to talking on the phone with other potential patients, payers, referring physicians, and others. 

Online scheduling isn’t just about making things easier for patients; it’s also about freeing up your front office to focus on patients, whether that’s welcoming them in, scheduling a follow-up appointment, or settling a bill. Online scheduling (along with tools like digital patient intake and electronic benefit verification) takes all the tedious work out of their hands and speeds up the entire process — helping you get rid of clipboards entirely and cutting their phone time down to a minimum. 

Get Online Scheduling Today 

The rehab therapy profession is as competitive as it’s ever been, as financial realities make the fight for new patients as fierce as a fight for the throne. In order to keep up with patient expectations—as well as the practice across town—you need to leverage every tool at your disposal to simplify the care process. With real-time online scheduling,  you’re throwing open your practice’s digital front door and eliminating a pain point for staff and patients alike.