How to Reduce No-Show Appointment - Essay Example

"How to Reduce No-Show Appointment" is a great example of a paper on the health system.

The best practice that emerges from the reviewed research is no-show appointments control by the practitioners. Healthcare professionals play a key role in minimizing no-show appointment occurrences by adhering to evidence-based appointment-control policies, which are based on proper timing and scheduling. According to Davies et al. (2016), patient no-shows for scheduled primary care appointments are common, and the healthcare practitioners, as well as management scientists, are required to correctly depict the no-show rate, turnout rates, and the effect of specific patient influences to assess the overall performance. In healthcare organizations, no-show patterns vary by gender, patients’ age, types of appointment requests, and appointment age (Mohammadi et al., 2018). The males record a higher rate of no-shows as compared to females to age 65. As the appointment age increases, the younger patients are highly susceptible to no-show appointments.

Neglected appointments become a key encumbrance to healthcare systems and have deleterious implications for patient care. The adverse effects of no-shows include reduction of patient quality of care, decreased acquired services, and caregiver productivity as well as escalated damage to follow-up and medical costs (Davies et al., 2016). For instance, in a study conducted by Healthcare Innovation in 2017, the United States healthcare sector was losing about $ 150 billion per year because of patient no-shows (Kumar, 2019). Moreover, patient no-shows lead to planning and functioning problems for clinics as it interferes with the continuity of care and active ailment management for patients.

Clinicians take some time to study the key predictors of appointment no-shows because the identified factors allow them to devise strategies approaches to improving performance. One of the factors that trigger no-show appointments is overbooking. In this perspective, overbooks may lead to excessive waiting times for patients, which discourages them from reattending in the next scheduled appointments. Overbooking also demands practitioners to work overtime, which leads to exhaustion and delivery of poor health services. Another contributing factor is the number of days since the previous appointment (Mohammadi et al., 2018). Patients become reluctant to show up if there is a decreased number of days since the prior appointment. Other no-show contributing factors include cell phone ownership and substance use. Patients without cell phones and those who use different substances such as tobacco and alcohol are likely to miss appointments. According to Kumar (2019), patients may experience transport difficulties, think that the visits are not essential, forget to attend, have personal work-related issues, or feel unwell, which also contributes to no-shows.

Healthcare management and care providers are expected to schedule organized attendance rates that reduce overbookings and escalate quality healthcare access. Predictive and simulation modeling, statistical exploration on large data sets, and data mining may be implemented in designing and testing strategies for reducing patient appointment breaking behaviors (Davies et al., 2016). According to Mohammadi et al. (2018), EHR data such as patient and scheduling information can be utilized in predicting neglected appointments of underserved populations, especially in the urban system of Community Health Center (CHCs). Investing in the current advanced technologies would make patients’ appointment data readily available. The implementation of automatic reminders within the healthcare facilities would assist in reminding patients about their upcoming appointments and get them prepared (Kumar, 2019). Convenient platforms such as emails, phone calls, and text messages can be used. Practitioners are required to focus on minimizing waiting time and offering quality services to increase patients' likelihood to attend future appointments.