Pro Show Provides an Easy Way to Remind Patients About Upcoming Appointments and Eliminate “No Shows!”

Healthcare organizations must constantly contend with patients who miss their scheduled appointments without notifying the physician’s office. These “no show” appointments cost thousands of dollars in wasted resources and staff. 1Call’s Pro Show Automated Appointment Reminder application helps healthcare organizations be proactive by reminding patients in advance, saving time, saving money, and increasing staff productivity. Pro Show is available as an on-site or remotely hosted solution.

1Call’s Pro Show can remind patients via home phone, mobile phone, e-mail, and text messages. Pro Show can send reminders instantly when the information is received, or they can be scheduled to be sent 72 hours, 48 hours, 24 hours, or any amount of time prior to the appointments. In addition to reminders for patients, Pro Show can also be used to remind physicians and staff members about upcoming meetings, events, classes, and for virtually any type of notification service needed. Pro Show offers multilingual capabilities, helping healthcare organizations ensure they can use it for even more patients, physicians, and staff members. Since Pro Show is automated, staff members that were assigned to call patients to remind them of their upcoming appointments can now work on other needed tasks in the organization.

Pro Show features built-in flexibility, efficiency and convenience, ensuring that it meets the specific needs of each healthcare organization. The types of notification, and number of attempts can be customized for each recipient. The time of day, and the days of the week that Pro Show can send reminders can also be customized for each recipient, eliminating late night, early morning, weekend and holiday reminders. For children’s appointments, Pro Show adjusts the prompts to be geared towards the patient’s parent or guardian. Pro Show keeps track of the outcomes of each notification attempt, giving healthcare organizations the data needed for accurate reports and statistics.

Healthcare organizations are currently using Pro Show to make thousands of automated appointment reminder calls, text message reminders, and e-mail reminders each month. These organizations have reported a significant reduction of patient no shows. Since patients who miss their appointments typically need to reschedule their appointments, an added benefit of Pro Show in these organizations is a considerable reduction in the number of people being placed on waiting lists.

1Call President Tom Curtin said, “Pro Show helps healthcare organizations keep their waiting rooms full, keeping their employees more productive while also increasing revenue for their organizations. Because of this, using Pro Show keeps both administrators and physicians happy.”

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The Future of Paging “miSecureMessages”

For decades our 1Call hospital and healthcare customers have used pagers almost exclusively as a means to alert doctors and nurses for emergency and some non-emergency issues. However, the expanding popularity of smartphones in the medical field is changing the need for pagers in the future.

Paging as a service was in its heyday in the mid 1990s until its popularity peaked in 1999. Since then the paging industry has taken a back seat to mobile two-way technology like mobile phones and more recently, smartphones. iPhone ®, iPad™, BlackBerry ®, and Android™ technology has changed the lives of average people, and now it’s finding its way into the healthcare fields and starting to take hold with physicians. Most physicians are trading in their pagers for smartphones. According to a recent Manhattan Research study, 72 percent of U.S. physicians use smartphones, and the research firm predicts that 81 percent of physicians will use a smartphone by 2012.¹

So with such a high percentage of physicians already carrying smartphones, how do we send pages to smartphones?

 

miSecureMessages is a product developed by AMTELCO/1Call as a pager replacement and two-way encrypted messaging application (app) for smartphones. miSecureMessages is used by 1Call customers in conjunction with their Infinity hospital call center/intelligent PBX console systems, as a stand-alone browser accessible messaging dispatch and monitoring product, or as a device-to-device messaging platform.

To send a message, the user simply selects the miSecureMessages smartphone icon, types the message, and clicks send. The physician receives an instant alert, and can view the secure message, and respond with a preprogrammed response, or their own custom message. The reply is securely sent back to the user. All of this activity is recorded, and can be viewed online real-time.

To find out more about miSecureMessages visit https://misecuremessages.com/

See for yourself how easy it is to send a secure message with miSecureMessages.

 

1. 72 percent of physicians use smartphones, by Brian Dolan, May 5, 2010, http://mobilehealthnews.com/7505/72-percent-of-us-physicians-use-smartphones/.

Matt Everly is the Marketing Director for Amtelco’s 1Call Healthcare Division and can be reached at maeverly@1call.com

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