Taking our “What the market says you need in your patient portal” series a step further, today we are going to address the market demand for dynamic scheduling. When it comes to the marketing work of drawing patients into the brick and mortar, I often tell clients that, where their website and patient portal are concerned, if 
they get the Find a Provider tool wrong, then they have gotten everything wrong. It’s an extreme statement, but it is meant to highlight a few key market dynamics:
- The fact that there are four primary “conversion” tools that transform unknown consumers into patients. They are: Find a Provider, Find a Location, Schedule a Class, and Make an Appointment. The value of these tools is that they allow us to finally put a name to that unknown consumer that is interested in interacting with your organization in some way. It also gets them to the most important step, which is scheduling an appointment.
- The dramatically high use of the Find a Provider tool by users of provider websites and patient portals. Go ahead and check your web and portal analytics (I’ll wait). Find a Provider is the most often visited page, right? Thought so. This is, by far, the most popular conversion tool that a healthcare provider has. It is the ultimate gateway towards getting that appointment scheduled.
- Our ultimate goal is to get that unknown consumer, or a current patient, in for an appointment for highly important service line X. To do so we need to reduce as many barriers as possible that could be in their way.
Enter the new world of scheduling embedded into a market driven patient portal. In this world we allow patients to schedule appointments online by providing them with calendar capabilities. Yes, this is very different from the way that business is currently done. Why? Clinicians work in a very dynamic environment that makes it challenging to manage schedules. Even though it is dramatically different from the way business is currently done, the market is making existing scheduling systems obsolete. Why? It’s surprisingly due to that very same dynamic nature of clinician schedules. The healthcare environment provides a seemingly endless supply of tasks for the clinician. Trying to overlay that dynamic environment over the traditional scheduling system is fraught with the well known long wait times, and poor consumer experience, that patients currently experience. Dynamic scheduling makes appointments easier for both the provider and the patient. Here’s how:
- Predicting Clinician Scheduling Chaos: Making sense of the chaos of a clinician schedule is no easy task. Dynamic scheduling embeds the power of mobile and analytics to exploiting knowledge of planned and emerging tasks. Ever hear of the butterfly effect? The premise there is that even seemingly chaotic events have a rhythm, but that rhythm is largely undetectable by we mere humans. With dynamic scheduling, mobile devices and wifi signals can triangulate location and analytics can span a number of different factors to make sense of a clinician schedule. This technology can be taken even further when you consider the life of emergency room clinicians. The dynamic scheduling application can sort data in real time to keep the clinician moving towards the patients with the highest needs.
- Patient Self Service Appointment Scheduling: On the portal, a patient can then interact, in real time, with a clinician’s dynamic schedule and securely book their appointments online. In that way, scheduling an appointment takes on user processes similar to online shopping in retail. Once a date and time are selected, the dynamic scheduling system can automatically confirm the appointment and record it in the EHR system. No staff action required. Secure automated email and text message reminders can also be used to decrease the number of no shows.
What do you think of the market drive towards dynamic scheduling?
