Improving the failure-to-attend occurrences in an inner-city family medical practice: Utilizing short message system text messaging as a patient reminder system

Patient no-show, or missed appointments, is one of the most costly and serious operational concerns affecting virtually all medical practices due to its comprehensive effect on the patient, the practice, and the community as a whole. The effects of missed appointments include, but are not limited to, the health risks to the patient, the health risk of a patient that was unable to book an appointment in the missed appointment time, poor use of staff time, and loss of revenue. There are numerous motives documented in the literature explaining why this occurs. Some of these reasons include lack of patient transportation, lack of appointment reminders, the patient's inability to determine the purpose of the visit, the patient felt better, and the patient was too ill to leave the home. While many agree that this issue needs addressing, there is no clear consensus on how this problem should be handled. The relationship between socioeconomic status, geographic region, and other factors to missed appointments was investigated by means of 402 subject surveys. The general aim of this randomized controlled trial was to examine the utilization of short message service (SMS) text messaging as a reminder system. It was hypothesized that individuals in the SMS text message group would experience significantly fewer missed appointments.