Rehab Clinic Reduces No-Show Rate by 12.6% with Automated Text Messages

Ridgeview Rehab Specialties is part of Ridgeview, an independent, nonprofit, regional healthcare system serving the southwest metro area of the Twin Cities. Ridgeview has eight rehab facilities that focus on providing comprehensive treatment and ongoing care for pediatric concerns, orthopaedics, neurology, cancer, sport and work-related injuries, and chronic diseases, as well as fitness and performance programming.

Challenges

Ridgeview Rehab Specialties was challenged to reduce its no-show rate, a common goal among many medical organizations. Patients would often forget about their appointments or face lastminute conflicts without rescheduling. After recording 6,264 rehab no-shows in 2016, leaders at Ridgeview explored ways to improve patient outreach and overall engagement without adding work for the clinical staff. Ridgeview realized that new technology— specifically text messaging—could help keep patients engaged and decrease the number of no-shows.

Solution

Ridgeview Rehab Specialties chose to implement PerfectServe’s Patient Engagement solution. With PerfectServe, Ridgeview was able to send valuable appointment information to patients via SMS messages, including pre-visit appointment reminders, scheduling and location details, requests for patients to reschedule missed appointments, and post-appointment patient experience and satisfaction surveys.

Implementation

Clinicians were given the ability to log in on their desktops and have instant access to real-time data, including overall patient engagement dashboards and individual text message responses. Most of Ridgeview’s provider-to-patient text messages became automated, so care team members no longer had to call every patient to remind them about upcoming appointments. By eliminating most manual outreach, providers gained more time to administer patient care and focus on the small percentage of patients who did not respond to text messages.

Results

Over a two-year period, PerfectServe’s Patient Engagement solution helped Ridgeview Rehab Specialties reduce its no-show rate by 12.6%. No-shows dropped by 792 visits at an average of $175 per visit, leading to an estimated total revenue recovery of $138,600 from 2016 to 2018. PerfectServe gave Ridgeview administrators a global view of how patients engage with text messages, including opens, responses, and click-through rates. Ridgeview now sends more than 235,000 messages to more than 100,000 patients each year to keep them more actively involved in their own care.

Conclusion

Clinical teams can use automated, personalized text messages to significantly reduce no-shows and empower patients to better manage their own health. By delivering text messages informed by the social determinants of health, PerfectServe’s comprehensive, flexible, and secure patient engagement solution helped Ridgeview Rehab Specialties recover substantial revenue by bringing down no-show rates.

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