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As a doctor you are responsible for the well-being of your patients and part of that service usually requires a member of your staff calling your patients and reminding them of an upcoming appointment. Many people, especially elderly patients find this service valuable as sometimes appointment cards can be misplaced and appointment missed. But if your practice should happen to be a busy one and you find that your staff member could be better utilized in another task, then you may wish to consider getting an automated reminder service.

An automated appointment reminder service saves your employees from having to spend hours calling your patients. It can be set up so that the automated reminder service works with your online appointment scheduler. It will make the phone calls for your practice based on the patient appointment schedule in the online system and some of the automated reminder services offer the option of requesting a call back from your patient in order to reschedule appointments at a more appropriate time for them.

Additionally, if you have patients that regularly use the Internet, your automated reminder system can be tied into your scheduling system so that a generic e-mail message with the appointment date - taken from the day's schedule - is sent out in advance, reminding your patients that they have an appointment without having to contact them over the phone. Both methods are time savers for you and your staff and it cuts down on the number of missed and canceled appointments.

If you should happen to have patients that speak a language other than English as their first language - for example, Spanish - your automated reminder system can be programmed to deliver the message to your non-English speaking patients in their own native tongue. There is a setting in the system that allows you to choose the language the message should be in. Set it appropriately for the patient in question and your automated reminder service will do the rest.

Choosing your automated reminder service is not difficult. Always look for one that offers you the option to may for the service on a monthly basis and a free trial. If you have an online scheduler already in place, you will want to make sure that the two systems are compatible. Your online scheduling system may have an automated reminder service built into in. Always verify this when you purchase a system so that you are not paying for a service you already have.

Make sure you automated reminder service will need little maintenance and is customizable to your practice. You are not going to want to deal with special hardware or software just to have this service when you and your staff need to be dealing with your patients. Many web-based systems are easy to set-up, affordable, and follow strict privacy policies so that your patient's personal information is always safe and protected.

Finally, try to roll an automated answering system into your automated reminder service or vice versa. This will help you save money and basically kill two birds with one stone. The answering system will free up the time of your staff and allow the patient to leave a message if there is a scheduling issue that will go to the right person to handle without your patient being left on hold for extended periods of time.