Patient scheduling IT cuts booking time in half, doubles bookers’ output

At Heritage Medical Associates, the IT is making patients and physicians happier, and is helping better control the costs in delivering quality healthcare to patients. The manual process for fielding scheduling calls can be a nightmare: Calls can take up to 20 minutes, and agents comb through binders/spreadsheets of provider calendars and scheduling rules to book an appointment.

This process can only place a handful of patients per day, despite call centers receiving hundreds of scheduling calls. This contributes to a poor patient experience, care delays, and, ultimately, a loss of business to surrounding competitors.

Heritage Medical Associates, a large, independent multi-specialty group in Middle Tennessee, had patient liaisons, centralized schedulers focused on scheduling new patient appointments, and relied on a cumbersome process to connect patients with providers: They accessed individual provider schedules to find the soonest available appointment.

“This negatively impacted the patient in two ways: The process of making an appointment was belabored and access to care was compromised,” said Jessica Smith, chief administrative officer at Heritage Medical Associates.

“With no shortage of calls coming in, patients were often put on hold as liaisons looked for the right provider and appointment. Sometimes they would be scheduled with a provider that could not accommodate them for several months despite appointment availability within days that was invisible to the liaison with their method of scanning individual schedules.”