Nearly 500 infusion centers – including more than 80% of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network and over 60% of National Cancer Institute members – rely on iQueue for Infusion Centers to increase access, decrease patient wait time, and lower healthcare delivery costs.
THE CHALLENGE
Infusion scheduling has always been a hard problem to crack. With operational constraints, varying nurse schedules, and very sick patients it is hard to construct a flawless schedule that fits the needs of everyone involved. iQueue for Infusion Centers leverages machine learning and predictive analytics to help centers stay operationally agile by optimizing their scheduling templates, level-loading the daily schedule across the nursing staff, flagging future problem days for preventive action, and identifying which appointments should be rescheduled to improve the experience for patients and staff alike. The result: $20K per chair per year improvement in increased revenue, 30 – 50% lower patient wait times and increased agility and resilience.
Schedule smarter with optimized templates
Most centers schedule patients on a first-come, first-served basis – much like a corner hair salon – with no regard for who’s in the chair next to them, before them, or after them. With the randomized arrangement of appointments, and the risks of patients arriving late, having an adverse reaction, nurses calling in sick, the pharmacy running behind, the clinics running late, it doesn’t take much to completely blow up the day’s schedule…only to have it happen all over again the next day.
Unfortunately, simple spreadsheets or traditional EHR approaches cannot create an optimal solution for scheduling appointments. Set your center up for better capacity management with templates engineered to minimize delays.
Plan ahead to avoid future bottlenecks
Sometimes shifting even just one appointment can be the difference between chaos and calm. iQueue for Infusion Centers’ easy-to-understand projections of scheduled and predicted volume alert you if future days’ scheduled utilization exceeds the resources you’ve scheduled so that you can take steps to avoid a problem day.
The Schedule Shifter nimbly suggests ways to restructure a future day’s schedule to improve the experience for patients and staff and keep your center functioning optimally.
Manage the day before it unfolds
How well center staff communicate plays a major role in keeping an infusion center operating in top form. Unforeseen bottlenecks, add-ons, and no shows can turn a not-so-bad day into a nightmare if everyone’s not on the same page. iQueue for Infusion Center’s daily Huddle Report provides a start-of-the-day view of expected chair utilization, template compliance, and over/under-booking estimations. The Appointment Booking Table guides your schedulers to the open slots in the day to accommodate same day add-on appointments.
The Huddle Calendar shows four weeks of daily huddles in one view to make it easy to level-load patients across units or days and helps identify problems before they occur. Center leaders receive a Daily Digest summary via email every morning that identifies patterns and trends in the previous day’s chair utilization; patient volumes; add-on and no-shows; patient arrivals and wait times; cycle times; and compares the day’s booking compliance with the scheduling template provided for that day.
Track your center’s performance against your unique goals
Executive Summary is a view in iQueue designed to help managers easily deliver executives the data they need to make strategic, proactive decisions and quickly spot operational issues that need attention.
Save time by eliminating the need to manually pull and piece together data to craft your executive summary, and create an actionable report in minutes. View up to 15 operational metrics so you can monitor performance over time and against your institutional goals.
Understand your resource utilization in seconds
Built-in reporting and allocation models make it easy to track utilization patterns and opportunities.
Easy to understand retrospective dashboards help staff review past performance, provide insights into cycle times, volumes and utilization, wait times, and add-on patterns.
Build agility and resilience
COVID-19 has resulted in infusion centers having to contend with volume fluctuations, staff burnout, repurposed physical spaces for social distancing and uncertainty about future waves.
iQueue for Infusion Centers enables infusion centers to be operationally agile and resilient by providing adaptable scheduling templates, staff allocation tools and pro-active schedule grooming.
“Before we implemented iQueue for Infusion Centers, our nurses were burnt out. They rarely had time for breaks – let alone lunch – and were concerned about patient safety in the daily chaos. Now, nurses not only get their well-deserved breaks, but feel more comfortable and confident in an environment that lacks the ‘feast or famine’ conditions to which they had become accustomed.”
James Bachman
Former Executive Director, Oncology Services, UC Health
“We were very pleased with how fast we were able to implement iQueue for Infusion Centers and see a difference. We see lots of happier patients because things are happening on-time.”
Karen Craver
Clinical Practice Administrator, Wake Forest Baptist Health
“We took two years of historical data and pumped that into the analytic engine as well as operating constraints, how many infusion chairs are available, the hours when the chairs are open and the staff that’s available and that’s translated into mathematical equations into iQueue and out comes a production schedule.”
Sridhar Seshadri
Vice President, Cancer Services
Stanford Health Care
