Physician shift scheduling leader will demonstrate healthcare’s first-ever technology solution for patient access at the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) Annual Conference in San Francisco
Lightning Bolt Solutions, the leader in optimizing physician shift schedules, announced a major expansion to their popular medical workforce management platform. Access Optimization is the first technology of its kind ever developed for the healthcare sector, designed to help get patients in to see their doctors faster by more efficiently scheduling existing clinical resources. Based in San Francisco, Lightning Bolt currently optimizes over 3 million physician shift hours a month for its global healthcare clients.
With Access Optimization, hospitals and large medical groups are able to automatically align the availability of clinicians with the demand for appointments by patients. By balancing clinician supply with patient demand, organizations avoid patient attrition and align their most valuable resources to their business objectives. Lightning Bolt’s technology uses prescriptive analytics to instantly evaluate millions of variables including seasonality, physician availability, appointment types, and staff preferences when building an optimal schedule.
“Studies show the availability of appointments is more directly tied to patient satisfaction than all other determinants, including bedside manners, facilities, and proximity of the clinic,” said Suvas Vajracharya, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Lighting Bolt Solutions. “Patients will change their primary care provider if they are able to find appointments sooner with another clinic or care delivery network. This kind of switching environment is toxic for medical groups and disrupts continuity of care for patients.”
Improving patient access is becoming a major focus for innovation in healthcare this year as the physician shortage creates conditions that burnout clinicians and leave patients waiting. Patients wait more than two weeks on average from booking an appointment to seeing their doctor, according to a study by Merritt Hawkins. Hospitals and large medical groups are working to improve patient access to physicians while supporting the complex scheduling needs of their physician staff.
“With widespread physician burnout and an aging population, a shortage of physicians is a devastating problem facing U.S. healthcare,” said Robert Rowley, M.D., Chief Medical Officer of Flow Health. “Increasing physician recruitment efforts is only a temporary solution for healthcare organizations. Lightning Bolt is paving the way for a real solution with Access Optimization—technology that proactively addresses burnout while improving patient access to care.”
When a hospital or large medical group enables Access Optimization, the solution automatically generates the best care schedule that meets provider objectives, taking into consideration different doctors’ productivity and specialization as well as physician availability and preferences. By utilizing work templates, the system learns a provider’s capacity for different appointment types. With this information on providers’ daily capacity, Lightning Bolt’s sophisticated algorithms schedule the optimal combination of providers to best meet projected patient demand while also honoring providers’ preferences, downtime requirements, and overall work-life balance. Providers are able to benchmark the efficiency of their institution through analytics and worklist tools detailing the gap between patient demand and clinician supply, which allows scheduling administrators to better manage and maintain alignment between the shift schedule and anticipated patient volumes.
The core focus of Access Optimization is to enable physicians to provide the highest level of care and ultimately transform healthcare from a system driven by the volume of services to one focused on the value of services and patient outcomes.
Lightning Bolt Solutions will be showcasing Access Optimization and its physician scheduling solutions at the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) 2016 Annual Conference in San Francisco from October 30 to November 2. Contact info@lightning-bolt.com with questions or visit booth 2225 to learn more about new features.