Schedule templates

[bucknut101]

Does anyone have an good examples or know of any good resources of good templates to schedule patients?

My practice is mostly general opthalmology, some cornea stuff, and my goal is to see 40-50 patients a day. With the morning hours being 7-12 and the afternoon 1 to 5. This is assuming having 3 technicians to help out and we have also have a "test pod" that does all of our visual fields, IOL calcs, etc.

I'm trying to figure out how to schedule slots for new patients, return short exams, and return long exams in the most effiecent way possible.

I do not want to be one of those doctors that just schedules patients every 5 minutes and hope it all works out. There's several docs in my group that do this and they are consistently running an hour or two behind.

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[Visionary]

Well, that issue isn't as cut and dry as you'd think. Even if you come up with the perfect template, the likelihood of your front office staff reliably placing patients in the correct slots is, unfortunately, quite low. Furthermore, the patients are not likely to call in in a manner that fills your template well, even if the schedulers are doing their jobs perfectly. Are you willing to turn away a "long appt," when you have no long slots, but do have a bunch of short slots? Should 2 shorts equal a long? Vice versa? Now, talk about staff issues! The practice I'm in has docs that have been out for 25+ years. I've discussed this very topic with them, and they said they just can't get it to work because of inconsistencies in scheduling. So, they pretty much do what your colleagues do.

I have a more simplified approach that seems to work for me, and I don't get too far behind (most of the time). To start the morning, a have the first few slots doubled up. I call this "priming the pump." That's followed by a few single slots to allow for the schedule to decompress. Rinse and repeat. Seems to provide for a pretty good flow, though I'm still tweaking it almost 3 years in.

 

[bucknut101]

Well, that issue isn't as cut and dry as you'd think. Even if you come up with the perfect template, the likelihood of your front office staff reliably placing patients in the correct slots is, unfortunately, quite low. Furthermore, the patients are not likely to call in in a manner that fills your template well, even if the schedulers are doing their jobs perfectly. Are you willing to turn away a "long appt," when you have no long slots, but do have a bunch of short slots? Should 2 shorts equal a long? Vice versa? Now, talk about staff issues! The practice I'm in has docs that have been out for 25+ years. I've discussed this very topic with them, and they said they just can't get it to work because of inconsistencies in scheduling. So, they pretty much do what your colleagues do.

I have a more simplified approach that seems to work for me, and I don't get too far behind (most of the time). To start the morning, a have the first few slots doubled up. I call this "priming the pump." That's followed by a few single slots to allow for the schedule to decompress. Rinse and repeat. Seems to provide for a pretty good flow, though I'm still tweaking it almost 3 years in.

Thanks Visionary. I actually was thinking of the doing it the way you do. Invariably every morning I start off the day sitting around a lot waiting for patients. Then by late morning I'm running behind rushing from room to room. And yes your right, getting the scheduling staff to schedule things properly is nearly impossible. And also you can't control patients showing up late, check ins taking too long, same day add ons. All of which screw things up.