Patient scheduling is one of the most crucial steps in healthcare delivery. Despite significant advances in healthcare technology, accurate and timely scheduling remains challenging, particularly when care transitions providers. Healthcare systems often lack unified access to the provider profiles and schedules that comprise their network, leading to revenue loss, delays in care, and patient dissatisfaction. Inadequate staffing and manual scheduling processes further compromise the timely and successful transition of care, ultimately placing the most significant burden on the patient.
While other industries, most notably travel, have modernized the way they approach scheduling, healthcare scheduling has largely remained dominated by phone calls and faxes. Why is this? The answer is complexity. First, healthcare scheduling is significantly more complex than scheduling normal day activities. The variety of patients’ needs and healthcare services offered are orders of magnitude more than the variety of travelers’ needs and available travel services.
Second, given the inherent complexity in servicing patients’ needs, every health system and practice operates their businesses differently. Therefore, every Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Practice Management System offers different behavior workflows and data.
Enter WellHive and its groundbreaking platform, set to revolutionize healthcare scheduling as we know it today.
WellHive's proprietary technology enables seamless connectivity across a healthcare system’s comprehensive network, integrating numerous disparate scheduling sources between internal and external providers. Siloed data and behavior is unified into a single interface, providing users and applications with a standard, consistent, EHR-agnostic view of providers and their schedules. By eliminating previous technical and organizational boundaries, WellHive ensures informed decision-making and a seamless and timely transition of care.
WellHive’s modern and robust integrated scheduling capabilities, offered within a highly secure FedRAMP-authorized environment, set them apart in Public and Private Healthcare IT. Its API-first design allows healthcare organizations the ability to incorporate WellHive functionality within native systems and tooling to deliver a familiar user experience. Highly configurable features and automations can be tailored to support alignment with current business processes and adherence to internal policies and industry regulations. Through WellHive, care teams gain a comprehensive 360-degree view of their provider network, transforming scheduling time frames from days to minutes leading to increased patient satisfaction and reduced operational costs.
Early on, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) recognized the potential impact of the WellHive platform in one of their most critical missions, providing timely and accurate care for Veterans. In 2020, VA initiated a pilot program at the Orlando, FL VA Medical Center to demonstrate the feasibility of the WellHive Platform to modernize and improve how they schedule Veterans with their network of community providers. Following promising results in Orlando, the pilot was quickly expanded to Columbia, SC, to test the impacts in a different geographic region with varying provider and patient demographics. Through these pilots, for the first time ever VA was able to gain real-time, digital access to their community provider’s schedules. This level of access and connectivity allowed these sites to take a previously manual process that took up to 14 days of multiple phone calls and faxes to schedule a single appointment down to just 7 minutes. Following the success of the pilots, WellHive was chosen as the technology vendor for VA’s External Provider Scheduling (EPS) program to implement Wellhive at over 130 VHA sites nationwide.
WellHive continuously expands its provider network, further enhancing the reach and impact of the EPS program. Providers and healthcare organizations interested in joining the WellHive network to support greater access for Veterans are encouraged to learn more here.
Identifying and innovating opportunities to improve care coordination is a top focus for VA and private and public healthcare systems everywhere. Patient referrals are one of the most common reasons for care transition. A 2018 study by Duke University found that of 103,737 analyzed referral scheduling attempts, only 36,072 (34.8%) resulted in documented complete appointments (Patel, 2018). Inefficiencies and significant disparities in scheduling processes across providers were major contributors to incomplete referrals. Failure to close the referral loop can also pose a financial liability for health systems. When referring providers need more readily available access to specialists within their healthcare system, they are more likely to refer to out-of-network specialists, reducing referral volume and revenue. These issues are further exacerbated in rural healthcare systems, where resources are already strained.
WellHive is the only solution on the market today that can unify internal and external scheduling sources into a single access point for providers, affiliates, care navigators, and patients. By allowing providers and their staff to view and compare specialist profiles and availability while scheduling referrals at the point of care, the likelihood of closing the referral loop is significantly increased, leading to improved patient outcomes and satisfaction. By further integrating WellHive’s scheduling capabilities with accessible healthcare delivery modalities such as telehealth and in-home video visits, healthcare systems can mitigate provider availability and accessibility challenges to ensure comprehensive care for their patient population.
Modern technology like WellHive has the potential to revolutionize healthcare scheduling while unlocking endless advancements made possible through truly integrated and connected care. With its innovative solutions and unwavering commitment to excellence, WellHive allows healthcare providers to focus on what matters most: their patients.
To schedule a demo, visit www.WellHive.com.