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No-Show Patient: Case Study

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The term “no-show patient” is used to describe patients who fail to reschedule or cancel a scheduled appointment. In outpatient primary care setting dealing with no show patients is one of the biggest challenges that has a tremendous impact on productivity and efficiency of the clinic. Residency teaching clinics are making constant efforts by actively participating in research studies and applying various strategies to decrease no show rate at the clinics. At Kaweah Delta Family Medicine Center we are looking at past interventions to develop proactive and effective ways of reducing no-show rates. Though there are numerous projects and researches conducted, this remains a major issue at outpatient clinics. A study by Du Moutier et al, showed …show more content…

This includes communicating to the patient the effects of missing appointments not only on the clinic but on their health as well 6. Double booking: All patients with chronic no show history were scheduled on a separate schedule for their appointment. If they arrived, they were added to the physicians schedule but were seen after the scheduled on time patients. The no show patients were notified of this policy earlier. This intervention reduced the no show rate in the Milwaukee clinic from 30 percent to 20 percent 2. At Kaweah Delta Family medicine center, we can implement some of the interventions discussed earlier to reduce our no show rate. One of the first interventions includes sending patients preferred reminder modality in their preferred languages. Young age is one of the independent predictor of high likelihood of missing an appointment 7. Using text message service in this technology friendly population can improve appointment adherence . A randomized control study found text messages modality equivalent but cost effective compared to telephone reminders. Second intervention that can be easily implemented at the clinic includes identifying chronic no show patients first, and then physician will begin to educate them on the impacts of not keeping their

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