A practice of four physicians and four nurse practitioners has five schedulers—one for each physician/NP pair and one to handle new patient referrals. Even with five full-time schedulers, they struggle to keep up with the workload. How to manage a schedulers time is frequently brought up to the practice administrator by two groups of people. The schedulers express that the work volume is increasing stress. The physicians share that they hear about it during office visits when patients report not getting calls back in a timely fashion or having trouble scheduling an appointment. The practice administrator observed the schedulers for a few days and realized the repetitiveness of many of their tasks. Extreme amounts of time were spent listening to voicemail messages and then followed by trying (usually with several phone calls) to get patients to answer the phone. The practice administrator clearly saw the inefficiency and quickly realized there had to be a better way to handle incoming scheduling calls from patients.
Diagnosis:
Phone message time-consuming staff’s workday
Options:
- Invest in software to handle repetitive tasks, which would allow the practice administrator to decrease staff and/or reassign duties
- Consider automated scheduling software
- Hire more schedulers and try to answer the phone in real-time to reduce the number of voicemails and decrease the need for callbacks
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