Success Stories

NewYork-Presbyterian Reduced Average Wait Times by 40%

55% Lower waiting times at peak hours

40% Lower average wait time

17% Higher patient volumes

Summary

As part of one of the largest health systems within New York City, NewYork-Presbyterian (NYP) is home to two of the nation’s leading cancer centers. These include the NCI-Designated Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center of NYP/Columbia University Medical Center, the NYP/Weill Cornell Ronald P. Stanton Clinical Cancer Program, and the Weill Cornell Medicine Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center.

Profile

212 chairs

10 centers

Epic EHR

NCI designation

Academic Medical Center

Northeastern US

Problem

Throughout its facilities, NewYork-Presbyterian treats some 7,500 adult and pediatric patients newly diagnosed with cancer each year. With its large patient population in a dense urban area, NewYork-Presbyterian needed to optimize the infusion capacity it had in a steady, manageable cadence. Infusion centers seemed to constantly operate at capacity but daily schedules were overloaded midday. This “peaky” utilization profile led to extended wait times for patients in the middle of the day, which negatively impacted patient experience and caused undue stress and inconsistent workloads for nurses.

Solution

To begin solving these challenges, NewYork-Presbyterian leadership turned to iQueue for Infusion Centers, an analytics solution that uses AI and machine learning to create optimized scheduling templates driven by historic appointment data. iQueue’s schedules are designed to continuously maximize patient flow and chair usage by predicting the likely mix and volume of appointments from day-to-day and suggesting the optimal schedule to smooth utilization and allow for adjustments. NewYork-Presbyterian began by implementing iQueue in one of its centers with 49 chairs to create optimized infusion scheduling templates there.

The center quickly saw results in the form of a flattened midday utilization peak, which allowed for better level-loading throughout the rest of the day. Wait times were reduced accordingly, and NewYork-Presbyterian was also able to accommodate a higher number of patients. NewYork-Presbyterian has now expanded its use of iQueue to 5 hospitals in its system.