"No-shows," that is, people who do not show up for scheduled procedures or cancel them at the last minute, can cost healthcare organizations millions of dollars annually. A Midwestern safety-net hospital recently reduced costly "no-show" appointments significantly while successfully engaging patients.
Here's how they did it.
The hospital activated the hc1® Healthcare Relationship Cloud® in 2014. The cloud-based solution now helps streamline patient experience reporting and the patient communication processes.
The program has allowed the hospital to:
1. Encourage pre-registrations and efficiently communicate with patients. Before the platform was activated, the hospital used auto-dial phone calls to patients scheduled for outpatient procedures and gave them surgery preparation details. However, these calls and voicemails were generally ignored. The technology now sends a series of personalized mobile text messages or emails that encourage pre-registration and communicate preparation details. By encouraging patients to bypass long registration wait times or easily reschedule an appointment, the hospital is improving the overall patient experience while realizing major financial gains.
2. Monitor real-time performance while leveraging critical intelligence. The platform helps create a full-spectrum view of the health system's performance, without requiring time-consuming manual data compilation. In the past, hospital leadership could not easily view a report that showed the number of "no-shows" associated with its various outpatient clinics. Today, hospital staff is now able to access a real-time, holistic view of registration outcomes as well as "no show" volumes at the clinic level. Via intuitive, automatically updated dashboards, users are also able to easily view historical volume and changes over a given time period in order to pinpoint the impact of its patient experience initiatives.
3. Segment and target patients in new ways. In addition to viewing registration and appointment outcomes at the clinic and patient level, the organization is able to better segment and target patients by coupling this intelligence with demographics. For example, after identifying lack of pre-registration among a certain age group, the outreach or marketing team can specifically target this segment with other campaigns or even incentives to encourage proactive registration.
The hospital is able to improve the patient experience while accessing the real-time insight to drive the action and accountability necessary to create a more profitable organization. With detailed insight into the patient experience, the health system can now tailor the care experience for thousands of patients by treating the as individuals instead of 'just a number.'