“We ran a pilot across 10-15 service lines, and the team was able to schedule without any training. It makes it extremely easy to work in different service lines that you’re unfamiliar with.”
— Justin Baur, Manager of Patient Access and Referral Management at IU Health
Challenge
Indiana University Health (IU Health) is the largest network of physicians in Indiana, with over 36,000 team members across five patient regions and 16 partner hospitals. IU Health plans to launch the Unified Medical Group in 2025, combining its five patient regions. In preparation for this move, the health system sought an enterprise call center scheduling solution to manage growing patient volume while maintaining its current staff size.
Solution
IU Health selected Experian Health’s Patient Schedule – Call Center Scheduling, an automation-powered digital scheduling platform, because it can effectively manage complex service lines in primary and specialty care. This decision was backed by Experian Health’s track record in providing call center scheduling solutions for large health systems.
Patient Schedule supports seamless self (patient) and staff scheduling. This solution helps IU Health staff handle the increasing patient numbers with minimal training. Front office staff and call centers can swiftly and accurately schedule appointments and resolve patients’ queries. Schedulers no longer have to memorize complex scheduling rules or work with lengthy notes, increasing staff efficiency, morale, satisfaction, and productivity.
Outcome
Thanks to Patient Schedule, IU Health achieved the following results:
- 52 departments now use Call Center Scheduling
- 114% increase in patient utilization within a year
- 600 referrals on average scheduled each month
- Staff cross-trained across multiple specialty service lines
Patient Schedule optimized IU Health’s scheduling capacity, making the call center more efficient and increasing specialty referrals. This solution has also brought more and unexpected benefits, including improving referral management, which means that patients can schedule cross-speciality appointments before the patient leaves the office. Call Center Scheduling also enabled the implementation of a single phone line for all patient bookings. Additionally, the product’s analytical features are helping IU Health discover ways to improve its scheduling infrastructure, as it works to standardize and expand the solution to all regions as part of the Unified Medical Group.
Altogether, this solution has improved provider, staff, and patient flexibility, satisfaction, and experience so much that it has become indispensable to IU Health’s scheduling operations.
“Now we have pods of four people managing seven or eight service lines because it’s so easy to work,” said Justin Baur, Manager of Patient Access and Referral Management at IU Health. “The team wouldn’t be able to go back to the old way. You don’t have to keep track of who you can schedule at what time or at what location because the algorithm does it for you.”
“We really could not have started this initiative without the platform, because we had to make sure we had staff who were well versed in the product and service lines that were properly embedded in the product before rolling it out. This was a big success and we probably could not have started this launch without Experian,” he concludes.
Watch the webinar to hear examples of how guided scheduling was implemented in specific specialties and learn more about using automated patient scheduling to create a resilient and efficient scheduling infrastructure that works better for patients, providers and staff.
