How One PCP Used Online Appointment Scheduling to Close Care Gaps

“In all of our patient outreach, we remind patients that they're due for things like annual physicals, or mammograms, or bone density scans, those preventive measures like that,” Reichert said in a phone interview with PatientEngagementHIT.

“Whenever we send outreach to the patients that are due for those things, we always include a link to the self-scheduler where they can just click on that and schedule on their own. It makes it a lot easier to get patients to actually take action on their own, because they can do it at all hours of the day or night.”

This follows a year and a half during which medical groups across the country saw tanking patient volumes and key patient care access hurdles related to the pandemic. In March 2020, those volume decreases could be tied to non-urgent care shutdowns, but since then many patients not accessing primary or preventive care mostly say they are scared of catching the novel coronavirus.