Rev. C. Scot Giles, D.Min., LLC

A few weeks ago I did a "practice audit." That is, I carefully logged and reviewed where my time was going, looking for ways to make things more efficient.

The result was no surprise. One of the biggest time wasters was playing "phone tag" with clients who needed to reschedule appointments. There had to be a better way.

The rescheduling and adjusting of client appointments is a nightmare for practitioners. Your schedule can be full, and then fall apart completely as clients call with conflicts and request changes. You can go from a profitable day to a day when you do not clear expenses, simply because people made appointments they then needed to change.

I'd done some checking on how colleagues handled this. Most have a policy similar to my own. If a client cancels an appointment on less than 24-hours notice, the client is charged. The problem with such a policy is that it can be hard to enforce for those clients who pay cash, and it doesn't change the fact that you have to call every one of those clients back to get them rescheduled.

Some practitioners simply assign every new client a fixed appointment. If you are a client you have a designated appointment slot and you pay for it even if you need to cancel it. As one colleague said, "everyone thinks they have a good reason to cancel a session, so everyone gets charged."

This solution works fine for the practitioner. Your schedule is stable and you don't need to call anyone back. If a client cancels, they already have the next appointment reserved.

The problem with this model is that it ignores what modern life is like for our clients. Few people have stable schedules and can commit to an unchanging appointment slot. This is especially true if you deal with people who have medical problems. They always have to adjust the schedule around treatments, scans and days then they feel too sick to go anywhere.

I've wrestled with this for a long time, and I think I've found a solution that will work for everyone. At least I know I feel good about it and the handful of clients who have used it so far are pleased.

If you look to the left side of my web site page you will see a new option, "Change An Appointment" under the "Take Action Now" menu. If you click on that option you will find yourself looking at a copy of my schedule. The schedule is updated every two minutes and all confidential information is removed. You can see only my free/busy times.

If you need to change an appointment you can scroll through my schedule and find a slot that works for both of us. Then, you email me to request the change. When I get the email I'll record the change and send you a confirming email. It's all done on line and we don't need to connect on the phone. This has already saved me hours, and clients like it because they can see where the openings are so it's efficient for them as well.

The business model I use is called an Ideal Micropractice. It's a model developed by primary care physicians to run a low-overhead, high-tech practice. The idea is to use technology instead of staff. By keeping your overhead low you retain more of what you earn and can charge lower prices and spend more time with clients and patients.

In keeping with this model I had been exploring how to move more of my practice administration to the Web, and this is an easy way to do that.