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How Novant Health Achieved a 41% Reduction in Average Patient Wait Time, and Opened a Large Infusion Center With a Small Waiting Room

Speakers

Susan Perrella. RN, OCN Assistant Nurse Manager Novant Health
Susan Perrella, RN, OCN
Assistant Nurse Manager, Novant Health
Lisa Rioux, RN, BSN, OCN, CRNI Nurse Manager Novant Health
Lisa Rioux, RN, BSN, OCN, CRNI
Nurse Manager, Novant Health

Summary

Novant Health’s infusion center branches had already struggled to align an unpredictable pattern of demand for appointments with a limited supply of physicians, staff, equipment, and infusion chairs. Centers experienced midday crunches of high patient volume, lack of available resources, patient dissatisfaction due to high wait times, and nurses who were overworked by patient bottlenecks. 

To better foresee and match future volumes and promote level-loaded schedules, Novant Health adopted LeanTaaS’ predictive and prescriptive analytics technology iQueue for Infusion Centers. The impact was so powerful that in 2020, when Novant Health opened a new 80-bay infusion center system in its Charlotte-based Presbyterian Medical Center, leadership envisioned a patient journey that began with seeing a provider or receiving treatment upon arrival – skipping the waiting room entirely. 

In this session, nurse managers from Novant Health discuss how their organization gained enough confidence in its infusion appointment optimization to plan for only a small waiting room for this new large center. Hear about how Novant Health used iQueue’s tools, overlaid on EHR data, to streamline their infusion center waiting rooms in order to quickly see patients. They then used learnings from this to fulfill their vision for a successful infusion center with minimal waiting areas, and leveraged iQueue to continue maintaining balanced schedules in the new center, to the satisfaction of nurses and patients alike. 

Viewers of this webinar will be able to: 

  • Describe the causes of the operational challenges Novant Health infusion centers faced, including unpredictability leading to extended patient wait times
  • Explain how advanced analytics technology enhances the EHR to create smart, supportive scheduling tools that optimize infusion resources 
  • Assess how Novant Health leveraged learnings from its previous optimization success with advanced analytics technology to build an infusion center designed for minimal patient wait times

Results

41%Reduction in average wait time
10%Decrease in average drug time
What was impactful to us, especially, was that we had free chairs. Those patients that were coming to their appointment weren’t waiting in a waiting room, or in the physician’s office that was calling to get their added appointment. They can more easily get those appointments made and patients weren’t waiting in a waiting area for a freed-up chair.
Lisa Rioux, RN, BSN, OCN, CRNI
Nurse Manager, Novant Health

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