Essay on Open Access Appointment Scheduling System

Open access is also known as advance access and same day scheduling. It is a scheduling technique whereby patients receive appointment slots on the same day they make their calls. Interestingly, they can nearly have the appointment with their personal doctors, specialists, or physicians. It simply applies the rule Do todays work today. At times, this method calls for the elimination of gatekeepers so as to enhance quick attendance by physicians to patients.

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It is a model that breaks away from the traditional appointment scheduling system in terms of waiting time, patient show up, physician overload, cost and revenue, just to mention a few (Robinson & Chen, 2010). As compared to the traditional system, this model does not call for patients to queue which is a 12% improvement, there are no patients accumulations in hospitals which is equivalent to 33% improvement from the traditional approach, the no-shows are managed by few staff, a reduction by a rate of 28% as compared to staff in the traditional method, and finally, fewer costs are incurred, resulting into an approximation of about 45% savings as compared to the traditional method.

Basically, medical practioniers can opt to implement this model through a series of simple steps as follows; being as accurate, or rather, as exact as possible while undertaking the measurements of supply and demand, willingness to try the system out by clearly establishing a team of test providers, reduction of the accumulation of appointments and this may take an approximate time of six to eight weeks (Murray & Tantau, 2000). However, to successfully implement this step, there is need to accumulate future accumulation of patients by attending to any upcoming sickness as soon as it occurs. This can also be done by screening patients each time they visit a medical centre, regardless of their key purpose for the visit.

Significantly, the different forms of appointments can be simplified and allocated the same time period, so as to prevent any backlogs in future. Finally, after a successful implementation of the model, the physicians are advised to continuously examine their effectiveness on a daily basis so as to reduce the waiting time and any possible delays for patients (Kennedy & Hsu, 2003).

An open access appointment scheduling system that has undergone through a successful implementation usually has got many benefits on the healthcare as well as to the patients. The major benefit is that patient delays eliminated completely. While this does not typically involve any addition of resources, patient and specialist satisfaction are usually enhanced greatly. Importantly, patients are able to be attended to by their own and specific physicians since there are no incidences of patients demanding for more appointments. As a result, patients are able to get a continued attendance and care for a long period of time. To wrap up the benefits of this model, it is a method that does not incur much amount of money; hence, a lot of savings are realized.

References

Robinson, L. W., & Chen, R. R. (2010). A comparison of traditional and open-access policies for appointment scheduling. Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 12(2), 330-346.

Murray, M. M., & Tantau, C. (2000). Same-day appointments: exploding the access paradigm. Family practice management, 7(8), 45-45.Kennedy, J. G., & Hsu, J. T. (2003). Implementation of an open access scheduling system in a residency training program. FAMILY MEDICINE-KANSAS CITY-, 35(9), 666-670.