How push notifications can help patient bookings
We take a look at how push notifications can help offer a better patient booking journey and add a more innovative layer of efficiency and security to the patient experience.
What is a push notification?
A push notification is a message sent direct to a patient’s phone through a patient engagement app like HotDoc app.
Push notifications open the door to professional healthcare practices that are looking to provide even better, more effective communication to patients — with reminders likely to be the first of a string of notifications that clinics could send to patients.
Other types of future push notifications may include patient feedback questionnaires, broadcasts, recalls, appointment lifecycle events and one-off, ad hoc messages.
And with patient engagement apps like HotDoc, clinics have full control over which messages are sent to which patients.
What are the benefits of push notifications?
- Save money: Unlike a traditional SMS, a push notification is free to send which means you can reduce the cost of your monthly expenses.
- Improved security: Push notifications add an additional level of security compared to SMS because reminders are sent to a logged-in user rather than just a phone number.
- Reduce no-shows: Push notifications are nicely integrated into patient engagement apps like HotDoc, allowing patients to access an ‘inbox’ type section where they can view unread messages and keep tabs on all of their past appointments.
- Strengthen patient trust: Push notifications allow clinics to build better trust with patients by displaying the familiar HotDoc logo on the reminder, rather than a blank phone number.
- Better patient engagement: Preliminary data from HotDoc’s trial clinics has shown that push notifications are slightly outperforming the open rates of traditional SMS reminders
How can I get started?
Customers of MedicalDirector that have a clinical and practice management system integrated with patient engagement solution HotDoc, will now have the option to send appointment reminders as a free push notification, rather than a SMS.
However like any change, it can take patients time to adapt to a new system. This is why for the time being, HotDoc still automatically sends a SMS to any patient who hasn’t clicked ‘confirm’ or ‘cancel’ within two hours of receiving their push notification. This ensures patients have time to get used to the new technology.
Click here for more information on integrating HotDoc with your MedicalDirector Software.
