No Shows in the Time of Corona

One of the costs of doing business is that sometimes patients with scheduled appointments will not appear. There is a name on the schedule, but no patient arrives. This can be due to different factors, but sometimes patients know they have appointments and just decide not to come. As I mentioned, we think of this as a cost of doing business. However, as we limit/change schedules to try to minimize the number of patients in the building due to public health concerns, it is an even bigger cost of doing business. It also costs other patients who want appointments but cannot get them due to the presence of the “no-show patients” in the schedule. I’m not sure that there is a satisfactory solution to this problem, but it is definitely a larger issue when we are very specifically tailoring our schedules to minimize the number of people in the building at any given time.