Appropriate use of provider scheduling tools leads to dramatic results across practice, including improved provider utilization, improved patient access, reduced administrative burden, and faster training and onboarding of new administrative staff, according to an analysis of healthcare organization customer data for IT scheduling provider Relatient Vendor.
“The only thing that doesn’t lie is your calendar,” said Jeff Gartland, CEO of Relatient. And service providers will be the first to tell you that they have many issues with their calendars that need to be addressed.
Healthcare Information Technology News She interviewed Gartland to talk about the state of access challenges organizations face today, unbalanced physician capacity across different specialties, and how smart scheduling can lead to improvements in both operational efficiency and patient satisfaction.
Q: Let’s talk about this analysis of customer data and the results. Please explain how you achieve these positive results and what exactly your data shows in some of these cases.
a. Intelligent scheduling tools save providers time and money by improving physician capacity, accelerating patient access, and reducing unnecessary staff training and management.
Let’s start with the Doctor’s ability. Many clinics tell us that they regularly lose significant amounts of their doctors’ productivity due to a lack of time, because they either were unable to locate and fill all available appointments in line with the doctor’s preferences, or because they miss appointments due to patients canceling and not showing up.
The scope of the no-show problem alone is staggering: no-shows cost industry dollars150 billion annually. the The no-show rate is 27%.Rather, it reaches 50% in some places. Some providers only accept this as a cost of doing business.
Intelligent scheduling systems that consistently manage the full range of physician schedules available to a healthcare organization make a huge difference. By analyzing the rules and preferences of each provider in the context of the specific individual patient, the technology helps identify open appointment slots to expand new capacity, as well as refill canceled appointments through automated queue management.
Second, finding ways to give patients modern, convenient access is an area ripe for improvement in healthcare. Found a recent survey 84% of provider organizations Patients are restricted to scheduling appointments only through the front desk or call center.
while, 61% of patients reported it They skip doctor appointments entirely because of challenges associated with scheduling, including being directed to schedule appointments via a traditional phone call. It’s a major break – and opportunity.
Organizations that facilitate online access, where patients can book their own appointments based on their unique needs, have seen up to 20% of appointments being scheduled online, with strong year-over-year growth in both new and established patient adoption.
Technology allows patients to not only be better in control of their own care, it allows them to do so at their convenience, whether it is in the middle of the night, in a meeting, in a crowded social setting, or any other time a phone call would be inconvenient.
Finally, reliance on staff knowledge and training has been shown to place a greater burden on operations scheduling and accuracy. This may be most evident in examining the costs associated with training scheduling staff on how to accurately schedule patients’ appointments that fit the physician’s rules and preferences.
It can take weeks or months for schedulers to get up to speed on learning and applying the intricacies of an average-sized medical group. On the other hand, smart scheduling systems have been shown to reduce employee training time by an average of 50% by offering schedulers an automated and guided user experience.
Q: Your observation, “The only thing that doesn’t lie is your calendar.” I added that for providers this is especially true, as calendars show usage gaps as well as disrupted or poorly managed patient appointments. What “truth” do provider calendars tell us for the industry, and what does that mean for healthcare organizations?
a. Big Truth Providers calendars reveal that there is an enormous problem of unbalanced capacity in many if not most healthcare organizations today. Some doctors are underbooked, some doctors are overbooked, and canceled appointments aren’t refilled quickly enough.
This imbalance occurs, as evidenced by some of the statistics I just mentioned, because as healthcare organizations become larger and more complex and offer more diverse services, calendar management has simply moved beyond traditional methods and processes.
It may be reasonable for the administrator in an office of four or five physicians to remember each physician’s preferences and to remain aware of available openings. On the other hand, it is almost impossible for schedulers distributed across multiple locations or in a regional call center to keep up with the very complex lists of current (and changing) preferences across dozens or hundreds of physicians.
Organizations grow, change and merge. Doctors and staff turnover. Patients get new insurance. Evidence-based protocol development. It can get complicated very quickly – which is why these organizations are embracing intelligent and automated scheduling.
s. Specifically, when it comes to specialized care institutions, why is it so difficult to delve into their practices also, according to your observations, see some of the biggest opportunities for improvement in utilization?
a. Patients can struggle to find timely appointments with different specialties because these doctors tend to have very particular barriers to getting them, whether that requires a referral, validating certain insurance requirements, or because there are unique scheduling rules in place to ensure a specialist is booked. appropriate based on the patient’s needs.
From a consumer standpoint, it all creates longer wait times. For example, getting a new knee from an orthopedic surgeon has different levels of complexity than routine appointments, such as an annual preventive care check-up appointment with a dermatologist.
While intelligent scheduling can reveal benefits and improvements for all types of service providers and organizations, the data on professionals alone is impressive.
We found specialty organizations using smart scheduling that saw an average increase of 5-10% in physician utilization, with gastroenterology, orthopedics and musculoskeletal, urology, and multidisciplinary practices each maintaining physician utilization rates between 87%. -98%:
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98% of the gastrointestinal tract (GI and GE)
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93% are orthopedics
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88% are urologists
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87% are multidisciplinary
These results are even more impressive when you consider the potential revenue associated with specialty medical groups in a larger health system.
s. Patients want more autonomy and access to their care and in many cases, they don’t get it. You say online scheduling is hard, but done the right way, it’s profitable for both patients and administrators. I added that transferring the “power of scheduling” to patients actually puts more control in the hands of administrators. Please clarify these points.
a. Done in the right way, online scheduling is a win for patients because offering methods for self-scheduling via online access not only reduces the administrative burden, but also makes patients happier. They can now control and schedule healthcare appointments when, where, and in any way they prefer.
This is a huge problem for patients, who have been very vocal about their dissatisfaction with call wait times, phone networks, and other precarious operations in their providers’ offices. Not only does smart technology increase scheduling (and rescheduling) flexibility for both new and existing patients, it also enables a streamlined process that collects only the key data points required to schedule an appointment, such as contact information, reason for visit, insurance information, etc.
From an administrative perspective, medical groups can struggle with online scheduling when they are designed without context for the complexities of a provider’s needs. A patient booking the wrong appointment slot or with the wrong provider can have a ripple effect on other appointments or revenue cycle operations, and leave the consumer deeply dissatisfied.
In contrast, a well-designed intelligent scheduling system for online booking by the patient allows physician rules, preferences, and availability to be managed broadly and in the context of individual patient needs.
Whether it’s data-backed insight into provider utilization, understanding patient access barriers by provider, or accurately rotating new patient volume across providers, there can be good gains for medical groups with a robust online scheduling system.
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