Obtaining control of your medical practice schedule and maintaining it has a bigger positive impact on profitability, resource use and overall patient, doctor and staff satisfaction. However, because the healthcare industry, even pediatrics, can be very complex, physician scheduling can be challenging.
Fortunately, the American Academy of Pediatrics has provided these physician schedule maker recommendations below.
1. Be Consistent With Days off
Try offering your physicians a set day off each week. You obviously can't guarantee this since anything can change in a minute and you don't want to end up in a situation where you don't have enough doctors to provide care to your young patients. Your patients are important and they need to know your practice is there to provide them with quality care always.
2. Don't Change Physicians' Schedules
You should finalize the physician schedules a minimum of two to three months in advance. This will allow parents to schedule the next appointment for their children before leaving the office. You shouldn't be constantly changing a physician's schedule since it can lead to having to reschedule patients. It should be clearly understood by all your physicians that once the schedule is posted, it's set in stone, with the exception for extreme emergencies such as a death in the family.
3. Create Customized Schedules
Practices that use the labor-intensive method of scheduling are most efficient. While new practices will likely not have the data and experience to implement this type of scheduling system fully, there are some basic techniques you can use now as your practice matures before moving on to more complex management development that may include shift scheduling, for example.
You'd use the modified open access system as your base template. You'll have one individual in the practice, which really should be a doctor with business skills, who will be responsible for maximizing the number of patient visits your practice can handle. However, the physician handling this responsibility will need to have several attributes:
They'll need to understand your practice's seasonal variations where certain types of visit will be in demand. For instance, they should customize the schedule where they'll assign more slots in the summer season to wellness visits and in the winter season, they'll assign more acute care visits.
> They'll need to understand how each physician works. Each physician will have their own style, therefore, they can't all have the same schedule.
> They'll need to have the compensation and time for monitoring how the practice is booking each day and be able to make requisite changes to the system continually.
> They'll need the authority to take complete control of providers' schedules.
> They'll need the ability to try to move patients' well visits to periods of lower demand like April or May in order to even out the crunch of these visits in the summer.
A great tool that can help with physician scheduling is physician scheduling software. Automation of emergency medicine scheduling helps minimize hassles, saves time, communicates with providers effectively, allows providers to switch shifts with each other, picks up and gives away shifts and obtains time off requests all with a click of a button.
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