Online scheduling and patient satisfaction at a suburban medical clinic

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).

Conclusion

The addition of two key technologies and the redefining of processes within the local clinic, a spin-off of a major hospital locally, has been very successful. Integrating an online scheduling application and support for selective medical updates has made the clinic a much more efficient and patient-centered facility. In addition, the morale of the staff has increased as they have much greater control over their work as well. Finally the patients are also being turned around within 30 minutes instead of the 90 minute turnaround which was typical in the past. All of these factors have also significantly helped to increase the number of patients now relying on this clinic, which is staging a comeback.