How to Manage Your Therapy Clinic’s Schedule

Juggling all of the patient appointments coming in and out of your clinic is a good problem for any therapy business to have; after all, a full patient load is a goal for any therapy practice looking to turn a healthy profit. That said, trying to keep your physical therapists’ schedules full while managing both patient care and the changing needs of your patients and their own schedules is challenging, to say the least. And for practices with more than one location, that's exponentially more work.

Directing traffic in a physical therapy clinic can make that job feel like putting together a puzzle where all the pieces are constantly in motion. Fortunately, front office staff can now lean on technology to ensure patients are getting seen in a timely manner and clinicians aren’t left with gaps in their schedule as the result of last-minute cancellations. Let’s dive into how online scheduling as part of your practice management software can help you manage your therapy clinic's schedule. 

Leave the phone behind. 

You’re never going to ditch scheduling via calls entirely; as tech-savvy as most people are today, there will always be folks who would sooner call and talk to a person rather than book appointments online. However, those patients are getting fewer and farther between. 

Most patients today prefer to do their appointment scheduling for healthcare (and most other appointments) online via one web-enabled device or another: smartphone, tablet, laptop, or whatever gadget they have handy. Whether you chalk that up to the fact that many patients are busy working during the day, or that people are more comfortable with indirect contact, a self-scheduling tool that patients can easily access should be a part of your public-facing outreach. A lead capture form is nice (although not necessarily HIPAA-compliant), but you don’t want to add extra steps to a patient’s journey; you want them to leave your website with a time slot and date for their first appointment that they can add to their Google Calendar, not a promise that someone will follow-up at some point. It might not seem like it, but online scheduling is another tool in the ongoing work towards access to care.

Improve the patient experience. 

Let’s look at scheduling from another perspective—that of a potential patient. They think they need physical therapy, so they do a bit of Googling and happen upon a practice not too far from their home. So far, so good—except that when they enter that website, there’s no way to see if there’s appointment availability to meet their busy schedule. Sure, they can fill out a form, and there’s a number to call, but chances are they can’t step away from their job long enough to find a time that works and answer all of the questions ahead of their first appointment. 

Instead, they’re backing out of that site and choosing a practice that lets them book an appointment within a few minutes and collects their intake information online. Online scheduling isn’t just a convenience—it’s a competitive advantage over other practices that don’t offer it. And with the right scheduling tool, you’re not just limited to your website; you can insert scheduling links into emails, social media posts, your company blog, or even the QR codes you use for print materials. 

Rehab therapists may be in high demand, but clinicians can’t forget that there’s also competition for every patient in a challenging financial environment. Real-time self-scheduling to help manage your therapy clinic's schedule allows you to stand out from the rest. 

Make sure patients are coming back.

Every physical therapist knows that patient attendance plays a huge factor in outcomes. That's why you want to make sure that, in addition to easy online booking options, you're also using tools that allow you to alert patients of upcoming appointments. Text reminders have been proven to help reduce no-shows, which in addition to ensuring patient progress in their treatment goals, has the added benefit of helping    

Save your staff some headaches. 

Of course, we can’t forget about the hard-working front office staff at every therapy practice. They’re often the first face a patient sees when they enter your practice—but if they’re overwhelmed with administrative tasks, they’re not able to offer a warm greeting or answer questions a nervous first-time patient may have. 

Online scheduling gives your front office back their time to handle the countless other things they need to do in a day—not least of which is taking care of the patients that come through your doors. With online scheduling, you can gather relevant information upfront, rather than having to sit on the phone with a patient. Better yet, because patients are able to do most of the work themselves, your front office can confirm appointments with the click of a button.  All of your appointments, pending and otherwise, can be found in one spot, saving your staff from having to collect and enter information across different platforms. At a time when practices need to be more efficient, improving that efficiency should start at the front of the house with how you manage your therapy clinic’s schedule. 

Gain insight into the patient journey. 

Convenience in and of itself is a great selling point for online scheduling, but it also offers the added ability to track additional data on everything from your patient acquisition to your retention rates. With the right online scheduling tool, you can look at attribution data to see where these appointments are coming from in order to focus on your most fruitful marketing channels. You’ll also track when patients stop booking appointments to figure out how to improve your patient engagement processes to optimize patient progress. Speaking of processes, you can also track how long it takes to get a patient appointment confirmed to further hone your front office workflows as well. All of this information is what you can’t get from a standard request form or call.      

Online scheduling won’t just make the lives of your front office staff easier, it will improve the experience your patients have with your practice. Whether it’s dropping yet another small barrier to patients seeking out (or continuing) rehab therapy to helping create workflows that prevent the need for tedious paperwork and wait times for patients as they enter for their appointment, adding online scheduling to your practice management software to manage your therapy clinic's schedule is a small addition to your therapy practice that can pay huge dividends.

Interested in making online scheduling part of your practice? WebPT Online Scheduling is part of our PXM platform, providing you with one system to handle every aspect of practice management from first appointment to patient documentation to billing and revenue cycle management and more. Let WebPT help simplify the work of practice management with PXM.