The switch to online availability: Just 4 Kids partners with Solv to offer patients more options
Geographic Area: Denton, Texas
Locations: 1 (second location coming soon)
Urgent care traditionally has been a walk-in-only business. It’s the one healthcare setting where patients have always expected to walk in and be seen and the only one where providers, front-desk workers, and office managers must pivot to the day's needs with little to no insight into what will happen. Yet, more and more patients want the ability to book an online visit, and more urgent cares, like Just 4 Kids, are discovering the benefit of offering both online and walk-in availability for patient experience and office operations.
Key Results
- Reduced average waiting room time by 15 min per patient.
- Decreased employee turnover
- Improve load balance throughout day
Challenge
Before partnering with Solv, Just 4 Kids was a walk-in-only clinic. While that is incredibly common for urgent care settings, they found it wasn’t necessarily great for anyone. With a busy clinic full of parents and children, they often had 30 parents waiting at the door. In the first hour of operating, it was common to have a waiting room full of sick kids, and angry and impatient parents. For front desk workers and other staff, this meant having to manage a lot of stressed patients and made it hard to set expectations and create smooth operations on the backend. On the worst days, parents were angry, front desk workers were stressed, and providers had no idea what kids were coming in for which made it difficult to triage appropriately.
Just 4 Kids partnered with Solv to provide online booking options for patients. While they didn’t know to what extent it would change their workflow or patients' experience, they found it vastly did.
"Before Solv, our staff previously came in up to 2 hours early before we opened and the automation with DocuTAP has decreased our payroll cost because it saves so much time." - Clinical Manager
Solution
By providing patients an option to book online, parents are able to get their kids seen the same day without waiting hours in a waiting room or in their car. Front-desk workers have fewer angry patients, and with features like paperless check-in and text-back features, they get more time back. Now, Just 4 Kids offers both walk-ins and online bookings. By using Solv they are able to control how much availability they want to show, throttling back when the waiting room is already busy, or increasing availability in slow times. This has been especially helpful on specific days when they vary from having one provider to many and can help give more flexibility to their providers by having insight into their days. In fact, before using Solv, the staff would often have to stay late after closing, but with online booking options now they don’t have to.
"Our staff was excited to start offering online scheduling because we weren't going to have hour long wait times anymore and angry parents. It increased our customer satisfaction dramatically and increased our staff morale because we were getting crushed at the beginning of winter and all in all decreased our employee turnover." - Clinical Manager
Results
Having access to paperless check-in has drastically changed the workflow for Just 4 kids. Now, front desk staff save time by not having to manually enter information, which reduces data entry errors. Providers enjoy the convenience of being able to immediately have access to patient insights vs waiting for the front desk to enter all of their information into the system. On average, they were able to reduce waiting room time by 15 minutes, improving overall door-to-door time. For a clinic like Just4kids that relies on business from happy parents, this convenience factor is huge for overall patient satisfaction.
"Solv helps us achieve our goal of getting patients in and out quicker, which is great." - Clinical Manager
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