From a patient's perspective, missing a doctor's appointment is at most an annoying inconvenience. After all, they can always reschedule. From a doctor's perspective, though, it's like watching money go down the drain.

One study found that the average hospital in the U.S. experiences 62 no-shows per day, adding up to a whopping $3 million in lost revenue annually. For smaller practices, the numbers are equally grim—the average no-show rate for primary care and specialty medical appointments is 20 percent annually.

If your patients consistently fail to show up to scheduled appointments, costing your practice valuable time and money, there's a solution that can keep your staff from having to make calls all day long: appointment reminder software.

In this Buyer's Guide, we'll go over everything you need to know about appointment reminder software to aid you in your research and help you make a more informed purchase decision.

Here's what we'll cover:

What Is Appointment Reminder Software?

Common Appointment Reminder Software Features

Benefits of Appointment Reminder Software

How Is Appointment Reminder Software Priced?

Other Appointment Reminder Software Considerations

What Is Appointment Reminder Software?

Appointment reminder software is designed to help medical practices by alleviating the burden of manually reminding patients about upcoming appointments. It accomplishes this with features such as scheduling integration, automated notifications and patient self-service.

Once it's set up, appointment reminder software automatically sends reminders to your patients via phone call, text or email at predetermined times before their appointment—increasing the likelihood that they show up on time.

Reminder email builder in AdvancedMD

This software can be purchased stand-alone, or as a feature set within a more comprehensive patient scheduling system, patient billing system or EMR.

Common Appointment Reminder Software Features

Appointment reminder software functionality will vary from system to system depending on how advanced it is, your practice size and whether it includes additional billing or EMR capabilities.

In general, though, most appointment reminder software systems will have the following five features in common:

Benefits of Appointment Reminder Software

Being able to automate patient reminders with software allows your staff to redirect their time toward more impactful tasks that will improve your practice. That's a major benefit of appointment reminder software, but it's not the only one. Here are a few more:

• Patients are more likely to receive reminders. People may be too busy during the day to respond to a phone call, but they will more easily see an appointment reminder via email or text. Software makes it easier to take this omnichannel approach to reminders, increasing the odds that patients receive them.

• Improved compliance. Texting or emailing reminders through ad hoc methods increases the likelihood that your practice will unintentionally violate HIPAA standards. Any reputable appointment reminder system, in contrast, is guaranteed to be HIPAA-compliant.

• Fewer no-shows. A study published by the National Institute of Health found that there is consistent evidence that appointment reminder systems improve appointment attendance "across a range of health care settings and patient population subgroups."

• Greater scheduling capacity and flexibility. If a patient doesn't show up to an appointment, that's a dead spot in your day you can't easily fill. Automated reminders can give your patients a chance to reschedule well in advance to ensure you're seeing as many patients as possible.

• Higher patient satisfaction rates. Sixty-four percent of the time when a doctor's running behind schedule, it's because patients are running late too. Appointment reminders can increase the likelihood that patients show up on time, allowing your doctors to see all patients more promptly and reducing frustration for your staff and your patients.

How Is Appointment Reminder Software Priced?

Appointment reminder software pricing can vary considerably based on a variety of factors, the most significant of which is whether the software is sold with a perpetual or subscription license.

With a perpetual license, you pay a lump sum upfront—typically starting at a couple thousand dollars—to own the software indefinitely. This fee can depend on your practice size or even which channels you'll be using for patient reminders. Voicent, for example, has one cost for phone-only appointment reminders and another for phone, email and text.

With a subscription license, on the other hand, you pay a smaller monthly or annual fee for as long as you want to use the software. This is usually a flat fee and is often tied to usage or based on how many licensed health care providers will be using the system. Drchrono, for example, charges between $199 and $499 per provider per month.

Outside of the license cost, buyers may see significantly different pricing options for stand-alone appointment reminder software compared to appointment reminder functionality that's wrapped up in larger practice management or EMR systems. There may be other fees as well for things such as implementation, training, support and EMR integration.

Be sure to ask vendors about all of these options to get a clear picture of the total cost.

Other Appointment Reminder Software Considerations

Just as important as deciding which appointment reminder software system to purchase is how you implement that system in your practice. Here are some final things to keep in mind when researching, purchasing and setting up appointment reminder software:

• Does your system of choice work with existing software? If you're purchasing a stand-alone appointment reminder system, it's important that it integrates seamlessly with any existing scheduling platforms or your EMR.

• How often are you sending out reminders? Send reminders once and they'll have little effect. Send them too often and patients will get annoyed. Survey your patients on the cadence that they'd prefer, then talk to vendors to ensure they offer that level of customization.

• Is there room for error with placeholders? When creating reminder messages, appointment reminder systems often use placeholder tags (e.g., ). When a tag is in place, the software will automatically pull the relevant information from your scheduling system to customize the message. If you have to type the tag manually each time, not only is it tedious, but it can also lead to errors that break the tag. Being able to drag-and-drop tags is preferable.