Scheduling treatment visits

Clinic openings and closings / Health care venues / Scheduling treatment visits / Solantic / Tactical innovation / Urgent care clinics / Walk-in clinics — Comments Off
22
May 12

Solantic Name Change; Game Change?

Drug Store News recently reported urgent care clinic operator Solantic’s plan to change its name to CareSpot Express Healthcare (Solantic urgent care changing name to reflect new vision, Antoinette Alexander, 5/18/12)

The name change reflects a planned facelift for Solantic’s 29 existing Florida clinics, as well as the addition of about 50% more clinic locations during 2012.

Solantic management is also promising potential clients internet-based (presumably self-serve) appointment scheduling – which they already offer – and clinic wait-time monitoring, among other features, to result from a revamped website.

Solantic plans a sort of ‘grand opening’ for their new name in September, though apparently Solantic’s CEO is already using “Solantic/CareSpot Express” in his correspondence (if the DSN presso is any indication).

Clinics and location-based services / Retail clinics / Scheduling treatment visits / Take Care Health / Target — Comments Off
17
Jan 12

TakeCare Health Introduces Appointment Scheduling

We’ve written about the pros & cons of appointment scheduling less than we would have guessed. One of our most recent entries on the subject was posted all the way back in January 2011, and didn’t technically have anything to do with retail clinics.

Target is alone among the “name” retail clinic operators to try appointment scheduling – and it abandoned the practice quite some time ago. ZoomCare, a clinics operator in Oregon and Washington, does offer appointment scheduling (and we feel does it the best).

That’s why we’re intrigued that TakeCare Health has decided to give scheduling a go (TakeCare Clinics Now Offering Real-Time Appointment Scheduling Option, 1/17/12 Drug Store News).

Walgreens’ Take Care Health Systems, which operates more than 350 clinics inside select Walgreens locations across the country, has announced that patients now can schedule appointments online or in the clinic.

Here’s a link to TakeCare’s new appointment scheduler (curiously, not provided in their media release).

We have to say, we like its design. You pick the reason for your visit from a list of options, select your clinic – or, even more conveniently, your location, and distance you’re prepared to travel – and the general time of day you’d like an appointment. Press enter and you’re presented the open visit times for any location within your selected travel distance.

Things we’re unclear about: Does the scheduler play nice with iPhone and/or other smartphone devices? We didn’t/couldn’t test that critically important capability. Close to one-third of visitors to our homely clinics locator are visiting from smartphones these days; we would guess the share is greater for actual retail clinics operators. Our untested concern is that TakeCare’s application seems like it would require a smartphone visitor to move through more steps than smartphone app users will typically endure patiently. We hope we are incorrect about that.

Things we’re less keen about: when we first visited Take Care’s site, we selected a clinic location to see its available appointment times. It was lunchtime at the clinic we selected but the display informed us only that the location was “Closed”. Not “Closed for lunch until [X time]” – just “Closed”. Psst, TakeCare: we’d advise you not to provoke your would-be visitors to assume the location has shuttered its doors & windows, for the day or maybe forever. Be specific about what “Closed” means.

In sum, TakeCare’s appointment scheduling tool isn’t quite as easy to use as ZoomCare’s – but it’s not at all shabby.

What do you think? Is retail clinic scheduling a feature worth featuring for clinics operators?

Clinics and location-based services / Data and clinics / Driving forces / Health care venues / Hospitals and clinics / Scheduling treatment visits / Tactical innovation — Comments Off
23
Dec 11

Times-Fables: ER Wait Times?

Critics: Emergency Department Wait Time Claims Unsubstantiated (Karen M. Cheung, FierceHealthcare, 12/22/11)

Elizabeth Dudek, head of Florida’s Agency Health Care Administration, said she does not know of any studies that back up the marketing claims….

Commissioner Dudek pointed out that her department has not received any complaints regarding the accuracy of wait times posted on billboards. Perhaps this means few are paying them any attention.

Short ER Wait Times? Billboards Tout Hospitals’ Claims (John Dorschner, Miami Herald, 12/21/11)

Baptist Health South Florida recently launched some ER billboards, but it prefers to report wait times on a smart-phone app. Baptist spokeswoman Christine Kotler says Baptist aims to provide “genuine wait times,” measured in 30-minute increments for urgent care centers and one-hour increments for ERs.HCA also pushes its ER wait times, using text messages, hospital websites or on HCA East Florida’s Facebook page. “We want to leverage all the portals,” says HCA spokeswoman Nicole Baxter.

Clinics and location-based services / Driving forces / Health care venues / Hospitals and clinics / Opinion/commentary/analysis / Scheduling treatment visits / Strategic initiatives / Urgent care clinics / Walk-in clinics — Comments Off
20
Dec 11

Aetna Acquires iTriage

We’re fans of developments in mobile health.

We know firsthand that the geography of “where is care?” plays a key role in health care, and that making it easier for people to find appropriate care for conditions they’re dealing with is a good thing.

We’ve watched iTriage – or more accurately, its media releases (example here), and partnership announcements – over the past several months, and have not gotten it.

We get Aetna’s purchase of iTriage, “for an undisclosed amount” even less. While the acquisition media release talks about , iTriage’s primary clients have been hospital systems, and a significant focus has been promoting ER usage, through features like information about ER wait times. As anyone who’s spent more than a half-hour perusing info about health care knows, emergency rooms are one of the most expensive places to obtain health care for conditions that do not happen to rise to the level of an emergency. People using their cellphones to scrounge around for a suitable treatment location are not, in the main, contending with conditions that rise to the level of an emergency. Driving more patient volume to ERs – particularly ERs of hospitals who’s spent a bale of dough upgrading their ER facilities – may be going where the money is, but few can make a defensible case that that’s where the health value is.

This picture of iTriage site visits doesn’t help us get iTriage:

On the other hand, maybe information of the type depicted in that chart helped Aetna get it – for whatever it’s worth.

Driving forces / Health care practitioners / Health care venues / National/regional/local TV coverage / Public policy / Scheduling treatment visits / Walk-in clinics — Comments Off
16
Dec 11

In Houston The Doctor Can’t See You Now (and Apparently Neither Can the PA, Frequently)

Carrie Feibel adroitly documented the increasing difficulty Houstonians have scheduling prompt doctor visits in this recent NPR piece(In Houston, The Doctor Can’t See You Now,Carrie Feibel, KUHF Houston, 12/8/11), but we wish she had noted that Texas physician oversight regulations, while loosened a bit in 2009, are still among the country’s most stringent (The Texas Coalition for Nurses in Advanced Practice did a nice job of summarizing the 2009 regulatory amendment’s effect here. CNAP summed up the limited impact of the law in this sentence: “For most APNs prescribing in primary practice sites, medically underserved sites and hospitals, [the amendment] will not change anything about the physician supervision required in their sites.”). It seems almost like nitpicking to observe that the Texas regulations also happen to vary from place to place around the state. Hey, it’s a big state.

Could it be that Martin Luther King Jr. Health Center clinics director Dr Robert Trenschel’s concern that “the situation in Houston is likely to worsen in 2014, when the Affordable Care Act allows 32 million more people nationally to get subsidized health insurance or Medicaid coverage” is exacerbated by Texas’s physician oversight regulations?

Why yes – yes, it could.

But hey Texas (and USA) – your wait times are probably still better than in Sweden, Norway and Canada (thanks to Slate’s Aaron Carroll and Matthew Yglesias!)

Health care practitioners / Physicians' perspective / Regulatory activity / Reports, white papers, studies, presentations / Scheduling treatment visits — Comments Off
29
Jun 11

HHS’s MD Appointment-Scheduling Survey: Hold, Please

Practically as soon as HHS announced plans to get data on the ease of scheduling appointments with physicians, they have called them off (Administration Halts Survey of Making Doctor Visits, Robert Pear, NY Times, 6/28/11). (Is it quibbling to note that no actual visits were ever going to come of the department’s survey activities?)

Opponents noted there already is considerable reputable evidence on the ease or difficulty of obtaining timely appointments with physicians, and Administration officials could certainly have managed planning and execution of the survey with greater transparency.

On the other hand, the letter from Republican Senator Mark Kirk to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelious requesting information on details of the survey plan contain howlers like this one:

…we request details of how this survey would be conducted, how investigators would be punished for misconduct or extortion and how patient/physician confidentiality would be maintained….How will patient and doctor confidentiality be maintained? If your researchers report bad information or use this survey for extortion, bribery or other bad acts, how will they be disciplined?

“Or extortion“? Senator, they’re calling to arrange a doctor’s appointment.

“Bad acts”, indeed; Senator your feigned outrage is leaving teeth marks on the stage props.

Driving forces / Health care practitioners / Health care venues / National/regional/local TV coverage / Public policy / Reports, white papers, studies, presentations / Scheduling treatment visits — Comments Off
28
Jun 11

Access Matters – So How Much IS There?

We struggle to imagine a more auspicious foundation for conveying messages about the potential benefits of a robust health reform role for the convenient care sphere:

NY Times coverage of the emerging story here: US Plans Stealth Survey on Access To Doctors (Robert Pear, NY Times, 6/27/11)

Pre-publication edit: apparently, the drumbeat of “outrage” amongst physicians about the mystery shopper exercise is already gaining volume. Kent Bottles has captured some quotes (posts to other blogs, or replies to the cited NY Times article, presumably*) in an entry in his blog this morning that depict a physician community in utter denial of a fundamental problem with their practice model – which is that they imagine it is THEIR time that is the driving factor in peoples’ assessment of a physician’s accessibility.

*at 10:50 ET, there were already 349 comments to the NYTimes article

Health care venues / Scheduling treatment visits / Tactical innovation — Comments Off
23
Feb 11

Wait, Wait, Just Pay Me: Cash Back for ED Waits

Ingalls Family Care Center locations offer cash back to any patients who use their new InQuicker ED reservation service and wind up waiting to be seen, according to this Chicago Sun-Times story: Service Ensures You’ll See a Doctor On Time, Or Your Money Back (Monifa Thomas, Chicago Sun Times, 2/22/11).

(we knew we’ve referenced InQuicker in previous posts, but we did NOT know we had done so as many as 4 times. But it’s a fact – you could look it up.)

We’re not sure what they do if a scheduled-but-waiting patient hasn’t yet given them money, as would often seem likely to be the case – but we quibble.

The novelty of timely health treatment – the kind available at retail clinics, and treatment facilities that take, and keep, appointments – makes news. That’s what we know.