Online Appointment Scheduling Expected To Increase In Healthcare
By Megan Williams, contributing writer
Medical software companies and EHR solutions providers take note — online self-scheduling is growing in big ways.
According to new research by Accenture, two in three patients will be booking their own medical appointments online by the end of 2019. That represents 64 percent of patients, and $3.2 billion in potential savings for the U.S. health system.
The process will likely resemble the systems patients currently use to book restaurants or reserve taxis, and will increase practice appointment capacity while increasing medical staff productivity. Overall, that means that health systems will be able to divert 80 percent of their appointment activity through self-scheduling portals.
Research indicates that it takes a little less than a minute to schedule an appointment online, in contrast to 8.1 minutes over the phone, with transfers being involved 63 percent of the time. In 2014, only 40 of the top 100 health systems offered self-scheduling options with 10 percent of smaller systems offering the same. Accenture has estimated that self scheduling was offered in only 11 percent of appointments, and patients opted to use the service only 2.4 percent of the time.
Accord to Dipak Patel, managing director of Accenture’s patient access solutions, “Adopting self-scheduling delivers value by enabling call center capacity and workforce to be reassigned to more complex activities. By making general appointment scheduling available online, health systems can reduce excess capacity, offer 24/7 scheduling and better manage schedules to maximize availability and capacity.”
In Practice
In a real-world example, Canadian software company, Cloud Practice, has recently released their product, MyHealthAccess.
The product is an appointment management web app that connects patients and providers online. Patients are able to access clinical schedules where they can plan appointments, freeing clinical staff from planning, scheduling, rescheduling, and confirming appointments by phone.
Patients are given the option of accessing MyHealthAccess on their own by searching for a clinic and sending a request for connection, or the clinic itself can initiate a connection via email. The software allows for multiple clinic connection on a single account, and patients are given the option of adding the reason an appointment is being booked.
On the EHR side, clinics are able to integrate their software with one of the country’s most popular EHRs (OSCAR). This means that information already in the EHR can be populated into a patient account on MyHealthAccess without additional data entry.