7 Best Medical Appointment Scheduling Software in 2020

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If 2020 and the bizarre Covid-19 pandemic have taught us anything, it is the importance of quality healthcare. It is not uncommon for hospitals, clinics, and other healthcare offices to have glaring operational issues. One such functional area that medical offices struggle with is scheduling and managing appointments.

Medical offices generally receive anywhere between a handful to hundreds of patients in a day. Even if you observe a walk-in system for patients, you will have to set appointments for follow-ups and periodic check-ups, at some point. More importantly, doctors can save lives, and for that, they must remain as accessible as possible to those who might need them. Also, now that social distancing has become a non-negotiable necessity, you cannot afford to have a crowd of patients in the waiting room.

With such varied product offerings, choosing the best medical appointment scheduling software for your practice can be quite an undertaking.

Here are the Top Medical Appointment Scheduling Software Solutions

1. Skedulo

Skedulo is intelligent healthcare scheduling solution for mobile healthcare providers. Skedulo’s software and mobile application can manage complex healthcare schedules with a host of features that optimize home healthcare delivery operations. It can make your caregivers more efficient, reduce costs, grow your patient base, and increase your revenue.

Features:

• Matches patients with the right caregivers based on caregiver’s qualifications, experience, and patient history
• Optimized routing to reduce travel time and costs
• Real-time tracking, status updates, and notifications
• Mobile app with charting and notes features
• HIPAA compliant

USP: It is an end-to-end schedule management solution for home healthcare delivery.

2. Luma Health

Luma Health is a feature-rich, comprehensive patient access solution. It improves the scope of access and communication in every step of the healthcare journey to fuel patient engagement. This user-friendly solution is flexible enough to serve clinics other health systems. It reduces no-shows and backfills cancellations without any staff effort.

Features:

• Actionable reminders for patients in their preferred language
• Patients can confirm/reschedule/cancel appointments directly via text/email/phone call
• Customizable, seamless integration with major EHR platforms
• Reaches out to patients post their visit to collect feedback
• Calculates Net Promoter Scores in real-time

USP: Luma Health’s HIPAA-compliant text messaging feature communicates with patients without the help of complex patient portals and mobile apps.

3. AdvancedMD

AdvancedMD medical appointment scheduling software solution can streamline the operations of your medical practice and improve the efficiency of your front office staff. It automates scheduling tasks so that your front office can focus on more critical tasks such as checking-in patients, collecting co-pays, and other essential administrative tasks.

Features:

• Verify patient’s insurance eligibility before/during the appointment or run a verification for all patients scheduled during the day in collective batches
• Snapshot schedule view for every provider, resource, or location
• Set a series of recurring appointments
• Patients can be added to a waitlist with a trigger to add them to newly-available time slots automatically
• Hover mouse over the calendar to see patient notes, contact information/clinical notes/appointment type/duration

USP: Along with the patient scheduling software, you can choose from other AdvancedMD products to build a custom bundle or select a pre-configured one to make your medical practice more efficient.

4. eHospital Systems

eHospital Systems is a comprehensive, customizable, and user-friendly hospital management solution for medical practitioners, multi-specialty clinics, and hospitals. It is available as an on-premise on-cloud solution.

Features:

• Registers patients by collecting details such as name, address, contact information, birth date, insurance details, etc. and creates unique patient IDs for tracking visits
• Quick and effective appointment scheduling module for managing appointments for doctors, laboratory, and radiology services
• Inpatient and outpatient management modules to streamline operations
• Specific modules for laboratory, radiology, pharmacy, inventory management, and so on
• It can interface with biometric devices, barcode, QR code, and inventory scanners for patient wristbands and inventory

USP: eHospital Systems is a one-stop healthcare management solution loaded with features that can manage all aspects of a healthcare system, including patient scheduling, staff, and facilities allocation.

5. PracticeSuite

PracticeSuite is a high rated medical appointment scheduling software that can handle multi-location, multi-specialty, and complex healthcare scenarios on a flexible and robust cloud-based platform.  Its features can solve the complex scheduling needs of large and enterprise-level healthcare facilities.

Features:

• Drag-and-drop functionality for appointments to minimize typing errors and save time
• Flexible, color-coded time slots and first-available scheduling
• It supports scheduling for multiple locations, tax IDs, legal entities, specialties and providers on a single cloud-based platform
• Customizable superbills, letters, labels, and reports
• Add unlimited providers

USP: PracticeSuite’s biggest strength is its effective multi-location and multi-specialty support features that can solve the most complex scheduling problems.

6. NextGen Healthcare

NextGen boasts 46 years of experience in the healthcare industry with an impressive network of 155,000 caregivers. It caters to ambulatory care providers of all sizes. It recently acquired Medfusion to provide superior patient engagement features and capabilities. NextGen’s solutions are suitable for small medical practices as well as the larger healthcare chains.

Features:

• The NextGen Patient Portal allows patients to schedule appointments, pay bills, request for medication refills, access medical records, and communicate from any computer or smartphone.
• NextGen Mobile allows care teams to collaborate via a secure texting platform to prevent any errors, lapses, and miscommunication
• NextGen Population Health enables care teams to identify individuals or populations and send them tailored follow-up communications, reminders, interventions, and alerts automatically.
• Check-in patients before their appointment to streamline their visit
• Medical billing, claims processing, verification of insurance claims, and claim scrubbing

USP: NextGen is purely focussed on ambulatory care and has extensive experience in that area of healthcare.

7. JotForm

JotForm provides HIPAA-compliant online forms to collect sensitive patient information quickly. Along with HIPAA-compliant forms, they also provide a business associate agreement (BAA) so that you can obtain health information securely.

Features:

• JotForm’s Google Calendar integration creates events on your calendar based on the date and time of the appointments entered by the patients on the form
• Get informed consent online with an electronically binding signature with customizable consent forms
• It can be easily integrated with other HIPAA-compliant software such as Google Sheets
• The forms are compatible with smartphones, tablets, and computers to enable appointment scheduling on-the-go
• Obtain relevant documentation and images directly through the form

USP: JotForm is ready-to-use, fully customizable, and user-friendly HIPAA form template provider that helps you save time.

Summing Up:

While the medical appointment scheduling software market can be tricky to navigate, the key is to take the time to understand the market and do your research. The right patient scheduling software can help medical offices take on more patients, avoid no-shows and cancellations, and bring in more revenue. A competent medical schedule management software solution can make life easy for doctors, medical and administrative staff, patients.

Did you find this list helpful? Are you excited to explore any of these solutions? Would you like to know more about them? Do let us know in the comments section below.