Times when veterinary appointments were written down in traditional, hard copy appointment books or calendars are long gone. Today, veterinary management systems usually enable the staff to handle booking in a more efficient and easy way. Veterinary appointment scheduling software is a solution that makes everyday work easier.
Help your veterinary clinic employees to set and manage appointments faster! How about enabling pet owners to choose the date and time for the appointment on their own? Leveraging the right veterinary appointment scheduling software has many benefits. You might save a lot of time if your customers are able to book appointments using an online platform or mobile application instead of calling your clinic’s receptionist.
How to schedule patients effectively?
There are several actions you can perform using veterinary appointment scheduling software. You can:
- schedule an appointment,
- change the date or the hour of the visit,
- cancel an appointment.
Additionally, it may prove helpful, if you can see the history of modifications of each appointment, current status and the reasons for the appointment - is it online or traditional consultation and which procedures are planned (vaccination, tests, surgery etc.).
Having all this information about appointments will help you manage them better and provide the best quality of service to your patients and their owners. That is why you should carefully consider the functionalities you might need in your veterinary appointment scheduling software.
Traditional or online appointment?
Veterinary market changes as dynamically as human healthcare. If possible, veterinarians can connect with pet owners using video calls to provide some basic advice, decide about prescribing medications etc. This kind of online vet appointment can be performed if you are dealing with a general visit and there is no emergency and the animal’s health or life is not in danger. You need appropriate IT tools to take advantage of such a possibility, though.
If you are giving your clients the possibility to make use of online, video consultations, you might as well enable them to book their appointments on their own through a website-based or mobile application. Day by day, your receptionist receives tens and thousands of calls and needs to go through your calendar. With the proper online booking system for veterinary clinics, your customers may check your availability, book the visit or consultation on their own.
Veterinary appointment scheduling software – how to choose
Let us go through the key features that a modern veterinary appointment scheduling software should have in order to significantly improve efficiency in a veterinary clinic.
Online Booking
This option gives your customers some capability to view the clinic veterinarians calendar and choose from available “free” hours to book an appointment for their pet without the help of your staff. You may allow them to do so using a mobile application or a special feature on your clinic’s website.
Appointment Calendar
Your clinic manager or receptionist needs to have a clear view of all the appointments planned for the given day and the coming weeks. A right scheduling system for a veterinary clinic should not only allow you to create and view upcoming appointments, but also to modify them. It should also have a functionality that prevents planning too many appointments for a certain day or hour, if you do not have enough employees to handle a particular number of cases.
Pre-Registration
Choosing a date from the clinic calendar is one thing, but customers often forget about the visit or their plans may change. That results in blocking the veterinarian’s time. You can leverage automated reminders (SMS or email) and notifications within the applications to remind your clients about appointments, confirm them or update some personal or medical information before the visit.
Boarding Patient Management
Do you need to manage pet boarding for long-term therapy or surgery? Advanced veterinary appointment scheduling software should help you deal with scheduling pet boarding services at your clinic.
Offline information in mobile app
Reminders in the form of notifications should be available for your customers in mobile applications even if they are currently offline. Allow them to receive messages about upcoming appointments, tests and time for administering medication to the pet also when they are not online.
Veterinary software with scheduling functionalities?
Modern veterinary clinic management systems like Provet Cloud should have all these features - and many more - already built-in. If you are looking for veterinary software, you have an important decision to make. Think carefully – an appropriate tool will help you gain a competitive advantage over other veterinary clinics, while choosing the wrong one could potentially negatively affect your efficiency.
