Which appointment slot dies while someone types the reminder?

The question this file answersHow many slots do we lose each week because a change sat in the inbox until it was too late to fill?

Fits: clinics and hospital groups seeing 50–300+ patients a day.

Typical day

What the desk looks like today

Typical, from the healthcare playbook's intake section, which covers appointment correspondence for clinics seeing 50–300+ patients a day; no-shows get no separate count, none invented. Confirmations, changes and did-not-attends arrive in one inbox; someone types reminders while a freed slot sits empty. Worst the day before a full clinic.

What changes

What Monday looks like after

The evening before a clinic, the coordinator's list holds the slots that are actually at risk and the patients who need a phone call, not every confirmation of the week. Reminders have gone out; the person spends the time refilling the slot.

Typical, not a measured client result. Every figure here comes from the playbook source named below.

Confirmed

confirmations from the scheduler, exceptions to a person — built like our intake file; no published figure for appointment correspondence

Before: confirms, changes and no-shows share one inbox while a slot dies. After: confirmations go from the scheduler and the at-risk slots reach a person the evening before. No number is attached, because none has been published for this inbox.

No published figure for this desk. The range lives on the parent file: Intake forms into the EHR; reception keeps the greeting →

How this file is built

Appointment-correspondence triage has no benchmark on its own. The McKinsey (2023) 30–40% quoted on the registration file is about intake admin as a whole and is not applied here. Not a no-show-rate promise.

What we install

What we put in front of the systems you already run

Your scheduling and PM system stays — Epic, Athenahealth, eClinicalWorks or the one you run — and the registration build is turned towards the appointment inbox:

incoming messages are sorted into confirm, reschedule and did-not-attend follow-up
confirmations and standard reminders are sent from the scheduler on your timetable and wording, and in-policy reschedules are drafted for one-click acceptance
urgent clinical requests, vulnerable patients and repeat non-attenders go to a named person with the history attached.

What stays human — and what this will not do

Urgent slots. Vulnerable patients. The call that is care, not a reminder.

Not a no-show-rate promise.

What can go wrong — and what we do about it

A vulnerable-patient or safeguarding flag that is not marked in the record cannot be respected by a rule; that master data is checked before the first send. Reminders by SMS or email need consent recorded in the PM system, or they do not go. The parent file's McKinsey intake range is about registration admin, not attendance — this build changes the inbox, not the no-show rate.

What it costs to get there

The path: free 60-second estimate → free 20-minute review → paid audit of this one process (€1.5–3K, typically two weeks) → pilot with your people in the loop (€10–20K, weeks, not quarters). No transformation programme. Prices are public, on the services page →

Scoped in the audit — the playbook has no estimate for this exact desk.

This is about you if…

Do confirmations, changes and no-shows share one inbox with everything else?
Is your did-not-attend pathway written down — who is called, and when?

What does this mean in euros?

That depends on your volumes and wage costs — this page will not invent the number. The free 60-second estimate runs that calculation from your answers, with every multiplier sourced.

Get your free savings estimate 60 seconds · no sales call Or write first → Map a healthcare process like this one — free, 60 seconds →

Not a named Aperanda client. Process file · Healthcare.

Short process file. Same build as its parent file; the playbook has no separate volume or benchmark for this desk.

All process files