Web Based Patient Scheduling with IVR Backend

Overview

Agho Clinic, a primary care practice with dual locations in Manhattan, NY and Parkchester, NY, saw over a thousand patients a month. Providing outstanding service while keeping administrative costs down was a major concern. Agho Clinic sought to cut inbound phone calls to boost productivity. Lance Technologies, in conjunction with its sister company, MDCall Inc, developed a web-based portal for patients to automatically schedule appointments. The web-based appointment scheduler was also tied to an interactive voice response system that made reminder calls automatically every day, decreasing no-show rates.

Problem

With over a thousand patients being helped a month, Agho Clinic office staff were already stretched and constant disruptions such as phone calls for routine issues dragged productivity. Additionally, Agho Clinic also suffered from lost revenue due to industry average no-show rates. To an aggressively growing clinic, increasing productivity by cutting phone disruptions and boosting revenue by lowering no-show rates was an obvious business improvement. The question was how to synthesize the two requirements in a cohesive system that did not add its own service management overhead.

Solution

Lance Technologies and MDCall Inc co-developed a web-based appointment scheduling system that allowed patients to view open times for each provider at either location in a graphical format and schedule themselves in. The web-based system kept track of all patient schedule information. Thus, patients could visit the web service at any later date and cancel or re-schedule their appointment based on Agho Clinic policies. A web-based administrative system provided password-protected access to patient scheduling data to Agho Clinic staff - allowing them to see schedules and patient contact information. The staff also used the same system to manage in-office scheduling as well. All provider schedules and office hours were also database-driven.

In addition to developing a self-service scheduling system to cut phone traffic and improve customer service, Lance Technologies and MDCall Inc created an interactive voice response system that integrated in real-time with the web appointment scheduling software to deliver daily appointment reminder calls to patients based on various criteria. Upon receiving a call, the patient could cancel their appointment by pressing a button or ask to be patched to office staff directly. The appointment reminder calling not only decreased no-show rates but, just as importantly, did so without adding any overhead for office staff.