CPaaS in healthcare: Improving your appointment management system

In healthcare, a common patient complaint includes communication from providers. This encompasses everything from indifferent attitudes from caregivers to poor or confusing explanations for diagnoses and payments. To avoid these same issues, you must maintain a transparent communication pathway between professionals and patients to guarantee the highest level of care – especially scheduling, rescheduling, and cancelling appointments.

Nevertheless, manually sending appointment reminders is time-consuming, costly, and, quite frankly, inefficient. Thankfully, there exists a better way.

With our Atmosphere CPaaS, your healthcare business can make appointment scheduling easy and convenient, not only for the patient but for your employees, too.

Our communications platform as a service (CPaaS) solution is powerful and comprehensive, allowing you to automatically send appointment reminders, including the option to cancel or reschedule through voice and SMS. With automated calls or SMS messages, your company can invite patients to schedule an appointment themselves while still giving them the option to connect with an agent if they have specific questions.

Many patients already use text every day for communication. Sending appointment information and reminders via SMS increases the likelihood of messages getting seen, thus enhancing attendance. Even if patients cancel or reschedule their appointments, these changes get sent to your staff as notifications, giving them the chance to follow up promptly.

Also, keeping internal teams informed while covering the appointment reminders with pre-set automations will let your front office focus on more complex patient issues, boosting productivity. And for those days when the phones don’t stop ringing, Atmosphere CPaaS helps your business create friendly interactions with an auto-attendant. Or, through self-service options, the patient can conveniently find what they need, which, according to Granter, most patients do before contacting a human representative. (Gartner, 2021)

The incredible benefits of managing appointments through our CPaaS offering speak for themselves. Our solution can easily integrate with your existing appointment software.

Atmosphere CPaaS can handle the booking of thousands of appointments per hour with no additional agent requirements, eliminating busy signals and high hold times. A study from Nemertes reveals that streamlining appointment scheduling and reminders for your patients will improve satisfaction by 31%, decrease operational spending by 28%, and increase revenue by 53%. (Nemertes, 2020)

Efficiently managing appointments and automating reminders can also reduce costly no-shows. In fact, missed appointments cost the U.S. healthcare system over $150 billion a year, underscoring the necessity of decreasing no-shows as much as possible. (Intrado, 2021) But with Atmosphere CPaaS, you can optimize staffing productivity and enable your company to save almost $6,629 per month for each additional employee who isn’t performing an automated task. (Indeed)

Yet, perhaps the most convenient feature of Atmosphere CPaaS is that it can easily integrate with your systems and take the hard work out of patient communications. You get to keep your current infrastructure and add the benefits of a cloud solution. Our Managed Solutions can do that heavy lifting and installation for you, allowing you to maintain your CRM, database, and other API-connected platforms. Furthermore, IntelePeer’s CPaaS offering can get united with tools like IBM Watson, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Mailchimp, Zendesk, and Salesforce.