Becker’s Healthcare recently spoke with David Dyke, chief product officer at Relatient, to discuss how intelligent and AI-driven scheduling and access tools benefit patients and providers, the imperative for organizations to address consumerism in healthcare, and future innovations he sees on the horizon.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: How has healthcare scheduling evolved over the last few years, and why is it becoming a critical component in today’s landscape?
David Dyke: The most significant evolution has been the adoption of self-service scheduling tools by a wide variety of providers.
For providers, adoption of self-service scheduling took some time. No one likes to go first. But now, adoption and use of self-service scheduling solutions has become common.
For patients, using mobile devices is almost a given. Consumers are comfortable making a restaurant reservation or scheduling a trip on their device. While healthcare can be extremely complicated, consumers now use their devices to schedule appointments with their doctors.
Q: How has the rise of healthcare care consumerism reshaped patient access and scheduling practices? What emerging trends or strategies have you observed?
DD: This rise of consumerism in healthcare is reflected in providers working to meet patients where they are and to offer more types of scheduling and access services for more use cases. This can include a relatively simple one-time appointment with a primary care provider, a series of recurring appointments with a specialist for a chronic condition, caregivers scheduling appointments for their children and/or parents, and a wide range of other situations.
Consumerism is causing providers to think beyond traditional scheduling within the call center to expand channels of access, such as post-appointment follow-ups, online chat, referral tasks and more, to deliver a convenient, simplified access experience.
Q: Which tools are proving most effective?
DD: A variety of tools can provide value for both patients and providers, based on their preferences. For example, some patients will want to call on their phone — here, a conversational tool in a voice response system is important. Other patients might prefer interacting with a chatbot on a website.
It’s important that all of these different options have the same underlying systems, with the same intelligence and same rules for how schedules are created and managed. This leads to the consumer having a consistent experience.
Q: Can you elaborate on how these innovations are driving financial performance and supporting overall organizational sustainability?
DD: Scheduling innovations can have a significant impact on financial performance, affecting both an organization’s cost and revenue.
On the cost side of the equation, time spent on scheduling has been significant. With organizations under extreme financial pressure, tools such as chat or voice AI and interactive voice response systems can allow healthcare organizations to grow without increasing costs. Existing scheduling resources can be leveraged for more complex tasks around care coordination..
On the revenue side, a helpful mindset is to think about a patient who schedules a new appointment as a lead. In the business world, once an organization gets a lead it focuses on converting that lead into a customer, satisfying the customer and turning them into an ongoing customer. But in healthcare, new patients aren’t treated as leads. They often wait a long time to get an appointment; the longer a patient waits for an appointment, the more likely they are not to show up for the appointment and go elsewhere for care.
A more effective scheduling solution can create a more positive patient experience, help patients get faster appointments and lead to satisfied customers that promote an organization’s financial sustainability.
Q: Looking ahead, what advancements do you foresee in scheduling technology, and how is this technology transforming healthcare operations and patient engagement for the future?
DD: Healthcare has come a long way in adopting innovative self-scheduling solutions that have improved patient wait times for appointments and organizational capacity. But there is still a long way to go.
Healthcare providers continue to struggle with no-shows and late cancellations and face challenges in optimizing organizational capacity. These challenges exist as providers treat a wide variety of patients of different ages, with complex conditions and very different needs.
One future innovation will be using data to be more predictive — about whether a particular patient will show up or cancel an appointment, and how long an appointment will take. Better prediction will lead to greater efficiency.
As AI continues to mature, it will also provide the opportunity to make genuine human connections, which will enhance the scheduling process.
We’re excited to continue to work on solutions that are easy for providers to use, are effective and efficient, meet patients where they are and enable providers to deliver outstanding end-to-end patient experiences at scale without increasing costs.
