Just one thing: Taking the first steps to forward booking

Scheduling a patient’s next appointment before the client has left the veterinary hospital is a simple but powerful way to support both patient health and client satisfaction. Known as forward booking, it ensures consistent visits and continuity of care, and improves the client experience by taking the to-do of booking a future appointment off of their plates.
 
As highlighted in a recent Chart of the Month, there is a gap between the percentage of pet owners who have a regular veterinarian and those who have visited the veterinarian in the last year. This points to an opportunity to bridge the gap and ensure that as many patients as possible are coming in for regular checkups and preventive care. 

Forward booking—a staple in human medicine and dentistry for decades—can help do just that.

Getting started with forward booking

Effectively implementing forward booking requires collective buy-in and commitment from the entire team. One way to gain that buy-in could be to start small: over the next week, offer to schedule clients’ follow-up appointments while they are in the practice with you, based on your medical recommendations.

For example, if you have prescribed a three-week course of medication and recommend re-checking the pet again in two weeks, book that recheck before the client leaves.

This approach links the next appointment to your medical advice, and gives the client the opportunity to choose a date and time that best suits their schedule.

Next steps 

Once you have some experience with forward booking, you can continue building momentum with a brief team meeting to discuss expanding it to include routine appointments as well as recheck exams.

In this meeting, the team can walk through the process of forward booking, share reservations or challenges, and collaborate on finding solutions to any hurdles. After the meeting, tackle any unresolved issues, such as developing scripts for the team to initiate these conversations, or researching how to best integrate forward booking into your scheduling software.