Result
One of our provider group customers is able to see 2x the number of patients each day. Our medical call center team completes patient intake before the patient arrives (clinical and non-clinical) at the offices.
Problem
The provider group had several offices in NYC’s medically underserved areas. Considering that NYC real estate is extremely expensive, company management wanted to bill for more patients per day. With limitations in office space, this wasn’t possible to do unless patients were entering and leaving the medical offices faster.
Churning patients faster was hard to do unless patients’ dwell time in the offices was reduced. This in itself was a challenge because a patient’s pre visit requirements need to be fulfilled (clinical and non-clinical) for providing high levels of patient care and to ensure that medical claim denials do not occur.
The tasks completed by our customer’s clinical and non-clinical staff included (for each patient visit) the following and required almost 20-30 minutes per patient. Meanwhile, the providers could easily diagnose a patient within 5-7 minutes. The bottleneck was in the pre-visit pre-requisites.
- Scanning and uploading Driver’s license, Insurance card to EMR.
- Scanning and uploading Consent form e-signatures to EMR.
- Collecting copays and past dues.
- Entering chief complaint, HPI, medical/social/family history, medications, allergies in their EMR.
- Medication reconciliation
- Tests as dictated by the visit type workflow
- Follow up appt for each patient
Solution
So, how did we save 25 minutes per patient visit?
We had our patient contact center wrap up patient intake before the patient comes in for their appointment. Below are the tasks our patient contact center completed for each patient.
- Driver’s license, Insurance card pictures.
- Demographics, emergency, care team contacts.
- Consent form e-signatures.
- Chief complaint, HPI, PFSH, medications, allergies – all.
- Medication reconciliation.
- COVID questionnaire.
Therefore, the patients only had to finish the necessary testing (if any) when they came in for their appointments. The patient never had to wait at the office to get their follow up appt. Our medical call center team called each patient after they left, and gave them their followup appointment.
Net-result – patient satisfaction increased multi fold, as was evident in the Google reviews. Crowding and long patient dwell times became a thing of the past. The providers could treat double the number of patients without spending any extra time in the offices.