How are “no shows” handled?
Patients who do not appear for their appointment are a perennial problem in outpatient care and telemedicine consultations are no exception. This varies somewhat by specialty. As an example, psychiatry, psychology and dermatology tend to have higher rates than cardiology. There are two strategies for dealing with this. The first and most commonly used technique is the airline approach of overbooking appointments, or scheduling more patients for appointments in a given day than you can expect to see with the assumption that a certain percentage will not appear. The second is to put more of a burden on the remote site to make sure that patients appear for their appointments. The primary method of doing this is to execute an agreement with the remote facility that they will pay something for every scheduled visit for which the patient does not appear.
