The Urgent Care: Patient Satisfaction and Cost Reduction

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Table of Contents

Health Insurance and Quality
Pay Source
References

Health Insurance and Quality

One of the approaches that will be applied to the urgent care center to increase patients satisfaction is the consolidation of repetitive processes during service delivery. Most patients who visit the urgent care center are concerned about their time during any visit and hence having a long wait time can lead to increase frustration and dissatisfaction with the services provided. Patrick and Puterman (2008), indicate that consolidation of duplicative processes ensures that time as a resource is maximized while still guarantee quality care for the patients. Eliminating repetitive processes ensures that the center can operate with less staff hence cutting on the cost of operation (Berwick, 2009). For example collection of patient data during triage, history taking, and billing leads to repetition and hence requires to be streamlined. To reduce the repetitive processes, the personnel who triage patients can also be responsible for billing which reduces the need to document the patient information (Patrick & Puterman, 2008). Other processes such as the recording of patient bills can be completed once the patient leaves the center to avoid unnecessary delays.

Skills training of the staff in the urgent care center will also be carried out to improve patient satisfaction and reduce operating costs. The training will focus on improving the history-taking skills of the staff to improve the delivery of service at the center (Patrick & Puterman, 2008). The training will also focus on empowering the staff to be in a position to communicate better with the patients in the center. For example, when staff can deal with arising issues such as patients agitation due to delays at the center the patient satisfaction will significantly improve. The training will also enable the clinical personnel to ask targeted questions that will enhance the quality of the information obtained during the visits. Collecting adequate information will improve the diagnosis made during patients visits and in essence increase their satisfaction while lowering the costs of care by avoiding misdiagnosis (Berwick, 2009).

The third initiative that will be implemented to increase patient satisfaction and reduce the cost of operation will entail scheduling patient visits. Rather than having a large number of patients sit in the waiting bay, the center will endeavor to schedule patient visits especially the return cases (Patrick & Puterman, 2008). For example, the scheduling will allow the center to allocate the repeat clients to visit during the off-peak hours to prevent them from experiencing delays that characterize the normal operations at the center. The scheduling will ensure that the staffing numbers match several patients hence ensuring that human resources are well utilized preventing unnecessary operational costs (Berwick, 2009).

Pay Source

The clinic will only be accepting Medicare as the pay source for the services provided at the clinic. The decision was informed by various advantages that are associated with Medicare as a source of pay for both the clinic and the patients. For example, the scheme has provisions for financing health promotion for the patients hence working to reduce the overall burden of the healthcare for the clients. The Medicare program requires minimal paperwork when serving the clients. As a result, the clients will spend less time in the clinic during their visits. Using Medicare will also reduce the amount of manual paperwork for the staff hence improving service delivery.

References

Berwick, D. (2009). What patient-centered should mean: Confessions of an extremist. Health Affairs, 29(19), 4-7.

Patrick, J., & Puterman, M. L. (2008). Reducing wait times through operations research: Optimizing the use of surge capacity. Healthcare Policy, 3(3), 7588.

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The Urgent Care: Patient Satisfaction and Cost Reduction

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