“The training went smoothly” Lacey noted, “The system is designed to work very intuitively, so there wasn’t a problem”. She estimated the one-time training time for her staff at 20-30 minutes. “We would absolutely recommend Cliniconex to other long term care homes! With limited resources and an emphasis on resident-centred care, it’s a great way to communicate with families to live our motto: Together, we improve the well-being of the people we serve.”

At its Misericordia Family Medicine Centre, the no-show rate dropped by almost 50% from 7.31% to 3.46% in the first month following Cliniconex implementation. Similarly, at the University of Alberta’s Northeast Community Health Centre, by January 2018, only 31 patients failed to show (3.06%), compared to 86 missed patient appointments (8.14%) in May 2017. This represents a 62% improvement six months post-implementation.

With the implementation of the Cliniconex automated reminder system, missed appointments are down significantly. Missed counselling appointments have been almost eliminated, says McGee. And the system provides staff with relief from the constant demands of the phone.

On any given day, 500 patients visit the University of Ottawa Health Services (UOHS) clinics. A range of services – family and specialty medicine, mental health services, physiotherapy, sports medicine and more – is offered to the University’s students, faculty, staff and the general public.

Cliniconex was deployed to ensure 100% of patients received an automatic reminder, plus the key location change information. “It worked wonderfully,” says Chris. “We had very few missed appointments during the renovation. And it’s only gotten better since.”

“Cliniconex allows us to create a message to notify the patient as soon as we have new information from their specialists’ instead of waiting for weeks. This is turning out to be a viable solution as it is saving our clinic staff hours wasted on playing telephone tag or getting a full voicemail box,” explained Dr. Ngui.

With steadily rising costs and other financial pressures on her mind, Kathleen McAuliff always looks to increase productivity at Sound Care. Recently, she decided to review the appointment reminder callout process. While the callouts reduce no-shows, staff neither liked doing them, nor was there enough time to remind everyone.

By eliminating reminder call-ins, Cliniconex reminders reduced call volume by about 50%. Now, patients rarely complain about not getting through and most of the call-ins are people booking new appointments. As for no-shows, these are no longer a problem because patients are always reminded about their upcoming appointment and have an opportunity to cancel.

Missed appointments are down significantly and there is an unexpected benefit. Because frontline staff can easily see reminder status in their scheduler, arguments about no-show fees have also been drastically reduced. “Staff absolutely love it because it has really taken a big task off their hands and opened their time up for other things.” says Dr. Werger