Case Study

The problem

Until June of 2013 the thousand plus patients who visit this super specialty hospital everyday from the nearby villages would camp under the trees overnight son the hospital campus so as to get themselves registered between 7 AM and 11 AM in the morning. The hospital administration for lack of a better solution was even contemplating building a large waiting hall complex with a budget of lakhs a rupees (hundreds of thousands of dollars). A large portion of these patients are economically disadvantaged and could avail the hospital services through a government reimbursement program while the rest of the patients were either employees, their families or paid out of pocket

All these patients irrespective of new or repeat were required to still go through the registration process for either validation or payment. On completion of registration the patients were issue a manual token number and index cards filled with the patients UHID numbers were rushed to the medical records room for the patients files to be pulled and sent to the respective OP consulting rooms. This whole process was causing very large crowds and waiting at every step leading to a very chaotic and noisy environment.

The Solution

The NoQ team spent a few days conducting a detailed study of the existing procedures and Works flow as well as the IT systems in place. The research indicated that 80% of the patients were of the repeat category and that in most cases the validation could be automated since no payment was required.

NoQ customized the platform so as to blend in with the existing procedures and leveraged the existing hardware requiring no significant capital expense (just a few monitors to display real time status of the appointemts) nor any complicated training or role reassignment for existing operational staff.

The Result

Since its deployment in June of 2013 the hospital has experienced the following

• About 600 patients a day are getting their registration validated and booking their appointment from the convenience of their home via a simple SMS and walking in directly to the doctors consultation room.
• The system also advises the patients who could not be validated to visit the registration counter before their scheduled appointment time (they are not denied a appointment)
• The medical records office has a list available first thing in the morning so that they may collect the patient files in a relaxed manner rather than scramble as was the norm before NoQ
• The walk in patients have an option of either getting a SMS based token and appointment or get a manual one issued at the registration counters, NoQ further streamline this process by creating a custom panel that resembles the tabulated sheets that were being used by the registration desks prior to NoQ and these manual tokens are seamlessly merged with the automated SMS tokens so that the overall intgeiryt of the FIFO oreder is maintained. The agents did not require any product training since it was very similar to their manual process.

Conclusions:

NoQ provided the hospital with a very cost effective and elegant solution that has led to the patients being spread out over the consulting hours evenly resulting in a much calmer operating environment. The system has been very robust and has been running continuously for over a year without any disruptions.