Provider & Resource Scheduling

Community-Wide Scheduling simplifies the process by which staff members at single and multi-facility health care organizations schedule patient appointments in any department or facility across the organization. In addition to streamlining patient appointment scheduling, the application helps reduce scheduling errors and missed appointments. Furthermore, it includes capabilities to manage resources efficiently and support managed care environments.

Components and Benefits

• Automated patient scheduling
• Waitlisting capabilities
• Scheduling communications
• Real-time access to patient information
• Resource management
• Conflict checking

Automated Patient Scheduling
The application instantly finds the first available time slot in which all the resources necessary to perform an appointment are available. Features include:

• Flexible appointment booking options
• Alternative appointment times
• Ability to schedule consecutive sessions for a patient
• Ability to schedule appointments at different facilities
• Ability to accommodate both centralized and decentralized scheduling
• Flags for frequent no-shows and bad debt
• Recurring visit feature to schedule appointments on a daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis

Waitlisting Capabilities
Waitlisting routines help departments and staff manage resources. Waitlisting provides prioritized lists of patients waiting for specific appointments. By utilizing waitlists, facilities minimize or eliminate unproductive time due to cancellations. Waitlisting allows staff to:

• Maintain and prioritize waitlisted appointment lists
• Track how long a patient remains on a waitlist
• Easily move patients from the waitlist to scheduled appointment times
• Record latest dates acceptable for patient appointments

Scheduling Communications
Several features improve the communication essential for efficient patient appointment scheduling and attendance.

• Automatic appointment reminders and cancellation notices
• Automatic archiving of system-generated patient letters
• Overdue Health Maintenance and Disease Management alerts
• Automatic scheduling alerts
• Electronic secure messaging between caregivers and office staff for patient phone calls, prescription calls, diagnostic test results, etc.

Real-time Access to Patient Information

• Appointment-related instructions for the patient and scheduler
• Automatic retrieval of a patient's existing demographic and insurance records (even if the patient has never visited the location before)
• Display of the patient's appointment compliance when scheduling appointments
• Display of the patient's scheduled and pending appointments
• Display of a patient’s outstanding health maintenance for physician practices
• User-defined access to a patient's Ambulatory Patient Record (APR) for physician practices
• Access to financial information and ability to enter copayments upon check-in or check-out

Resource Management
Additional features assist the management of personnel, rooms, and equipment.

• Ability to customize each clinician’s daily schedule by time, duration of appointments, and appointment type
• Ability to customize daily schedules for rooms as well as medical equipment
• Ability to monitor and switch resources in an emergency
• Ability to enable managers to plan and schedule staff meetings at the most convenient times
• Flexible views of resource’s schedules to book appointments

Conflict Checking
Conflict checking warns a scheduler of potential conflicts at the time of scheduling, allowing conflicts to be detected and avoided. Conflicts can be based on patient's gender, age, insurance plan or other scheduled appointments. Features include resource, personnel, and appointment type conflict checking.