Ask any doctor, dentist or medical practitioner what their biggest financial drain is, and you likely won’t hear them mention office admin salaries, electronic equipment or computing software.  It’s the surprisingly high cost of patient no-shows.

According to a recent article in a UK newspaper, patients missed an average of 10 million general practitioner appointments and 5 million practice nurse appointments each year, leading to a total of 15 million missed appointments.  The Developing Patient Partnerships which conducted the survey estimated that these appointments cost the UK an average of £180 million each year.

And while these figures were taken from UK statistics, it’s not a difficult leap to claim that US doctors, dentists and other medical practitioners are losing out on important revenues from patients missing appointments.  Add to the fact that many office admin spend much of their business hours following up with appointment reminders and contacting patient no-shows, and it’s easy to see just how badly medical practitioners need a reliable – and affordable – alternative to ensuring that patients show up for their appointments.

Did I hear someone say “text message marketing”?

Besides marketing and advertising, text messaging services provide an invaluable tool that can help medical practitioners reduce operational costs by reducing the number of “no-shows” and administrative expenses.  By using a company’s database, an SMS marketing platform can send out a text message to those clients who are due to appear for appointments and check-ups.  With options ranging from weekly reminders to a message sent an hour before the appointment, practices can significantly reduce the number of no-shows, in addition to the operational costs of hiring office admin to place reminder calls to patients.  In fact, one article details how a New York-based dentistry cut the number of no-shows in half and saved tens of thousands of dollars thanks to text message marketing.

This is just another example of the unlimited usages for a mobile marketing platform. Make sure and stay up to date with all iZigg activities by texting “izigg” to 90210!