WHAT IS REAL-TIME SCHEDULING IN FIELD HEALTHCARE?
The backdrop of recent operational pressures matched with modern customer expectations can be solved through real-time optimisation. Often, this is using your existing resources with efficient cost- and skills-based scheduling and route planning.
In planning workflows, moving to an
optimised scheduling platform and a real-time field app provides:
- Geocoded appointment location – ending time wasted searching around Post Codes
- Overlapped service ranges – opening previously-hidden alternative schedules and routes
- Regulated skills and medicines/tools required for the visit automatically factored
- Vehicle availability and type – whether the field visit must be offered by healthcare workers’ own car, or a fleet vehicle (and the required storage capacity)
- Actual time of day driving speeds – real-world data to calculate the travel time between appointments
- In-day re-optimisation – within seconds to account for unplanned availability/traffic conditions/missing supplies
- Cost-optimisation – allowing head-office to add/subtract new operational rules with SLA compliance factored in real time
Healthcare professionals and medical technicians both receive live instructions to their
field service app. With mutual agreement this also provides the opportunity for your field employees to begin their shifts from home addresses, saving unnecessary fuel use to an office/warehouse. As discussed, it's often the case that healthcare visitors now operate telecare appointments – and these must take place in a supervised clinical environment.
These appointments and their associated
travel time are factored in to ensure the
windows offered are optimised.
In the patient/customer workflow, moving to an
optimised appointment scheduling software and booking portal provides the integrated self-service
customer portal (or call centre), a pre-optimised appointment window. The appointment is selected and this data may be twinned into a CRM through the back office. (This includes emergency appointments which are created -
not just set aside 'just in case').
What is happening in the background?
- FLS VISITOUR calculated with all parameters as described above
- The algorithm created availability at the earliest time (according to the best outcome)
- The dispatcher had the option to proceed with the proposed time
- The customer was satisfied to be offered a menu of appointment windows
- In-day re-optimisation for all field employees with live ETA tracking for the customer
- For maximum transparency, the field employee has the account and case history available, a photo of either the completed work, and/or sign-on-glass is linked back to the work order and written into the CRM
Take this lesson from the Insurance Industry about
how to deploy a Field Office within hours, here:
Reacting in Real TimeRead more about
in-built tools to assist Compliance, Regulation, and Traceability here:
FLS Industry - Healthcare & Medical Engineering