Can You Automate Patient Scheduling?

Why Intelligent Scheduling is the Future of In-Home Healthcare

If you are like most in-home therapy business owners, you and your team are already operating at 110%. You have a list of available therapists and you know in what zones they operate. You may even have their schedules memorized and know when which therapist is most available. 

However, this business model, even though it’s common among in-home therapy businesses, is not sustainable. And, it’s not ideal for anyone - particularly you!

One of the first automations that business owners in your shoes ask for is automating the process of matching patients with the right therapist. And this is the automation we are going to dive into in this article.

Question: Can You Automate Patient Scheduling?

Answer: YES!

Automated patient scheduling is the most popular feature in cliniCONNECTS. Here’s why:

Manually scheduling patients is time-consuming. You have to have a well-organized and easily searchable list of therapists, their specialties, their zones of operation, and their schedules. Then, you must quickly contact the most appropriate therapist on your list to see if they are available to take on the patient. If they say no or are not answering the phone/text, you must continue down the list until you get a match.

This sounds simple - if time-consuming - but you know that it’s more complicated than the above. There is only one business that has created software purpose-built for in-home therapy companies - which is cliniCONNECTS. That means most businesses in this industry find it incredibly difficult to get that initial sortable/searchable list together. It’s usually a combination of Excel, Google Maps, and someone’s brain power. If one of those factors fails, then the patient matching is done incorrectly or is even more time-consuming - or a patient falls through the cracks.

This is an area where human involvement makes it tricky, but automation and customizable algorithms make it so simple.

When you set up cliniCONNECTS, you work with a team to customize your therapist attributes. For example, you can note what areas they operate in, whether their credentialing is up-to-date, exclude them if a particular home health company doesn’t want to work with them, and include their area of specialty.

Then, once you have all of that information that was once living in your head included in cliniCONNECTS, you can set up a process to match a patient with the best clinician for the job. When the patient referral comes in, the system will automatically reach out to all clinicians who will best fit with the referral, and ask them if they’d like to add the patient to their caseload. Then, once the patient is accepted by the most available and best-fitted therapist, the therapist can schedule the patient for their first and subsequent appointments - all through cliniCONNECTS.

In the words of Mara Trafficante, CEO and President of Words and Motion:

“cliniCONNECTS is the way to go. If a business still manually assigns therapists to patients or clients, they are in the ice age. It’s just not going to get you very far anymore. We wouldn’t have grown without cliniCONNECTS.”

This intelligent scheduling system is truly the future of in-home healthcare.

A Note on HIPAA Compliance

Anyone working in healthcare is, of course, concerned about HIPAA compliance. We are happy to share that the cliniCONNECTS automated patient matching system - indeed the entire software platform - is HIPAA compliant. 

Ensuring HIPAA compliance means that you can automate many aspects of your business - not just patient matching. cliniCONNECTS also offers automated credential management, simple billing, automated profit margin control, streamlined payroll, operational metrics and reports, and much more.

Find out how you can access this HIPAA-compliant automation platform today. Schedule an appointment to see the software in action.