Ophthalmic Consultants of Boston is a referral center for advanced eye care, serving patients throughout Greater Boston, Metrowest, the North Shore, South Shore and Cape Cod. It was the nation’s first multispecialty private ophthalmology practice, founded in 1969. Today, Ophthalmic Consultants of Boston has 66 providers and 450 employees, with 14 clinic locations with 250 exam rooms.
THE PROBLEM
The healthcare organization has a unique clinical design, comparable to a collection of smaller practices where each doctor independently manages his clinical space and rents it from Ophthalmic Consultants, of which Ophthalmic Consultants partly owns and rents another part from a commercial agency. So instead of ophthalmology consultants covering the cost of expenses like rooms, technicians and more, individual doctors cover this themselves.
“Since physicians pay out of pocket for the exam rooms they use, we needed a reliable system to accurately record which rooms were used by which physicians each day,” said Krystal Duarte, senior business intelligence developer at Ophthalmic Consultants in Boston . “Before we turned to exam room management technology, we kept a spreadsheet of every room every doctor used, every day of the month.
“We not only wanted to make sure that physicians paid for the rooms they used, we also wanted to make sure they weren’t overcharged for rooms they didn’t use,” she continued. “This placed a heavy administrative burden on our staff in collecting accurate usage data and correcting discrepancies when a physician did not use a room originally assigned to them.”
With the spreadsheet method, staff would not be notified if a doctor was absent for a day or changed from five to four exam rooms. Too often, teams were two months behind in processing the information and submitting it to the finance team, with no visibility into how they were using their space.
This not only caused a lack of data accuracy, but also created a sense of dissatisfaction among physicians and burnout among staff.
PROPOSAL
In an effort to solve the problems, Boston-based Ophthalmic Consultants has adopted vendor QGenda’s exam room management system.
“Our main goal was to increase the accuracy of the data and have a source of truth that we can tap into in the research space,” Duarte explains. “QGenda proposed their exam room management system for accurate, centralized visibility into upcoming exam room usage and availability in real-time, which would also allow physicians to request and reallocate space based on physicians’ free time needs.
“Not only was this type of technology supposed to help with our data issues, it would also improve scheduling efficiency, increase transparency and satisfaction for physicians, and streamline scheduling reporting for the financial industry,” she added.
MEETING THE CHALLENGE
With the new exam room management technology, Ophthalmic Consultants was able to create new policies for physician involvement in exam room management and scheduling in a single system. Since this system became the source of truth for the finance team, physicians can verify their schedules – including leave requests – and exam rooms on a daily basis.
“Our team can now also easily proactively identify any issues, improving both accuracy and transparency,” said Duarte. “As a result, our physicians have gained confidence that they are using the rooms they are charged for, increasing their job satisfaction.
“In terms of usage, this has given us a clearer picture of space usage,” she continued. “Previously, we thought total utilization was close to 100% because physicians were often told there was no room for additional caregivers when they asked to switch rooms.”
However, with insight from the QGenda system, Ophthalmic Consultants found that usage was closer to 50%.
“So while our original goal in implementing the technology was to gain insight into accurate room usage data to ensure clinicians were charged appropriately, it also allowed us to think strategically about improving space utilization and optimizing clinical resources in the future and making decisions that also benefit ophthalmology consultants and patients,” she said.
RESULTS
The data insights provided by exam room management technology have enabled ophthalmology consultants to make strategic decisions and improve overall financial health by reducing real estate costs and overhead. More specifically, staff can determine where to consolidate offices – and the associated costs.
“For example, we found that room occupancy at one of our locations was only about 46%,” Duarte reported. “So we compared patient demographics and found that most patients drove past other clinic locations on the way to their appointment. As a result, we moved and scheduled existing physicians to the other, more convenient facilities.
“Taken together, this insight gave us confidence that we could close the underutilized location without disrupting physician and patient access and avoiding being locked into an expensive, long-term lease,” she added.
Ophthalmic Consultants was able to close two underutilized clinics and in turn recoup $750,000 per year. Very recently it closed two more clinics for a total of four, so that dollar amount continues to rise.
“In terms of administrative burdens, our finance teams have found a sense of relief thanks to QGenda’s support,” she said. “Previously it took one to two months to complete rental reporting, but we continue to optimize these processes and aim to have this completed within about a week.”
ADVICE FOR OTHERS
“The biggest piece of advice I would give to an organization considering exam room management technology is to really find a vendor that offers a single system for multiple needs,” Duarte said. “For us, that meant a vendor who could not only support us with exam room management, but also help with scheduling doctors and technicians, even though we didn’t know we needed it at first.
“Scheduling physicians and technicians was also a manual process that went hand in hand, so having them together makes scheduling more efficient for both,” she continues.
When implementing this type of technology, you really need to rely on the data and insights it can provide. If you don’t do this, you may be overlooking ways to save the organization a significant amount of money, which won’t take away from physicians and, most importantly, patients. , she concluded.
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