What's the future of healthcare? If medical IT company Patient Innovations has its way, it includes eliminating waiting in doctors' offices, optimizing patient scheduling and appointment management, and improving patient satisfaction and medical practice productivity. The company is bringing that future closer by using Alpha Anywhere to build their OnTimeCare® app.The company was looking for a platform to develop OnTimeCare, an intelligent scheduling system that calculates the correct variable amount of time that a patient will need for their visit. It calculates the correct variable length of time the physician and all medical personnel will need with the patient. If the doctor is running late, OnTimeCare notifies patients to arrive later. Messaging alerts patients to delays even after they've arrived. OnTimeCare includes a VisitFlow Tracking®, a component that uses RFID equipment to track interactions between care providers and patients.
Patient Innovations chose Alpha Anywhere to develop it, because it securely connects to any core EMR medical system, and offers a full suite of tools to build enterprise-level software quickly, and to build mobile apps. Patient Innovations President and co-founder explains, "It was the ideal solution. It lets us connect to any core medical system - even legacy systems - and it's a low-code solution, which means that we can prototype and build applications quickly."
Big Benefits
The benefits have been considerable. Because of its ease of building sophisticated Web apps, Patient Innovations built the OnTimeCare Web app far more quickly and at far less cost than if it had used another tool. OnTimeCare has been tested by medical practices, and they have seen significant benefits from its use, Greenberg says. Patient wait times have been drastically reduced, doctors are spending more quality time with their patients, and patient no-shows can be reduced by 75 percent. Cancelled appointment slots are filled quickly and automatically, and appointments can be rescheduled or canceled in minutes.
"It leads to big productivity and cost savings for medical practices," he says. "It can also lead to increased revenue because the practices have fewer unused slots. It can pay for itself in a half year."
In addition, it improves patient satisfaction because there is less time spent waiting for appointments.
UnitedHealthcare partnered with Patient Innovations to build the software to an enterprise level system and test it in one of their largest practice groups, Greenberg notes.
Just using VisitFlow Tracking® in the initial test case, wait times in waiting rooms fell 4%, wait times in exam rooms dropped 13%, the time doctors spent with patients in exam rooms increased 57% and the time doctors spent in their offices consulting with patients increased 22%. This occurred with no loss of patient volume.
"We believe that the future of healthcare is bright, thanks to the technology we're building," Greenberg says. "Waiting to see the doctor, or weeks for an appointment with a busy specialist is the number one patient complaint. OnTimeCare® solves this problem, engendering patient delight while making the practice more efficient and profitable. It's a win-win, and a key component in everything we do is Alpha Anywhere."
For more details, see the full case study here.
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