Optimize Patient Throughput by Stacking Appointments Like Firewood

Leverage advanced technology and AI to create an efficient scheduling system that maximizes revenue while still delivering high-quality care.

How to fuel healthcare practice revenue by managing capacity and minimizing idle time

Managing supply and demand is critical to any business and, of course, healthcare practices in the U.S. are businesses, as reliant on revenue as any other. That means that scheduling has always been critical. The goal is to see as many patients as possible (high volume) while also delivering exceptional care (high value).

This challenge has only grown over the past 18 months. The crush of razor-thin reimbursement rates, rising administrative costs, and in many areas of the country, severe provider shortages ran headlong into a global pandemic that complicated care delivery in myriad ways. Even as Covid-19 caseloads ease in some places, experts predict it will take months, if not years, to make up for delayed care and its consequences, such as chronic disease complications.

Optimizing patient throughput remains a matter of survival for any healthcare practice but has also taken on a new dimension as community service. Finding ways to meet today’s incredible demand with a limited supply of providers is now an especially urgent, industry-wide mission.

The Fine Line Between Idle and Overbooked

If talk of scheduling increases your stress levels, join me around a crackling fire to discuss some solutions, taking inspiration from the wood that fuels the blaze we’re imagining. 

Have you ever stacked firewood in quantity? If so, you recognize that there’s a fine balance in creating a secure structure that will hold up for several seasons while the green wood dries. Piling logs too loosely can leave the stack vulnerable to dangerous collapse. Stacking too tightly, on the other hand, inhibits airflow

Apply this metaphor to healthcare practice scheduling and it becomes clear why office managers, administrators, and practitioners are so often frustrated. Healthcare offices usually alternate between:

• Loose scheduling: Fitting too few appointments into available slots is a recipe for financial collapse. Small gaps between appointments can aid flexibility but long periods of provider downtime will compromise revenues.

• Tight scheduling: Days crammed with double- and triple-booked appointments have downsides as well. Harried clinicians, angry patients in the waiting room, and declining satisfaction ratings and return visits don’t make for a pleasant or successful practice.

The ideal is to end the oscillation between these extremes. Doing so requires schedule optimization.

The Art of Scheduling Becomes (Computer) Science

To return to our firewood metaphor, if logs were shaped like bricks, stacking would be easy. But in reality, each piece of wood is different. Triangular wedges and round branches need to be fit together on the fly. People who grew up stacking firewood for the winter have a feel for how to quickly select and position pieces for each slot.

The same can be said about an experienced office manager who has seen enough days unfold to know what works and doesn’t with regards to scheduling. The industry has long relied on their art. Unfortunately, this approach remains subject to human error and limitations, it cannot scale as the practice grows, and it may fail entirely if the “scheduling guru” takes a vacation or leaves altogether.

Hoping for more reliability, countless practices have looked to electronic health records (EHR) solutions for scheduling tools, only to be disappointed. Despite their sophistication in many realms, these systems treat appointments more like reliably shaped bricks. Offering rigid time blocks, EHRs usually don’t take into account variations, things like:

• Provider-specific factors, such as a clinician who spends a few minutes longer with new patients than colleagues and must be scheduled according

• Patient-specific factors, such as comorbidities that require longer, more complex consultations, regardless of the stated purpose of the visit

• Practice history, such as no-show rates by day of the week, season, and the overall trend

• Supply constraints, such as space in the lone audiology booth at a small otolaryngology office

• Evolution in the office environment, such as when telehealth is incorporated or new processes streamline patient flow

Smarter systems, drawing on innovations in artificial intelligence, can respond to such appointment changeability. They can “stack the firewood,” so to speak, such that appointments dovetail in the most efficient manner possible, delivering long-term practice stability.

Offices that use these tools are neither overbooked nor are they plagued by excessive idle time. They’re in the Goldilocks Zone of optimal scheduling.

A Fireside Chat?

At DOCPACE, we call this technology-driven optimization capability “real-time appointment stacking.” It’s our way of describing how we use advanced statistics and predictive analytics to organize patient flow, strategically fitting more patients into the gaps in each day to realize their full throughout potential without overwhelming them.

Like a well-constructed wall of firewood, a perfectly optimized schedule is a sight to behold. If you’d like to see how it would look in your own practice, DOCPACE offers a complementary Idle Time Discovery Analysis. We’ll uncover the root cause of operational inefficiencies in your office(s) and then we can chat about implementing our AI solution. It’s a deployment so easy, you could be enjoying the benefits of better schedules before winter descends, a cup of warm cider optional.