New clinic eliminates the waiting room

Northern Arizona Healthcare’s Verde Valley Medical Clinic—Camp Verde has implemented Versus Advantages Clinic to support patient flow efficiencies and throughput at its new facility, including a self-rooming protocol that eliminates the patient waiting room.

The 17-room clinic in rural Verde Valley, offers primary care with extended and weekend hours, ophthalmology services, an optical shop, and a rotation of visiting specialists. As one of the few clinics in a developing area, patient volumes have grown steadily in the last two years. When building this new clinic, Northern Arizona Healthcare searched for a patient flow solution that would allow them to maximize resource utilization and clinic space to efficiently serve more than 425 patients per week.

To give clinic staff real-time visibility to the various stages of the patient visit and improve efficiencies, Camp Verde Campus implemented the Versus Advantages Clinic patient flow solution, which provides operational and clinical workflow intelligence using real-time locating system (RTLS) technology. The implementation was completed in cooperation with Climatec, a local certified Versus system integrator.

Instead of sending patients to a traditional waiting room, front desk staff at the Camp Verde campus review a real-time clinic floor plan to determine which exam rooms are open. A patient receives a locator badge and room number reservation. Once the patient occupies the reserved exam room, the Advantages Clinic software automatically updates the room on the real-time floor plan, enabling staff to easily see that the patient is ready to be seen.

Patients at Camp Verde also have easier access to specialty providers with the patient flow improvements. When the orthopedic physician visits on Fridays, the Advantages application streamlines patient throughput, enabling him to care for 30 orthopedic patients within a two-hour window.

Camp Verde is also using RTLS data to improve operations through Reports Plus Analytics. The Versus reporting platform delivers accurate operational metrics staff can use to increase room utilization, adjust staffing ratios, and more.

In the optical shop, staff review Versus reports to compare time spent with walk-in customers to customers with scheduled appointments. This enables staff to retrospectively review customer flow and alter resources during peak shopping hours.

Room utilization and patient flow reports, as well as real-time patient flow information, require highly accurate location data. In a 2016 report from the healthcare research firm KLAS, Versus received the highest rating among RTLS vendors that provide both hardware and software. Versus also received the highest rating for location accuracy as well as for many other categories.¹ Source: Versus

Reference

1. “Real-time Location Systems (RTLS) 2016,” 2016 KLAS Enterprises, July 2016.