Healthcare Services Healthcare Facility Analysis

Healthcare Services

Healthcare Facility Analysis

Recently a local hospital expanded its clinics in the surrounding suburban areas, and the most recent addition is being heavily promoted for its reliance on state-of-the-art scheduling and medical status updates from the physicians working there. While this location is called a clinic, it is actually a full service medical treatment facility that has general practitioners, pediatricians, and specialists on staff to support a very broad scope of patients. The majority of patients however are children as there are many families around the area. A recent visit to the waiting room showed that 70% of those waiting to see a physician are thirteen years of age or younger, with the remaining 30% being older adults in their late 50s and 60s.

Services Offered

As this is a spin-off from a very large and highly respected local hospital known for its treatment programs in pediatrics and orthopedic surgery, the clinic has a staff of experts in each of these areas. What make this clinic unique however is how the services are scheduled and evaluated in terms of patient satisfaction. This is the first clinic in the country to provide online registration for visits. The use of online scheduling applications and programs is critical for meeting the response-time expectations of patients (Qu, Rardin, Williams, 2011). The clinic also shows that it understands how variations in time perception change patient satisfaction as well. The use of the online scheduling system is voluntary yet already has 80% usage rates and high customer satisfaction ratings overall. Based on a visit to the clinic, it is clear that the majority of patients there are from young families, where time is at a premium and it is common to time conflicts, especially when there are multiple children in the family. Further, this approach to automated scheduling has also allowed for greater efficiency in how physicians and specialists plan out their days and also define the necessary support services and supplies they need. The more aligned time perceptions are within a healthcare provider the greater the level of efficiency and profess performance over time (Navarro-Espigares, Torres, 2011). The clinic is certainly seeing this as the pace within the waiting room was minutes instead of hours between appointments. At one point, the entire waiting room was empty, and this was during the January cold season. In addition to these services, the clinic also has a follow-on services scheduling option that also allows the patients to review those areas of their medical records that were modified. Providing patients with the option of evaluating to what extent their medical records are changing based on activity and actually seeing how they were modified is a best practice that brings greater trust into the overall patient-provider relationship (Sibona, Walczak, Brickey, Parthasarathy, 2011).

Analysis

The ability to schedule online and also have the ability to view records online significantly increased he patient satisfaction levels, judging from how much happier the families seemed to be to get into see the physicians. This same location had in years past been run with completely manually-driven systems and it was common to wait 90 minutes to see a doctor. That was painful and there was this continually re-looping video of Alaska travel videos one of the physicians brought back from vacation. It was an oppressive, boring environment that put internal efficiency at the center of focus for the clinic, not the patient. Now with the online scheduling system and the feedback on what has changed in a medical record, patients appear to be much more satisfied with the result. The staff is also seems to have a higher level of morale as they have much greater control over their own time and aren't either apologizing for the doctors being late or having to fend off angry patients. Overall morale is also up because the supervisors in the office say they can get much more done with so fewer distractions and dissatisfaction about wait times. The better the alignment of patient expectations to experiences, the more efficient a medical facility can function as it can focus on streamlining only the most critical process areas to serve patients (Navarro-Espigares, Torres, 2011).