Case Studies
New Patient Flow Strategy Reduces Patient Wait Time by 75%
Patients
were waiting 30 or 40 minutes, sometimes up to 1 hour.
As you can imagine patient satisfaction was at an all-time
low for this practice. Providers and staff could not
pinpoint the bottleneck and needed to find a solution to reduce
patient wait time. They turned to Quality Physician
Services for help.
QPS consultants took a look at the
practice scheduling procedures, chart flow, patient check-in,
etc., and the staff were all working very hard to take care
of patients effectively and efficiently. What the consulting
team discovered is that the various patient exam rooms were
not being utilized in the best ways possible. The primary
provider, a D.O. had certain equipment in certain exam rooms,
but like most physicians, could not include an adjusting table,
all diagnostic equipment and provide ancillary services in
every exam room. Consequently, patients had to wait
for the particular room to come available to receive the care
they needed.
QPS
outlined procedures at the front desk that would help schedulers
best determine the type of care each patient would need and
designate which room would be needed to examine and treat
them. They also modifying the practice
management scheduling software in order to schedule patients
by specific exam room. This new process reduced wait
time by 50%, and patient satisfaction increased immediately.
Staff and providers breathed a sigh of relief when the problem
was identified, and easily adopted the new procedures that
improved patient flow.
The
practice further reduced wait time by implementing a sub-waiting
area at the recommendation of QPS. The sub-waiting area
moved patients out of exam rooms to receive lab diagnostics
and other simple ancillary services. This strategy not
only increased patient satisfaction, but better utilized the
providers’ time as well.
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