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Webinar

How Nebraska Medicine Kept Infusion Center Wait Times Under 10 Minutes While Growing Volume

Speakers

rebecca-duchman
Rebecca "Becky" Duchman, MSN, MA, RN, NEA-BC
Director Ambulatory Infusion/Treatment Services Nebraska Medicine

Summary

The Nebraska Medicine Buffett Cancer Center opened an 8-story clinical facility in 2017, comprising 39 infusion rooms among many other treatment areas for cancer patients. The new center needed to optimize its large capacity to accommodate its many patients. The facility’s operational challenges included scheduling templates that did not easily accommodate add-on patients, heavy patient loads in the morning and midday, and nurses having to miss breaks and lunches on a regular basis. 

To address the operational bottlenecks that caused these issues, Nebraska Medicine Buffett Cancer Center partnered with LeanTaaS to launch the iQueue for Infusion Centers solution in 2018, with the goal of deploying iQueue’s predictive and prescriptive analytics to improve patient access, lessen overbooking and increase capacity without adding full time nurses.  

In this session, the Director Ambulatory Infusion/Treatment Services at Nebraska Medicine describes how the cancer center leveraged iQueue’s smart tools to optimize infusion scheduling, allowing them to accommodate add-ons and treatments that were not linked directly to clinic appointments, and create efficient level-loaded schedules that supported lower wait times for patients and manageable workdays for nurses.

Viewers of this webinar will be able to:

  • Understand the challenges that infusion centers face in managing high patient volume with limited resources, including chairs and staffing
  • Learn about the benefits of maximizing resource utilization in infusion center operations, both in terms of patient satisfaction and institutional financial goals
  • Discover how Nebraska Medicine used iQueue for Infusion Centers to keep patient wait times under 10 minutes and increase daily patient appointment volumes, without adding additional infusion chairs

Results

12%Increase in patient volume at one of their main clinics
20%Decrease in overall wait times
9Minutes average wait time
We were able to successfully increase our patient volume, our scheduled patient volume specifically, by 12%, and our completed patient volume by 8% without increasing our chair capacity and or our nurse FTE staff capacity.
Becky Duchman
Director of Infusion and Treatment Services, Nebraska Medicine

Related resources

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