In the highly competitive health system market, savvy hospitals are stepping up to make their resources go further and work harder, and are recovering their most valuable resource of all, time, in order to keep revenue flowing into their health system and keep patients and providers collaborative and happy. By Bill Reid, SVP of Product Management and Partners, SCI Solutions
In the highly competitive health system market, savvy hospitals are stepping up to make their resources go further and work harder, and are recovering their most valuable resource of all, time, in order to keep revenue flowing into their health system and keep patients and providers collaborative and happy.
By Bill Reid, SVP of Product Management and Partners, SCI Solutions
“Brother, can you spare a time?” Yes, this a change in the lyrics made famous by Bing Crosby but today it is better representative of the challenge facing hospital leaders – there is a crisis of time. Not only are there new financial constraints, always with some looming deadline, but simultaneously they’re navigating many legislative requirements, ensuring compliance to a complicated regulatory framework and its massive number of changes.
In their spare time, if there were such a thing, health system leaders are working to migrate their practices away from the fee-for-service reimbursement models towards value-based care. What is ironic is better management may require more time with patients to do better care and lower costs. Unfortunately, we are in a transitional period that places strains on people on the front lines of patient care. Now, more than ever, hospitals need to maximize the use of their resources to preserve their most precious resource – time.
Tighter Scheduling, Better Collaboration
Savvy health systems should recognize the best way to recover working capital and be more profitable is to ensure the operation is using its time – the finite resource that it is – as carefully and fully as possible. This means ensuring its facilities and staff investments are being best used and capacity is well deployed. Scheduling and pre-registration advancements are core to this issue. It also means tighter collaboration with its community of independent care providers and better managing referrals and orders from this network. In the end, patients benefit immensely when more time and attention is focused on the right issues, and this approach keeps health systems operations healthier as well.
Strategies In Practice
Mountain States Health Alliance, a not-for-profit healthcare organization based in Johnson City, TN, operates a family of hospitals serving a 29-county, four-state region. The health system recognized it could be saving inordinate amounts of time and money by deploying smart technologies for referrals and orders – and believed it could turn the new, multi-state scheduling approach into a differentiator in its competitive market, leveraging these new tools.
By taking a broad and strategic approach, Mountain States Health Alliance designed a process that would be convenient for both physicians and patients by allowing for multiple appointments to be scheduled at one time, reducing hold times, and enabling referring physician offices to schedule appointments for their patients. This could all be accomplished without requiring patients to call the health system directly —all while they were still in the office.
By deploying this strategy and these tools, Mountain States Health Alliance’s self-scheduling solution increased scheduling volume 58 percent by linking more than 600 providers across 29 counties. Currently, the health system’s provider portal is used by 154 offices and schedules more than 7,000 appointments per month – more than 35 percent of all of the health system’s appointments. As an output of this new process, the health system also realized that appointment volumes grew, as physician and patient satisfaction improved, strengthening overall loyalty to the health system.
Specifically this strategy helped Mountain States Health Alliance in the following ways:
- 154 offices representing more than 604 providers actively use Provider Portal
- 58 percent increase in overall scheduling volume over three years
- 35 percent – 7,022 appointments – self-scheduled monthly
- improved physician satisfaction through greater convenience and efficiency gains
- improved patient satisfaction with streamlined process, better communication about finances, and appointment preparation
- reduced unnecessary phone calls and fax traffic
- reduced hold times dramatically
- increased both revenue capture and patient compliance
- eliminated lost orders through the seamless process for orders and scheduling
- allowed physicians to schedule at any time, after hours or early morning
As may be seen from Mountain State Health Alliance, new tools and technologies may be instrumental in saving hospitals precious time, helping them realize new plateaus of productivity. As hospitals work to overcome personnel resource and financial constraints, against the backdrop of legislative mandates and new industry requirements, these strategies and tools may be the difference between slowly losing much needed revenue, and turning that energy around to actually grown revenue streams.
In the highly competitive health system market, savvy hospitals are stepping up to make their resources go further and work harder, and are recovering their most valuable resource of all, time, in order to keep revenue flowing into their health system and keep patients and providers collaborative and happy.
