Enabling Efficiency in Healthcare
Background
A leading non-profit, health care and medical services provider in the US, providing acute, specialty, primary and preventive care services. They are comprised of hospitals, medical centers and one of the nation's largest group practices, which includes more than 1,200 physicians practicing in over 40 specialties, and over 30,000 employees overall.
Challenge
Part of the responsibility of the staff at the provider was managing appointments made between pharmaceutical representatives and the physicians. This process was managed offline through a Microsoft Access database housed on a shared drive. This led to multiple issues: data concurrency problems (multiple team members interacting with the database at the same time), file accessibility problems, phone-only representative interactions, lack of overall accountability and performance, and no data backups.
Solution
We interviewed the team members to understand all of the features and the data schema of the Access database, then migrated the project into a secure, cloud-based environment. After a quality phase to ensure both the necessary procedures were in place and the data was accurate, we implemented a web portal where representatives could log in, securely communicate with the provider and negotiate appointment requests online. This significantly streamlined the time it took to collect the appointment requests, and allowed for better workflow management. We also developed a dashboard that provided visibility into where and from whom the appointment requests were coming from, which physicians were taking them, and the overall frequency of requests.