Infusion therapy centers provide extremely important services to patients that are receiving care for a variety of serious ailments. Infusion centers often feel extremely busy and overwhelmed and managing the schedule can be difficult. This clogged scheduling can be problematic as it can reduce the amount of patients that can receive care and can affect total revenue earned. Fortunately, preventing clogged infusion center scheduling is possible by changing a few different practices. There are a few different tips and practice changes that can help an infusion center to avoid clogged schedules, reduce stress and provide better care to more people.
Focus on Improving Scheduling Efficiency
A primary way that you can help to prevent clogs in your schedule is by focusing on having an efficient scheduling process in place. You should be able to accurately predict how long an appointment will take, how long it will take to clean and prepare the room and a variety of other factors that can influence how many patients you can see in a day. By creating a detailed schedule that all employees can follow, you can ensure that your entire operations is more efficient.
Keep Customers Informed of Appointment Dates
When someone comes in or makes a call to schedule an appointment, they are likely going to choose a time that works based on their schedule. However, schedule needs do change, or they could make a mistake when initially calling in. They could then realize the mistake later and cancel at the last minute. Due to this continued challenge, finding a way to communicate and follow up with patients is very important. A great way that you can do this is by sending an email or making phone calls to follow up in the weeks leading towards the appointment.
Reduce Schedule Lead Time
If you are looking to maximize efficiency, reducing the amount of lead time that you have in your visits is very important. In general, the farther out a visit is scheduled, the more likely it will be for someone to not come in. If you are able to reduce the lead time scheduled to 30 days or less, you can greatly increase the chances of people showing up for their visits. Having a standard cap in place for how far out visits can be scheduled could help with this. This can help you reduce the amount of space waste that you have and keep your entire organization running more efficiently.
Reserve Slots for Short Lead Time Patients
While you will want to ensure that you do not back-clog your schedule at the infusion center, it is also important that you have spaces reserved for those that need immediate care. There are bound to be situations when someone needs to come in immediately and could jeopardize their health by waiting several weeks for an appointment. Because of this, it is important that you always have a few slots available each week to take people that have shorter lead time. You can determine how many of these slots you need based on the patterns that your infusion center typically sees.
Continue to Assess Processes
For an infusion center to be effective, it also needs to be willing to adapt to change. As time goes on, you may continue to notice that there are changes that need to be made to your scheduling process. You should keep your eyes open for bottlenecks in the process and ensure you are listening to customer feedback. This can keep you aware of what is going on at the infusion center and make the changes needed in the future to keep your schedule organized and the center running efficiently.
An infusion center continues to provide extremely important care for people that are struggling with many illnesses. When you are looking to provide better care at an infusion center, optimizing your efficiency and scheduling is important. These tips can help to reduce a clogged schedule and allow you to be efficient, which can maximize revenue and ensure you are able to care for as many patients as possible.
