How to Thrive During a Physician Shortage

Because of both an aging citizenry and a growing population, the United States faces a projected shortage of between 37,800 and 124,000 physicians within 12 years—and it may get worse.

Many health care organizations are turning to automated technology to help take a load off providers’ plates. However, while health care leaders might look to ease the physician shortage by onboarding clinical technologies, one area that holds the most promise in alleviating over-booked clinicians is actually found before a patient ever books an appointment.

Two ways to ensure your practice survives and thrives are leveraging technology to maximize physician capacity (ensuring physician time is fully booked and billable) and guaranteeing all physicians are practicing top of license as much as possible (ie, practicing to the full extent of their training, and not spending time doing tasks that could be performed by other staff).

Smart scheduling solutions can help get the right people to the right physicians in the right time slots to ensure maximized appointment capacity. These solutions can also remind patients of appointments to reduce no-shows, reschedule appointments, and refill time slots left vacant by cancellations.

Here are 5 proven tactics and techniques for helping you and your organization work smarter, not harder, by leveraging centralized and automated scheduling practices.

Working at Full Capacity

#1 Coordinate quickly by aggregating scheduling data from multiple locations and templates

As sub-specialty practices continue to grow and become adopted by existing health care organizations, provider groups have tried to facilitate efficiency and compliance by using scheduling templates, each of which is designed to capture detailed information about narrow areas of a practice.

This is tremendously helpful—except that too often, there’s no visibility across templates, so clinic managers can’t see whether time is available in different locations or across different specialties. Further, even when they can see if time is available, they often don’t have the necessary administrative rights to initiate or change appointments.

Don’t let your practice become so compartmentalized that no one knows what anyone else is doing, which makes coordination difficult or impossible. Aggregate data across multiple scheduling templates, share appropriate permissions, and ensure physicians and coordinators can see each other’s availability and easily fill available space to ensure providers aren’t leaving time and appointment spots on the table.

#2 Integrate contingencies into appointment booking

Planning for contingencies improves physician utilization. Many provider organizations lose tremendous amounts of their physicians’ productivity due to unfilled time because they haven’t booked enough patients with the right conditions to match physician availability or because they lost planned appointments due to no-shows. Some bear this waste by accepting it as a cost of doing business, but setting up smart and dynamic scheduling rules that monitor patient populations helps quite a bit.

Know which patients are likely to respond to reminders and requests for confirmations and set up appropriate auto-reminders. Strategically manage overbooking and waitlisting by monitoring historical patterns. Aggregating more patient data, analyzing it, and carefully building dynamic if/then sorts of automation can dramatically increase productive time use and cut back on revenue and time lost to no-shows.

#3 Incorporate metrics into organizational planning

Most scheduling systems are set up to view physicians’ time availability as generic, not taking into consideration that it usually varies by time of day, day of week, season of the year, geographical location, or physician preferences.

Smart scheduling can adapt to physician-specific rules and preferences—for instance, if a physician prefers to see a certain number of a specific type of patient, often on specific times and days or at specific locations. Further, smart scheduling can account for patient preferences for location, time of day, and appointment type. Matching patient and physician preferences helps maximize physician capacity and ensure patients can be seen as soon as possible.

Staying Focused on Top of Practice Work

#1 Build discernment about patient needs into scheduling with upfront triage

A patient with arm pain may benefit from a physical therapist or an arm surgeon depending on symptoms, and sending that patient to the wrong provider wastes time and money for everyone. Instead, incorporate triage directly into the scheduling process by automatically gathering patient data up front. Be sure you’ve done everything you can to ensure an office visit is as useful as possible for both patients and providers.

#2 Engage patients more thoroughly in the appointment-setting process

Having administrative staff spend time on the phone with patients to set—and possibly re-book—an appointment can cost $5 to $8 per appointment and take up staff time that could be better focused on more valuable activities. Your health care organization should have an easy way for patients to book and reschedule appointments on their own. This not only saves your clinic money, but it gives patients added flexibility and autonomy, since many of them prefer to book after hours, often late at night or early in the morning when your booking staff might not be available.

In fact, this strategy isn’t only about clinic efficiency—it’s also about meeting customer demand. More and more patients are starting to demand this kind of self-service technology. A recent KLAS survey found 67% of respondents want the ability to schedule appointments online, but the majority of health care organizations don’t have the capability.

In Conclusion

Careful planning and persistent use of these tactics will help physician practices develop workflows that are friendly to both patients and providers, ensuring they are operating at the top of their license and maximizing their capacity without overloading their schedules. This also helps your organization to realize higher patient engagement, optimize the online customer experience, and save staff time at all areas of the practice by enabling smart, centralized scheduling.