Improving a patient appointment call center at Mayo Clinic

Rohleder, Thomas R.; Bailey, Brian; Crum, Brian A.; Faber, Timothy; Johnson, Brandon; Montgomery, Le Tesha; Pringnitz, Rachel

doi:10.1108/ijhcqa-11-2011-0068

Cited by 12 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 13 publications

(6 reference statements)

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“…CCs have been studied in various industries and countries which demonstrates their importance. For example, previous studies have examined a diversity of international and national industries including: health (Guillot and Fung, 2010; Rohleder et al , 2013; Malm et al , 2013; Liebow et al , 2012; Bowers and Fish, 2013), pharmaceutical and medical, mobile telecommunications (Anaman et al , 2008), water utilities (Olstein, 2009), academic libraries (Murphy and Cerqua, 2012), car rental (Takeuchi et al , 2007, 2009), Amazon.com (Keblis and Chen, 2006), banking (van Dun et al , 2012; Hakan Özkan, 2012; Surana and Singh, 2012), telecommunications (Tate and van der Valk, 2008), internal IT helpdesks (Padmanabhan and Kummamuru, 2007), telecom service providers in Europe (Visweswariah et al , 2010), the service industry (van der Aa et al , 2012) and call centers in Bangalore (Ghosh, 2013), India (Surana and Singh, 2012; Poster, 2013; Taylor et al , 2013; Das et al , 2013; Aneesh, 2012; Nandialath et al , 2012), the Philippines (Hechanova, 2013), Germany (Gerpott, 2012), South Africa (Hunter and Hachimi, 2012), Hungary (Dezső et al , 2010), Australia (Owens, 2014), Malaysia (Abdullateef and Salleh, 2013), Egypt (Kamel and Hussein, 2008), and the Netherlands (van der Aa et al , 2012).…”

Section: CCmentioning

confidence: 99%

Past, present and future of contact centers: a literature review

Saberi

Hussain

Chang

2017

BPMJ

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Purpose Contact centers (CCs) are one of the main touch points of customers in an organization. They form one of the inputs to customer relationship management (CRM) to enable an organization to efficiently resolve customer queries. CCs have an important impact on customer satisfaction and are a strategic asset for CRM systems. The purpose of this paper is to review the current literature on CCs and identify their shortcomings to be addressed in the current digital age. Design/methodology/approach The current literature on CCs can be classified into the analytical and the managerial aspects of CCs. In the former, data mining, text mining, and voice recognition techniques are discussed, and in the latter, staff training, CC performance, and outsourced CCs are discussed. Findings With the growth of information and communication technologies, the information that CCs must handle both in terms of type and volume, has changed. To deal with such changes, CCs need to evolve in terms of their operation and public relations. The authors present a state-of-the-art review of the challenges in identifying the gaps in order to have the next generation of CCs. Lack of an interactive CC and lack of data integrity for CCs are highlighted as important issues that need to be dealt with properly by CCs. Originality/value As far as the authors know, this is the first paper that reviews CCs’ literature by providing the comprehensive survey, critical evaluation, and future research.

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Section: CCmentioning

confidence: 99%

Past, present and future of contact centers: a literature review

Saberi

Hussain

Chang

2017

BPMJ

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“…20 Beyond the evaluation of potential policy changes, DES can help to guide implementations in a variety of complex healthcare settings evaluating nurse scheduling, LOS, patient satisfaction, and need for operational interventions. 21, 22, 23, 24 …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using discrete event computer simulation to improve patient flow in a Ghanaian acute care hospital

Best

Dixon

Kelton

et al. 2014

The American Journal of Emergency Medicine

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Objectives Crowding and limited resources have increased the strain on acute care facilities and emergency departments (EDs) worldwide. These problems are particularly prevalent in developing countries. Discrete event simulation (DES) is a computer-based tool that can be used to estimate how changes to complex healthcare delivery systems, such as EDs, will affect operational performance. Using this modality, our objective was to identify operational interventions that could potentially improve patient throughput of one acute care setting in a developing country. Methods We developed a simulation model of acute care at a district level hospital in Ghana to test the effects of resource-neutral (e.g. modified staff start times and roles) and resource-additional (e.g. increased staff) operational interventions on patient throughput. Previously captured, de-identified time-and-motion data from 487 acute care patients were used to develop and test the model. The primary outcome was the modeled effect of interventions on patient length of stay (LOS). Results The base-case (no change) scenario had a mean LOS of 292 minutes (95% CI 291, 293). In isolation, neither adding staffing, changing staff roles, nor varying shift times affected overall patient LOS. Specifically, adding two registration workers, history takers, and physicians resulted in a 23.8 (95% CI 22.3, 25.3) minute LOS decrease. However, when shift start-times were coordinated with patient arrival patterns, potential mean LOS was decreased by 96 minutes (95% CI 94, 98); and with the simultaneous combination of staff roles (Registration and History-taking) there was an overall mean LOS reduction of 152 minutes (95% CI 150, 154). Conclusions Resource-neutral interventions identified through DES modeling have the potential to improve acute care throughput in this Ghanaian municipal hospital. DES offers another approach to identifying potentially effective interventions to improve patient flow in emergency and acute care in resource-limited settings.

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“…In that small, de-centralized primary care practice, any concerns about the scheduling decision could be reconciled through direct communication between the nurse and clinician. In contrast, within large healthcare organizations, appointment triage may occur at a centralized location, 9,10 disconnected from the primary care team which knows the patient. Triage staff may follow scripted protocols to assess symptom severity and urgency, and determine if, when, and for how long the patient should be seen, using a standardized template to allot a fixed amount of time based on the stated concern, potentially scheduling the patient with any available clinician within the recommended time frame.…”

Section: The Status Quo: What Happens When a Patient Asks For An Appomentioning

confidence: 99%

Patient-Centered Appointment Scheduling: a Call for Autonomy, Continuity, and Creativity

Matulis

McCoy

2020

J GEN INTERN MED

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When making an appointment, patients are generally unaware of how much clinician time is available to address their concerns. Similarly, the primary care clinician is often unaware of what the patient expects to accomplish during the visit, leading to uncertainty about how much time they can allot to each sequentially appearing concern, and whether they can reasonably expect to address necessary preventive services and chronic disease management. Neither patient nor clinician expectations can be adequately managed through standardized scheduling templates, which assign a fixed appointment length based on a single stated reason for the visit. As such, standardized appointment scheduling may contribute to inefficient use of valuable face-to-face time, patient and clinician dissatisfaction, and low-value care. Herein, we suggest several potential mechanisms for improving the scheduling process, including (1) entrusting scheduling to the primary care team; (2) advance visit planning; (3) pro-active engagement of ancillary team members including behavioral health, nursing, social work, and pharmacy; and (4) application of innovative, technologically advanced solutions such as telehealth and artificial intelligence to the scheduling process. These changes have the potential to improve efficiency, patient and clinician satisfaction, and health outcomes, while decreasing low-value testing and return visits for unaddressed concerns.

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Improving a patient appointment call center at Mayo Clinic

Abstract: Structured quantitative modeling of contact centers can be an important extension to traditional quality and process improvement techniques.

Cited by 12 publications

References 13 publications

Past, present and future of contact centers: a literature review

Past, present and future of contact centers: a literature review

Using discrete event computer simulation to improve patient flow in a Ghanaian acute care hospital

Patient-Centered Appointment Scheduling: a Call for Autonomy, Continuity, and Creativity

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