Planning by key players crucial to scheduling
Planning by key players crucial to scheduling
Rehiring staff, adding PCs part of challenge
The overall lesson learned when Cincinnati-based Mercy Health Partners went live with its new Windows-based scheduling system is that the participation of key players in the planning process is crucial.
That advice comes from Jane Lach, RHIA, MBA, regional director of access, who is overseeing the system’s implementation of Pathways Healthcare Scheduling (PHS), a product of Atlanta-based HBOC.
"You have to create a team with the appropriate people — radiology managers, cardiology service managers, etc. — and gain the participation of the sites and the people affected," says Lach. Because the Mercy project team lacked initial participation from personnel in the ancillary departments at the system’s four hospitals, modifications had to be made after the system went live, she adds. "We got feedback from the departments and had to make changes to the [scheduling] reports."
Each department works off the next day’s schedule because of the need to order supplies for specific exams and make other preparations for appointments, Lach notes. The nuclear medicine department, for instance, needed the patient’s height and weight, and other areas required other clinical information. Because there also were questions about the way the exams were listed on the reports, the form was changed so the exams were grouped under the various resource groups.
Another issue that arose after Pathways went live on Jan. 10, 2000, was that the departments realized they needed more computer hardware than they initially had requested, Lach says.
"This scheduling system requires a pretty robust PC, and to make life easy, they soon realized they needed PCs in places where they had terminals with no memory and no hard drive."
The system requires a PC with a random access memory of at least 64 megabytes, she explains.
Before going live on Pathways — the crux of a new call center consolidating precertification, preregistration, and scheduling for the four facilities — staff had to load 4,000 future appointments into the new system manually, Lach says. "The entire [call center] scheduling staff, plus others from the sites, worked four days straight until 10 p.m., which was good, because they took ownership for how correct [the information] was."
The staff met the goal of entering all the January and February appointments before the live date, and by the end of that day, they had entered the future appointments for March through June, she says.
Anticipate errors beforehand
Although staff did quality assurance on the work, there were some errors in the 4,000 entries during the first two weeks the system was live, she adds. The individual departments were encouraged to print out scheduling reports from the old DOS-based scheduling system before the "go-live" date so they could verify the new PHS computerized schedule.
"We’re running a report from the old system and then looking at what’s in the new system," she says, "but it’s like a moving target because every day it changes. A patient could call and change a time, [for example], so it’s like swimming upstream."
Surgery department eyes system
As of late January, the scheduling system was operational for four hospitals in radiology, cardiology, and pulmonary services, Lach says.
"As far as future applications for PHS, we’re looking at creating a schedule for preadmission testing appointments at all four sites. We’re working with the surgery department on that," she explains.
Through June or July, Lach will be overseeing efforts to bring up radiology, cardiology, and pulmonary services at two additional hospitals acquired by Mercy Health Partners in April 1999 and then add physical therapy and the system’s wellness center at all six facilities, she says. "The project probably will go on for another 12 to 18 months."
Feedback from the call center’s own staff during the system’s first week in operation also has prompted some retraining, clarification, and rebuilding of schedules to make the system easier to use, Lach notes. "The other thing we monitored during go live’ was the call center service levels, including abandonment rate [the percent of callers who hang up before staff can answer], length of talk time, and grade of service [calls answered within 50 seconds]."
Those service levels went down during the first week on the new system, with the abandonment rate increasing from 3.6% to 8.8%, the average talk time increasing from three minutes and 15 seconds to three minutes and 45 seconds, and the grade of service falling from 85% to 69%, she says.
The good news is that those levels bounced back by the end of the second week, with the abandonment rate down to 3.3%, the average talk time at three minutes, 19 seconds, and the grade of service back at 85%, Lach says. "We made a fast recovery."
Project hits a snag
The scheduling project suffered a bit of a setback when Mercy announced to the staff at the two new hospitals, located on the city’s west side, that they would be moving to a new central location: "One [employee] of 10 or 11 decided to come to us," Lach notes, "so we had to rehire. We’re training new people to support the westside hospitals until we can move them to [the call center], which won’t happen until next summer."
Those who elected not to move have taken other positions within the admitting department or transferred to other departments at the hospitals, she adds.
After the westside PHS database is built, Lach says, staff will be trained on-site so they already will know PHS when they move in with the rest of the call center employees to take calls for the entire health system.
Need More Information?
Jane Lach, Mercy Health Partners, 4350 Glendale Milford Road, Suite 260, Cincinnati, OH 45252. Telephone: (513) 956-5988. E-mail: [email protected].
Subscribe Now for Access
You have reached your article limit for the month. We hope you found our articles both enjoyable and insightful. For information on new subscriptions, product trials, alternative billing arrangements or group and site discounts please call 800-688-2421. We look forward to having you as a long-term member of the Relias Media community.