April 30, 2019 | Doug Cundiff, MPT, MPH

3 Minute Read

[VIDEO] Big KPI Improvements In 12 Months: A Client Success Story

At Net Health, we believe in the power and potential of ReDoc® powered by xfit® and its ability to positively change several aspects and areas of your rehab clinic.  One of the many beautiful traits of ReDoc is how it can make these positive changes with the business you already have. As a professional consultant for Net Health 360, my goal is to help target specific problems your facility may be facing, formularize strategies to address these problems, and integrate those strategies into your business’ day-to-day. So when a client comes to us with a list of problems that need to be addressed in their clinic, our knowledgeable and experienced staff with the support of ReDoc tools, are confident we’ll improve best practices, execute the discussed gameplan, and help deliver the ROI you’re seeking. It’s rewarding to our team to witness the success of the collaborative effort we had with our client and having them follow up to report their satisfaction with the results of us working together.

Here’s a recent success story we had with a client. The client, a large network of six clinics that sees over 30,000 visits annually, came to us with the goal of focusing on better patient attendance and patient engagement.  With our focus and goal identified, we were able to cultivate a strategy to improve patient attendance and engagement, by reviewing the patient policy and deploying an automated appointment reminder, just to name a couple of tactics.  After a year of implementing our strategy, this client saw tremendous improvement in the following areas:

  • Patient engagement and attendance (an additional 1.4 visits per episode of care)
  • Improvement in no show/cancellation rates (from 20.6% to 13.5%)
  • Added net revenue ($560,000 to be exact!)
I invite you to watch the video below, as I talk about our journey together to improve patient attendance and engagement, and the successful aftermath of our collaboration.

 

7:14

 

 

View Video Transcript

Well, we just wrapped up working with one of our clients in Southern Central Missouri. And I want to tell you a story of great client success.

In working with this director over the past year, he wanted to focus on one key performance indicator, and that was visits per eval. He recognized what the business that they had, that if they can focus on better patient attendance, better patient engagement, that they can change the revenue that was coming into the hospital tremendously.

This is a client that has six different outpatient locations, and they see roughly just over a hundred patients per day. And so his focus, his charge for this past year was better patient attendance, better patient engagement. So the first thing in this initiative that we got started on together was making sure first that the way we were tracking and scheduling patients and marking them as a canceled visit or a rescheduled visit was accurate.

We knew that sharing the data with the staff on a regular basis was going to be important. But we needed to make sure that that data integrity for those metrics was there. So we went through an education process with the front office and the therapist to make sure this is when we cancel an appointment, this is the scenario when we reschedule an appointment.

The next thing we did was dust off the patient attendance policy. They had a policy in place that had existed for years, but over the past several years had really fallen by the wayside. So we revisited that patient attendance policy. It really focused on how are we going to use the policy? So the process they put in place was a patient was scheduled for an initial evaluation. They would arrive 15 minutes early. They would do their arrival paperwork. And included in that process was a patient attendance policy that they would review and then sign.

That policy was put in a small paper chart. It went back with the patient and the therapist for an initial evaluation. And on completion of the initial eval and reviewing the home exercise program, reviewing the goals, then we reviewed the patient attendance policy.

And it stated that how the patient is accountable for their own recovery and what the role of the therapist in the clinic was going to do. And that attending therapy on a regular basis was a crucial part of that. And they had wording in there that said, “If you can’t come in, that’s okay. Things come up. Give us a call. 24 hours in advance would be great, but give us a call and let us know so we can get that appointment rescheduled.” So they deployed the patient attendance policy. They made sure that the therapist all had the proper scripting and they went about doing that.

The second thing they did was deploy an automated appointment reminder system. This involved the patient receiving a phone call two days before their scheduled initial eval, reminding them of the appointment. After that initial eval and the visit frequency was set, they would then receive a text reminder one day prior to each subsequent followup appointment to encourage patient attendance and to prompt the patient that if something had come up, to call, cancel and get that appointment rescheduled.

The next thing they did was leverage the use of FOTO. So their patient outcomes module was FOTO, focused on therapeutic outcomes. And that’s a system that has a large risk adjusted database, over 7 million completed visits. And the process that they made sure happened consistently was, upon completion of the initial eval, the therapists would review the FOTO survey that the patient took time to complete and make sure that they were in a line with the goals that they were trying to achieve. But then they referenced the predicted or projected number of visits that FOTO saw in patients that were presenting just like that patient.

And that was important because as the therapist was recommending a plan of care that involves two to three times a week or for four to six weeks, 10, 12, 14 visits, one thing that the patients are starting to do more and more now is they have higher deductible health plans. They have higher copays. And so they start doing the math on, okay, this is going to be a significant investment. But then when the therapist reviews the survey with the patient and shows them that patients just like them typically require 10, 12, 14 visits to achieve those goals, now the therapist and the clinic have that third party endorsement for the patient that say, “Okay, if this is important to you, this is an investment that’s going to be required.”

So leveraging the FOTO survey and that projected number of visits is further engaging the patient. So the patient attendance policy in place, have automated appointment reminder in place, encouraging better patient attendance. They’re using FOTO and the survey, not just at that initial eval. They’ll do a status survey to show the progress being made. They’re able to tell the patient, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do the next appointment. This is what we’re going to do next week.” They’re engaging the patient to continue and complete plan of care.

The next thing they start to do is once they deployed the policy, the appointment reminder and using FOTO, they started sharing the cancellation no-show results weekly. Every Monday they would post those results saying, “Okay, this is how we did. This is how we did against our goal. Who did well, who has an opportunity to improve.” And they can create a friendly but competitive atmosphere that was very transparent. This is how we’re doing against our goal.

When a patient would no-show, the therapist were also encouraged, and it was required that they called the patient. Patient no-shows, there’s a gap in that schedule. We could get some paperwork completed and so on, but give that patient a call, let them know that, “Hey, we’re expecting you today. Something must have come up. Give us a call. Let’s get you that appointment that you missed today rescheduled.”

And they also made sure they had a two strikes and out process in place where if a patient missed … no-show I should say, two consecutive appointments, they were removed from the schedule. But they could call and get back on the schedule, but they removed them so that, that occurrence didn’t continue to happen, that lack, loss of productivity didn’t continue to happen there.

As a result of this focus on patient attendance and patient engagement over the past year, this clinic saw tremendous improvement in patient engagement and patient attendance. They saw an improvement in their cancellation no-show rate that went from just over 20%, 20.6% I believe it was to 13.5%. So cancellation no-show rate improved significantly.

And again, this was a network of clinics, six clinics that saw over 100 patients per day. This had a financial impact, over $500,000, $560,000 just by focusing on one metric, visits per eval. The way they went about doing it was focusing on patient attendance and patient engagement.

This is just one example of a client success story, where after working with a client for one year in our Good to Great program they saw tremendous results. If you’d like to learn more about opportunities that may be appropriate for you, whether it’s a performance growth strategy, a health check, and making sure that you’re utilizing all the features and functionality of ReDoc and all the modules that go along with it, or there are some operational best practices that you feel you’d like to learn more about and deploy, please don’t hesitate reaching out and giving us a call.

Does your rehab clinic or facility need similar attention?  We’re here to help.  Please contact us if you’re looking for a specialized and customized approach to improve best practices and workflows for your business.

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