Patient Family Centered Scheduling
The ultimate goal of Patient Family Centered Scheduling (PFCS) is to enable families, referring physicians and other internal and external stakeholders to be able to schedule single or multiple appointments anywhere within the Children’s Hospital by calling a single phone number. Today there are Pediatric Service Representatives at the Battle Building and the PFCS office who are scheduling (hundreds and thousands) appointments for patients seen in Pediatric Clinics: GI, Peds Urology, Cerebral Palsy and Otolaryngology. Over the next several weeks, Endocrinology including Diabetes, Renal, and Pediatric Allergy and Immunology will join PFCS. But how do these Pediatric Service Representatives do it? They use the Schedule Advisor.
The Schedule Advisor
We know scheduling appointments at a major health system is a complicated task. Divisions use different sets of rules around medical conditions, clinics, and care providers. Historically, scheduling has required a highly trained scheduler, who over time has learned a store of knowledge specific to their division or clinic assignments.
As a part of Patient Family Centered Scheduling, the Process Design workgroup created a knowledge management tool for categorizing and capturing these stores of knowledge, thereby creating an organization change to scheduling. This knowledge management tool, the Schedule Advisor, captures the required instructions, prerequisites, tests, and records for each possible permutation of an appointment in a database and allows schedulers to drill down to the right advice from multiple directions.
This allows us to offer a scheduler all the instructions – the standard work – for scheduling any kind of appointment in the system. Schedule Advisor allows us to be systematic in our scheduling, reducing errors and increasing efficiency.
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