Telephone reminders reduce no-shows: A quality initiative at a breast imaging center

Purpose: To improve the workflow and productivity at a Breast Imaging Center, primarily by decreasing the no-show rate.

Materials and methods: Mammography clinic data were recorded and analyzed for a 6-month period prior to our intervention. Personal pre-appointment phone calls were then instituted for all patients, following which data was recorded and analyzed for a 2-month period. Analyses compared pre- and post-intervention data.

Results: No-shows were significantly reduced (p < 0.001) from 20.99% (907/3775) pre-intervention to 7.07% (69/976) post-intervention. Calling ahead to cancel an appointment from those who either were no-shows or canceled their appointment significantly improved (p < 0.001) from only 2.81% (22/784) calling to cancel pre-intervention to 25.00% (23/92) calling to cancel post-intervention.

Conclusions: Through systematic pre-appointment phone calls and documentation, we were able to achieve a very significant decrease in the no-show rate at our Breast Imaging Center. We believe that our intervention can be useful for other radiology groups to implement in their practices to reduce no-show rates.