Scheduling staff and patient appointments in a healthcare organization is a challenge under the best of circumstances, but when your staff consists of over 33,000 employees and you’ve got a medical staff of 4,000 providers, it’s not surprising you’d take the chance to see what new AI can do to help.
That’s one way to look at a recent piece by our colleague Bill Siwicki at HealthcareIT News about the Hartford HealthCare Cancer Institute in Hartford, Connecticut.
As Siwicki sums up the organization’s dilemma, “(o)ver the years one of the biggest problems facing infusion centers has been the challenge of adequately scheduling appointments for patients receiving chemotherapy.”
Among the challenges is working to smooth out the differences between the slow periods – early morning and late afternoons, for example – and peak, mid-day periods when appointment bottlenecks abound.
"During these busy times, nurses often would have to juggle as many as four to five patients at once," Abbi Bruce, RN, OCN and program director of medical oncology and infusion services at Hartford HealthCare Cancer Institute, told Siwicki. "Nurses, providers and managers all felt this way of scheduling wasn't effective as each patient is unique and might require different education, support and dedicated time during the busy window, delaying the process even more."
But then the organization’s administrators learned about iQueue for Infusion Centers, which, according to Bruce, “leverages machine learning and predictive analytics to help centers stay operationally agile by optimizing scheduling templates, level-loading the daily schedule across the nursing staff, flagging future problem days for preventive action, and identifying which appointments should be rescheduled to improve the experience for patients and staff alike.”
The upshot for the Institute since implementing iQueue has been a dramatic improvement in how patients are scheduled, as well as significant pressure off staff.
"We now have more capacity, so we can see patients throughout the entire day," Bruce noted. "We have worked closely with our providers to help them understand the importance of the tool and the benefits it provides. . . . There’s a nurse-allocation tool that incorporates the acuity of the regimen and determines the best schedule for each nurse working that day.”
Patients have benefitted, too, said Bruce. “Our wait times have significantly decreased. Because of our increase in efficiency, patients that have short treatments can get in and out quicker and nurses are able to get their lunches and are happier, which makes our patients happier."
She concluded, "Based on our experience, the issues we faced are common challenges most centers face. Additionally, the industry as a whole is seeing more outpatients when it comes to chemotherapy, (so) utilizing technology allows nurses and hospitals and health systems a better way to manage these increasing volumes and improve their overall workflows.”
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