Some hospitals and health providers send text reminders to patients a day or so before the appointment and on the morning of the day of the appointment. Some of the reminders stipulate the importance of keeping the appointment and even state that if the patient no longer needs the appointment or, for any other reason, cannot attend, to please text reply as soon as possible cancelling the appointment so it can be provided to another patient.
If the patient has been referred to a Specialist service (Opthalmologist, Ear, Nose & Throat Surgeon, etc), the text reminder will also disclose whether there will be a financial penalty for failing to attend such as, "Failure to advise the Specialist of Non-attendance will incur a fee of $ etc" Sometimes the penalty is the cost of a one-hour appointment, even if the Service is provided free-of-charge for attendance. Of course, there are always extenuating circumstances and Specialists use their discretion but the use of penalties has reduced non-attendance. In the case where a patient is assessed as not having a good reason for failure to attend, he or she needs to pay the penalty before they can be re-referred.
The hospital I work for routinely sends out text reminders to all patients and the findings are astonishing:
DNAs (= Did Not Shows) have reduced from 18 percent of all appointments to 2% - a huge reduction. Obviously the hospital intends to keep using this strategy to reduce DNAs. A colleague has estimated that savings over a year are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This text reminder service links in with another finding: The earlier an appointment is provided before the patient attends, the greater the number of missed appointments. The explanation is very simple: People forget. Sending text reminders addresses that problem.
