MEDITECH
Community-Wide Scheduling
product brief

MEDITECH's Community-Wide Scheduling (CWS) application simplifies the process by which staff members at multiple and single facility health care organizations schedule patient appointments in any department or facility across the organization.

In addition to streamlining patient appointment scheduling, the application helps reduce scheduling errors and missed appointments. Furthermore, the application includes capabilities to manage resources efficiently and support managed care environments.

Highlights:
   • Automates and streamlines patient appointment scheduling
   • Minimizes scheduling errors and missed appointments
   • Performs conflict checking by resource, personnel, and appointment type
   • Generates automatic appointment reminders and cancellation notices
   • Utilizes waitlists to minimize/eliminate unproductive time due to cancellations
   • Maximizes managed care contracts by improving scheduling efficiency and resource allocation.

Standard Features

Automated Patient Scheduling
The application instantly finds the first available time slot in which all the resources necessary to perform an appointment are available. Features include:
• Alternative appointment times
• Control of the time window in which an appointment can take place
• Ability to schedule consecutive sessions for a patient
• Ability to schedule appointments at different sites
• Ability to accommodate both centralized and decentralized scheduling
• Flag for frequent no-shows and bad debt
• Recurring Visit feature to schedule appointments on a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual basis
• An automatic rescheduling feature which finds new times based upon the original appointment's criteria
• Graphical calendars
• User-defined buffer periods between appointments
• Single, dedicated appointment book scheduling screen for physician practices.

Access to Patient Information
• Appointment-related instructions for the patient and scheduler
• Automatic retrieval of a patient's existing demographic and insurance records (even if the patient has never visited the site before)
• Display of the patient's appointment compliance when scheduling appointments
• Display of the patient's scheduled and pending appointments

Conflict Checking
Conflict checking warns a scheduler of potential conflicts at the time of scheduling, allowing conflicts to be detected and avoided. Conflicts can be based on patient's gender, age, insurance plan, or other scheduled appointments. Features include:
• Resource conflict checking
• Personnel conflict checking
• Appointment type conflict checking.

Appointment Communiqués
Several features improve the communication essential for efficient patient appointment scheduling and attendance, such as:
• Automatic appointment reminders and cancellation notices, such as letters to patients and e-mail messages to staff
• Automatic archiving of system-generated patient letters
• User-defined messages in the Appointment Conflict and Resource Appointment Conflict dictionaries.

Resource Management
Additional features assist the management of personnel, rooms, and equipment, for example:
• Ability to schedule patients at specialized facilities within a health care organization
• Schedules for multidisciplinary clinicians can be arranged to reflect these clinicians' practice patterns; for example, a physician who works both as a general practitioner and as an orthopedic surgeon can be defined as a general practitioner on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays and as an orthopedic surgeon on Thursdays and Fridays
• Ability to determine appointment duration by appointment type and/or resource profiles
• Ability to collect the data necessary to determine the efficiency and frequency of resource use
• Ability to monitor and switch resources in an emergency
• Ability to enable managers to plan and schedule staff meetings at the most convenient times.

Waitlisting Capabilities
Waitlisting routines help departments and staff manage resources. Waitlisting provides prioritized lists of patients waiting for specific appointments. By utilizing waitlists, facilities minimize or eliminate unproductive time due to cancellations. Waitlisting allows staff to:
• Maintain and prioritize waitlisted appointment lists
• Track how long a patient remains on a waitlist
• Easily move patients from the waitlist to scheduled appointment times
• Record latest dates acceptable for patient appointments
• Efficiently manage the waitlist process.

Links With Other Applications
• Link with MEDITECH's Order Entry application allows users to automatically place any associated orders when scheduling an appointment
• Medical Necessity checks on these associated orders allow enterprises to limit certain tests and treatments to only those patients with certain diagnoses (meeting HCFA's requirements)
• Scheduling data is shared with MEDITECH's Enterprise Medical Record; authorized users can access a list of patients' scheduled appointments and clinicians can get a list of patients they are scheduled to see
• Link with MEDITECH's Physician Practice Management (PPM) application provides a single scheduling system that ties together all facilities and coordinates scheduling across the enterprise
• Link with PPM allows automatic insurance verification and access to the patient's most up-to-date demographic information.

Support For Managed Care Environments
The application enables health care organizations to maximize returns on managed care contracts by improving scheduling efficiency and resource allocation, for example:
• The statistical information collected and retrieved by the application helps health care organizations negotiate managed care contracts
• Patient tracking information can be used to determine staffing requirements necessary to satisfy future contracts
• CWS provides the ability to avoid registration delays, last minute cancellations, and lost reimbursement by efficiently managing insurance-related tasks. Sites can verify when an appointment is scheduled during pre-registration or at registration. Links with MEDITECH Managed Care or Direct EDI links with major insurers reduce staff time needed to manually verify insurance.

For more information about us, contact a MEDITECH Marketing Representative

MEDITECH
Medical Information Technology, Inc.
MEDITECH Circle
Westwood, MA 02090
781-821-3000
www.meditech.com