Every year, the total cost of missed healthcare appointments in the United States reaches $150 billion.
The no-show rates are as high as 30% nationwide, and 61% of patients skip medical appointments due to scheduling issues.
The need for intelligent medical scheduling gets even more critical when it concerns serious diseases such as cancer. By effectively handling appointment slots and cutting down on waiting lists, healthcare organizations can serve more patients, especially in areas with scarce healthcare resources.
Thus, a well-organized scheduling approach for a specific clinic can increase customer loyalty, boost revenue by 30-60%, and help save as many lives as possible.
Efficient Treatment Starts with an Intelligent Scheduling Approach: How to Choose Between Customizing Your Scheduling Solution or Switching to New Ready-Made Software
What to choose: replace your existing solution with one of the many off-the-shelf products on the market, customize it, or even create your own custom scheduling solution?
To make an informed decision, discover the pros and cons of each approach.
Ready-Made Scheduling Solutions
Going with a third-party application fits best for small organizations with fixed budgets. The basic functionality of out-of-the-box solutions is enough to meet all the scheduling needs of a small healthcare enterprise. However, if you require your system to meet unique security, scalability, and performance settings, it’s better to consider creating your own platform.
Furthermore, a limitation of ready-made solutions is that you’ll need to adapt your workflow to fit them, whereas custom scheduling systems are built to align with your business processes.
Pros
- Low costs
Cons
- Privacy & data security risks
- Limited scalability
- Lack of customization
Building a Custom Smart Scheduling Software Solution
Opting for a smart long-term investment in custom scheduling software goes hand in hand with the ability to scale your product along with your business, integrate with your existing software, increase productivity and security, and benefit from other opportunities your custom platform offers.
Pros
- Scalability
- Enhanced security and data privacy
- Functionality aligned with your specific needs
- Third-party software integration
- Design customization
Cons
- Higher costs*
- Delivery time
*Custom software development may require more significant investment, though, as a rule, for large enterprises, adapting processes to accommodate an off-the-shelf solution can often result in higher costs than developing a custom solution.
Scheduling Software Solutions for Clinics: A Way Out to Your Challenges
Scheduling challenges in healthcare organizations impact patient care, staff satisfaction, and overall operational efficiency:
- Last-Minute Changes: Patient admissions, emergencies, and unexpected staff absences can lead to last-minute scheduling changes. Adapting to these changes quickly without disrupting patient care requires a responsive scheduling system.
- Shift Rotations and Coverage Gaps: Healthcare facilities operate 24/7, requiring rotating shifts to ensure continuous patient care. Managing these shift rotations while avoiding coverage gaps and maintaining a healthy work-life balance for staff is challenging.
- Anticipating Patient Demand: Accurately predicting patient volumes and demands helps healthcare organizations schedule the correct number and type of staff, avoiding overstaffing or understaffing situations.
- Staff Preferences and Fairness: Employees often prefer specific shifts or days off, and ensuring a fair distribution of these preferences can be difficult. Failure to accommodate preferences leads to dissatisfaction and increased turnover.
- Compliance with Regulations: Healthcare scheduling must adhere to various labor laws and regulations, such as maximum hours worked and required break times.
Custom scheduling software addresses all these challenges and makes your life easier in several ways:
- Loyal clients: By adopting intelligent scheduling methodologies, you can reduce waiting durations, enhance the appointment process, and foster a more favorable patient experience. No queues and a time-efficient treatment plan—everything your patient dreams of.
- Loyal employees: With efficient cyclical scheduling, idle time minimization, and personalized workday structuring reached by intelligent scheduling, you can nurture employee loyalty, resulting in a harmonious workplace environment and elevated performance levels.
- Maximum revenue: You can reduce overhead expenses through lowered idle time and optimized resource allocation. Efficient scheduling further prevents revenue loss by averting overbooking or underbooking.
Development of the Custom Scheduling Solution
Explore the range of tasks and processes custom intelligent scheduling software allows to automate at each step of the patient journey:
Making an Appointment
- Minimizing errors when filling out a request through autofill fields
- Distribution of patients among branches within the city
- Integration of Carriers to automate Patient Insurance Pre-check
- Functionality for managing appointments on the patient’s side
- Scheduling a series of appointments at once according to the treatment plan
- Assigning different duration for different types of appointments
Minimizing No-Shows
- Analysis of historical information and classification of patients based on the likelihood of their no-show
- Development of differentiated algorithms to prevent no-shows
- Utilization of bots for sending SMS and making calls (reminders and appointment confirmations)
Development of Prediction Models
- To forecast the number of visits based on local factors, weather, events, and so on.
- Forecasting the duration of appointments based on each doctor’s characteristics and historical patient data.
Personnel and Equipment Planning
- Shifts planning
- Vacations management
- Accounting for the compatibility of individual employees
- Automatic assignment for the appointment of all necessary participants (doctors, laboratory assistants, nurses, equipment)
- Analysis of downtime and staff efficiency
Success Story: Smart Scheduling Platform for a US-based Chain of Dermatology Clinics
A US-based chain of dermatology clinics needed a solution for booking, rescheduling, and canceling appointments. The core goal was to reduce reliance on phone calls and increase patient engagement to expand their services.
In less than 12 months, the Intetics team developed an innovative, AI-powered scheduling platform with a user-friendly interface and simple navigation. The solution’s transparency ensured clear visibility into available appointment slots, scheduling options, and information required for successful booking.
The platform implementation resulted in a 30% decrease in no-shows due to increased patient satisfaction. Employee satisfaction improved as well, with a 15% decrease in staff turnover and a 25% increase in user efficiency among medical staff.
Robust data storage mechanisms of the system helped the client to protect sensitive information and comply with privacy regulations. Read more about how the client deployed a smart scheduling software solution.
Featured Case Study: Intetics Remote In-Sourcing Team Created and Supports One of the Largest Health Portals in the USA, Serving 5M People a Year
Free More Time to Care about Your Patients: Smart Scheduling Solution for Clinics
Say goodbye to no-shows, missed appointments, and dissatisfied employees. Predict your workload and coordinate resources intelligently with the power of easy-to-use scheduling software for digital health clinics. Serve more patients, increase loyalty, and generate more revenue to scale.
Looking for a reliable scheduling software development partner? Reach out today to get an expert consultancy on your scheduling needs.
