Hallmark attracts new patients with online appointment booking · Hallmark attracts new patients with online appointment booking ... Ambulatory Services Team Hayes Management Consulting
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Goal: Share our story of online appointment implementation process and our approach to a strategic planned rollout and optimization.
We hope you will gain a clear picture of what this technology and integration with CPS has to offer, and understand what it takes to put in motion. Then you can decide if this is a workable solution that supports your organizational goals.
• Objective 1: Understand the online appointment interface functionality with Centricity scheduling.
• Objective 2: Get a glimpse of a high level implementation steps including all the challenges that come with a Centricity integration and changing provider schedules to make this work.
• Objective 3: Walk away understanding challenges or techniques for creative solutions to achieve maximum results using online appointment scheduling with Centricity.
• Attracts new patients• Ability to schedule when the office is closed • Frees up staff by reducing phone calls• Leverages technology to improve operations and increase revenue and patient
satisfaction• Ultimately boils down to convenience for patients and staff
How it works: • Patients go online and search for an appointment using a variety of criteria
options • Search returns list of nearby providers and available appointments • Patients can view provider profiles, read reviews, see pictures of the office, and
• From staff workflow point of view: When patient books an appointment, our vendor provides an “alert” pop up that indicates the appointment was placed in the schedule
• Angela, from Hayes, was brought in to work with the HHMA office managers and the vendor technical team. – She is the scheduling “guru” and had already worked with the managers on Centricity schedule
• Solution: When patients search for available appointments online you still setup your schedule to control what patients see – Your schedule can be set up to show availability using a few options:
• Option B: Allocated Slots Only– Can choose which allocated slots will show for New Patients – Can choose which allocated slots will show for Established Patients
• To take it a step further, we made 2 special appointment types– Added optional additional layer of control for the managers to use allocated slots that were
• Regardless of how the manager decided to “read” the time slots, when the actual patient appointment was made, only these 2 appointment types would be “written/booked” on the Centricity schedule. – EVERY appointment made online would be either
• A few practices decided to increase the standard lead time of 2 hours (up to 4 hours or 1 business day) – Gives the practice more time to prepare for the patient– Also some providers are not currently accepting new patients
• Challenge: Working with the office managers to achieve maximum provider availability in the Centricity schedules with minimal interruption to existing office workflows– The good news is that the setup choice could be changed after go‐live so there was minimal risk
• Our vendor does not require patients to enter an address– Since the address is a required field in Centricity, placeholder text is
populated which causes a problem for us and we are still currently working on a resolution
– Special characters entered by the patient can not be prevented. These can potentially cause claim rejections if not caught and fixed by staff in Registration
• Patients and online communication– Some patients not responsive to phone calls if information is needed prior to
their appointment. You will have this for any patient, but more so the electronically savvy patients.
• There is some ongoing maintenance with online appointments:– If templates change, vendor may need notified– If appointment types change, vendor may need notified and templates will need updated
and maybe even visit reasons/durations on website– If providers decide to accept or not accept new patients– If providers start seeing patients at another facility (or change suite numbers)– If office hours/days of the week change– If a provider leaves the practice– Age limits of who can book online
• Most vendors typically provide a helpful availability report or analysis • Performed audits on schedule templates and daily schedules
– Staff manually blocking slots on daily schedule – Schedule template set up to “read yellow” but found blocked allocated slots on daily schedule – Some providers still hesitant to offer many online slots
• Worked with vendor to do technical audits– All availability not always shown on website– These were fixed right away