Medicine has traditionally predetermined the availability of daily office care by arbitrarily categorizing the urgency of patients' needs. In the United States, the average patient can wait three weeks or longer for a routine appointment. Because of this, many patients have been "trained" to expect a long delay for physician appointments, and patient access to timely clinical care is unnecessarily limited.
Standard office practice demonstrates:
Introduction
Do Today's Work Today
- Difficulty in meeting requested appointment needs on a timely basis
- Categorizing care urgency to deflect immediate demand
- Overbooking
- Long delays in waiting for appointments
- Shunting of excess demand to outside care sources, such as urgent care clinics and hospital emergency rooms
Same-day appointment scheduling methods restore a patient's right to determine the urgency of his or her request to see a physician regardless of the reason he or she wishes to be seen.
Same-day appointment scheduling allows you to:
Same-day appointment scheduling allows you to:
- Delight patients
- Improve the quality and timeliness of patient care
- Reduce cancellations, no-shows and rescheduled appointments
- Decrease staff phone time for scheduling and triage
- Enable physicians to see their own patients over 90 percent of the time
- Give physicians time to complete paperwork during regular office hours
- Increase the ability of physicians and staff to take time off without wreaking havoc in the office
- Improve physician and staff productivity and satisfaction
In short, you can do today's work today by meeting all requests for same-day appointments and thereby constantly freeing the future appointment schedule. Thus, capacity is created to maintain same-day access to appointments on a daily basis.
Goals:
Goals:
- To help you achieve access to same-day appointments for urgent and routine care in your practice.
- To provide resources to guide your implementation process.
Downloadable tools: Click on the links in the sidebar on the left to download tools to help you measure and improve your performance, track your data and analyze your results.
Open Access
