Vaccination Clinic User Group Feedback: 5 Critical On-line Booking & Workflow Capabilities
Representatives from a little under under one hundred vaccination clinics meet once a week to discuss on-line appointment booking and workflow enhancements and prioritization. It’s quite amazing to hear the perspectives from such a diverse group of healthcare professionals from Acute Care, Community Care, Public Health Units and Primary Care. These operational & clinical experts are delivering vaccinations in mass immunization clinics, mobile, and pop-up clinics to workers in healthcare, elderly, teachers, essential commercial businesses, and canvassers performing assisted booking for vulnerable populations in naturally occurring retirement communities, shelters and vaccine hesitant populations. These weekly meetings have resulted in 5 Critical Vaccination On-line Appointment Booking & Workflow Automation Capabilities being added to the Verto solution in the last several weeks.
5 Critical Vaccination Online Appointment Booking & Workflow Capabilities:
1) Bulk Reschedule Second Shot Appointments for Thousands of Patients
Government guidance has changed frequently regarding the time frames for second shot appointments. Initial guidance of 22-28 days after the initial shot was then changed to 100+ days due to vaccine shortages and is now expected to be pulled forward to a yet to be determined interval, that will likely be based on ethical prioritization for sub-demographics and high risk patient populations. Manually making and tracking 2nd shot scheduling changes for thousands of patients and managing the corresponding call center call volumes is just not practical. Based on guidance from the vaccine clinic user group, Verto has added the capability to perform bulk rescheduling, by sub-demographic and automate patient notifications of scheduling changes via text or email.
2) Maximize Patient Flow by Scheduling Appointment Intervals by the Minute – 6 minutes, 7 minutes, – NOT in 5 minute Increments
Each vaccination clinic has it’s own unique staffing configuration and unique patient population that it is servicing, which can change on a daily basis. Scheduling appointment intervals in 5 minute increments is either too short, or wastes time, dramatically impacting vaccination clinic throughput and capacity. Whereas mass immunization clinics might be optimized for 7 minute appointment intervals, mobile clinics might be better served with 8 minute intervals and pop-up clinics servicing mobility challenged or elderly patients might be optimized at 12 minute intervals. You can even go down one layer further and schedule different appointment intervals for different sub-demographics (second language, mobility challenged or elderly). This helps minimize line-ups and enables your staff to determine the best appointment intervals to optimize patient throughput and vaccination clinic capacity.
3) Use Secure Appointment Booking Tokens to Distribute Appointment Booking Slots to Community Care, Home Care, Primary Care, Mobile Pop-ups & Canvassers.
Mass Immunization Clinics are good for a certain sub-set of the population, but having vulnerable patient populations come to Mass Immunization Clinics isn’t necessarily practical, efficient or safe. Coordinating vaccination booking for vulnerable populations by leveraging Community Care, Primary Care, Home Care, Mobile Pop-up clinics and canvassers and allowing them to either send a limited quantify of secure booking tokens to a patient roster, or provide secure token assisted booking support is a much more effective approach.
1) Allocate a Specific Number of Booking Tokens to Circle of Care Organizations and view their consumption in real-time.
2) Full Audit Trail, Booking Tokens can be Revoked at any Time.
3) Provide Additional Booking Tokens at any Time.
4) Quickly Change or Shift the Number of Booking Slots Available for Prioritized Sub-Demographic Populations
In a single view, see current appointment booking traffic across the different booking slots allocated for prioritized sub-demographic populations (essential worker, indigenous, geographical hot spots) and quickly and easily reallocate those appointment booking slots based on actual booking traffic in order to optimize booking slot fill rates.
5) Coordinate Appointment Booking Across Multiple Vaccination Delivery Organizations with a “Digital Front Door”
For Healthcare organizations supporting multiple vaccination clinics or vaccine delivery approaches, making it easy for patients to find the right one based on zip/postal code or other criteria can be accomplished with the user of a “Digital Front Door”. Patients enter a few key criteria and are automatically directed to the most appropriate vaccination delivery resource to book their appointment with.
