2 Way Technology is here!

In order to truly understand the advantages provided by an integrated system, you need to first understand the alternatives.

1) Manual entry into a web form

2) Static export from your office PM/EMR

3) Real-time "two-way" interface

All confirmation services have a way of interpreting your schedule in order to determine which patients need to be confirmed. This 'interface' is traditionally accomplished in one of three ways.

1) Manual entry into a web form

A member of your staff logs onto a website and manually enters the list of the patients to be called. There is no interaction with your existing PM/EMR. (Your staff member is the only link between your PM/EMR and the confirmation system.

There are obvious drawbacks to this option: Your staff is double entering all of the patient data that's already available within your PM/EMR suite and maintaining an accurate schedule is very difficult. As appointments are cancelled or rescheduled your staff must re-visit the site to remove or reschedule them from the calling list.

At the end of the day, your staff logs on to the vendor's website to determine which appointments have been confirmed. 

2) Static export from your office PM/EMR

This category describes the method that traditional confirmation vendors use to eliminate the double-entry problem associated with the first method above. This option relies on a once-daily manual export from your PM/EMR suite. When vendors have an available interface with your PM/EMR suite, what they are saying is that their system is capable of reading a report that your office manually generates from your system each day. If you have asked the vendor to send out calls in advance of an appointment, your office would save a list of patients to call that day. Depending on the vendor, this file is either uploaded manually to a website or picked up by their software running on your PC.

In this scenerio, if there is a communication error or you forget to save the file, the calls for that given day do not go out. Additionally, since you are sending a snapshot of your schedule, if a patient calls to cancel or reschedule after you have sent your report, they will still get a confirmation call for their old appointment time.

Calling results are made available on a website or e-mail/faxed to your office at the end of each calling cycle. No further attempts are made to confirm the appointment after the report is sent. In order for your PM/EMR scheduler to be updated with the confirmation results, a member of your staff must take the report and manually mark each appointment as confirmed within your schedule. Again, your staff member is main link between your PM/EMR.

3) Real-time "two-way" interface

Patient Prompt™ is the only vendor in this category. Our patent-pending "two-way" bridge technology talks to your existing PM/EMR schedule on a real-time basis. As appointments and patients are created or modified, the new information is securely transmitted to our servers. When appointments are confirmed, the results flow back through our software and are populated back into your scheduler in real-time. Since our calling results are published directly into your schedule, office staff can view which appointments are confirmed from within the same screen that they book the appointments.

Our integrated approach allows us to offer some very progressive features

For example:

- If an appointment is confirmed by a member of the office staff within the scheduler, we make note of the status change and cancel any scheduled calls for that appointment.

-If we are unable to make contact with your patient during the evening calling hours, we'll keep trying the next morning! Results of our calling attempts are populated into your PM/EMR schedule within minutes of the call.

-Since the software interfaces directly with your scheduler, all client and appointment details set within the PM/EMR can be used to customize the confirmation process.