Between January 30 and February 3, a team consisting of Scheduling, Outpatient Care, Revenue Cycle, and Travel came together to work on improvements to scheduling and increasing patient access to care. The team mapped out the outpatient schedule process and identified several ways to make this process more efficient. The improvement work aims to increase patient access to care on time through enhanced appointment availability for all services: medical, dental, behavioral, optometry, audiology, and wellness. The goal of the work is to increase “real-time” access to care. The key metrics of patient satisfaction, process time, and clinical quality indicators were gathered and used for measuring changes.
YKHC provides Continuity of Care to each patient. This means the same provider delivers the right care, in the right place, at the right time. Our production and productivity are critically crucial whether the team member is in a village, inpatient, outpatient, or a support service. Our patients are experiencing long lead times, and we should understand our work through the patient’s lens. Understanding the constant change of needs in our patients’ experience is also critical. Improving patient access will allow us to meet our patients’ needs, ensure we have slots available for acute or routine care, balance the work for the employees, and reduce unnecessary emergency room visits. This is outlined in the Napartet Tactic of improving the patient experience. The standardization of the process contributes to goals outlined in the Shape culture to support high-reliability Napartet Tactic.
During the week of improvement work, the lead time, or total time the process from building schedules to the first booked appointment, was reduced from seven months to two months. The list of patients waiting for an appointment was reduced by a couple of hundred. The time to schedule one appointment was reduced by 44%.
Do you want to learn more about Lean and improvement work? Reach out to Miranda_Robb@ykhc.org.
On Wednesday, February 1st, the team hosted an open house to see the improvement work. This was well-attended and valuable feedback was gathered.