Open access also known as advanced access and same-day scheduling is a method of scheduling in which all patients can receive an appointment slot on the day they call, almost always with their personal physician.
Here’s how open access scheduling works, and why your practice may want to consider it.
Background and Objectives: Open access is one method of improving the quality of clinical practice. Leaving the majority of appointments open to be scheduled the same day allows patients to have control of their access to care. These appointments can be used for all visit types, including physical exams. Our objective was to implement this system to improve efficiency, and patient/provider satisfaction, while maintaining financial profitability.
Implementation of Open Access:
Most studies of open access suggest lengthy pre planning to estimate and decrease the backlog of work that is waiting to be completed. This backlog of future appointments would usually require calculating demand and capacity and working to relieve the backups over time. Since our computer system allowed us to create provider schedules only 3 months in advance, we had an opportunity to move to open access without the “suggested” delay. In November 2001, we decided to institute the change on January 2, 2002. All patients waiting for a follow-up or a health maintenance visit had to call to obtain a new appointment in our system anyway.
Starting January 2, all patients who called for an appointment were offered same-day appointments, and attempts were made to identify each patient’s preferred provider. Although some open-access models use up to 50% pre booked appointments, it was our desire to maximise the number of same-day appointments, and we thus severely limited the number and type of pre booked appointments that can be made.
Advantages of open access scheduling:
- Fewer no-shows: Patients who made their appointment weeks ago may forget their appointment, despite reminders, or may no longer need medical attention when the visit date rolls around. Patients who just made their appointment that morning are more likely to show up.
- Save time: Your staff won’t have to spend time sending appointment reminders. Your schedulers will spend less time on the phone. Instead of listening to people beg for an appointment and discussing the patient’s availability, your scheduler can simply say, “Would you like to come in today?” To minimise the time spent on the phone, use only three appointment types:
- Unestablished – When the visit isn’t tied to a specific doctor.
- Team – When a patient sees another physician in your absence.
- Personal – When a patient sees their preferred personal physician.
- Save money: Administrative staff spends less time scheduling and re-scheduling patients, and clinical staff spends less time triaging patients to determine who really needs to be seen today. Therefore, you reduce the cost of staffing.
- Shorter wait times: Allowing patients to schedule same-day appointments reduces wait times, both to get an appointment and once inside your office. In the open access model, physicians don’t have to squeeze patients who call with an “urgent” problem into a fully booked schedule.
Schedule a srategy meeting session on how scheduling can be done effectively