Stamford Health

Tamika M. Williams

Contact Center Leader

The overall mission of effective and efficient medical scheduling is to place patients at the forefront by giving them efficient access to care and making sure all their needs are met on a first-call resolution. Therefore, the lifeblood of medical scheduling involves more than just getting the right number of people in the right place at the right time doing the right things. Rather, the recipe for success involves people, processes, and technology.

Key Ingredients of Medical Scheduling:

1. People: Post-COVID-19 pandemic, many healthcare facilities throughout the US are faced with workforce shortages. The call volume is through the roof, the wait times are significant, and the patient/provider complaints are continuous. You also do not have adequate manpower to bring you above the water. At the same time, your employees are burnt out and stressed too thin, which impacts the quality of care. Ultimately, it appears to be impossible to achieve patient satisfaction as it all feels like a recipe for failure. In hindsight, the central idea is to just make it work or figure it out.

According to data from the March 2023 Harris Poll survey, ‘More than 70 percent of adults feel the health care system is failing to meet their needs in some way such as taking too long to get an appointment.’  Whether your office is decentralized or centralized, call volume is forecasted for the future but can also be unpredictable because calls are random. Depending on what is going on, you never know if the call volume will be significantly higher than predicted. Therefore, one must always be prepared for unforeseen circumstances.

In general, staffing models for medical scheduling in a contact center environment are comprised of historical data and formulas used to identify how call volume, average handled time, and shrinkage impact the number of staff needed to handle the calls. Therefore, staffing must be looked at as a bottom- up approach where the focus should be on the actual required number of staff needed to consistently deliver the expected service level agreement. This can be accomplished by budgeting for employee turnover through overstaffing. Taking this proactive approach helps to reduce costs, gain better efficiencies, and minimize patient access issues and/or poor experiences.

2. Processes:  Life experiences have proven that so much time is spent in coordinating care. Ultimately, every healthcare facility's mission is to provide an optimum patient experience. To accomplish this, medical scheduling processes must be streamlined. Most often, by popular demand, providers prefer to use visit types coupled with timeslot scheduling. This method of scheduling appears to be very straightforward. 

However, performing the traditional methods of scheduling is no longer the best way to create patient satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Therefore, healthcare systems must make effective use of different methods when scheduling medical appointments.

"Providing patients the ability to self-schedule at their own convenience allows for better time management and reduction of no-shows."

Such additional methods are wave/walk-in and cluster scheduling. The wave and walk-in technique is a simplified approach where patients are pre-scheduled at the top of the hour each hour while the other half hour is used as an open access slot for allocating same-day add-ons and/or walk-in patients who require an urgent appointment. The cluster scheduling method is where multiple patients with similar needs are scheduled back-to-back on any given particular day. Both methods address the need to give patients quicker access to care and providers the ability to help patients in a more effective and efficient way.

Another key process to incorporate into medical scheduling is performing checks and balances once an appointment is set. It is inevitable for appointment errors to happen when scheduling is done manually by staff. For that reason, having appointment auditors and quality analysts in place is essential. Medical scheduling is one of the most critical elements of a patient's visit. It incorporates more than just booking the patient with the correct provider and timeslot. It also involves staff being courteous, helpful, knowledgeable, and HIPPA compliant. Insurance information must also be collected at the time of scheduling to verify eligibility prior to the appointment.   Incorporating a quality analyst and audit specialist can identify and address the root causes of broken workflows, inefficient scheduling, poor performance, and service. Ultimately, this approach will also help healthcare organizations understand what makes a patient ‘tick’ and where to improve to be at the forefront of achieving and sustaining satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Technology:  Nowadays, administrative burdens have been at an all time high. This is a direct result of the increased demand for access to care. Since the COVID-19 pandemic shaped the healthcare industry, many organizations have implemented strategic plans incorporating the ‘digital front door’ approach. Simply explained, this is a plan of action where technology is used to manage and improve patient experiences throughout their journey to healthcare.

Nonetheless, the key ingredients to a successful medical scheduling environment incorporating technology include patient self-scheduling and artificial intelligence coupled with an EMR system that incorporates built-in templates by appt type along with the rules and preferences of the providers. Providing patients the ability to self-schedule at their own convenience allows for better time management and reduction of no-shows. On the other hand, artificial intelligence (AI) coupled with provider templates helps to optimize appointments by creating maximum efficiency in scheduling. Most importantly, it boosts productivity, removes the potential for costly mistakes, and helps to improve patient plus provider satisfaction.

Overall, the foundation of effective and efficient medical scheduling is built around paving the way to embrace necessary changes to allow for a better tomorrow. In doing so, it would save healthcare organizations a lot of time and money and create long-lasting patient and provider satisfaction.