Local competition, patient satisfaction may drive urgent orthopedic care clinic success
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When deciding whether to open an urgent orthopedic care clinic in association with a practice or hospital, presenters at the American Alliance of Orthopaedic Executives Annual Conference noted it is important to take the local competition into consideration.
“Part of it is the competition fact, to say if you do not offer urgent care or same-day access, what is your competition doing in that market? Are you going to lose patients because of the situation?” Nate Moore, CPA, MBA, FACMPE, president of Moore Solutions Inc., said in his presentation.
In addition, local competition will also drive which hours an urgent orthopedic care clinic is open, according to Mona Reimers, MBA, FACMPE, CPC, director of administrative operations at Ortho NorthEast.
“If your other competitors in town ... are doing extended hours, you might be harmed if you do not try to match those hours or come close to those hours,” Reimers said in her presentation.
As a practice or hospital continues to build its urgent orthopedic care clinic, Moore noted it is important to measure patient satisfaction. He said this includes satisfaction with the staff, length of wait and courtesy, as well as overall patient satisfaction.
“If you are not measuring patient satisfaction, it is something to start, and if you are, I would specifically look to these questions for urgent care to say what did you think of the staff experience?” Moore said. “By staff experience, yes there is the provider involved, but I have seen patient reviews where the doctors are great but the nursing staff or the clinical staff is not so great and it affects that.”
By tracking patient satisfaction and overall wait times, Moore noted urgent orthopedic care clinics can identify which days of the week it may need more providers staffed due to a higher volume of patients.
“In a perfect world, providers are free and you just staff all you want, and everybody gets a 10-minute wait,” Moore said. “But it is not a perfect world and trying to balance the cost vs. the wait time is a big deal.”
An urgent orthopedic care walk-in clinic-type environment can also be started in a practice without opening a new office location or hiring additional providers, according to Reimers.
“You can say we have a walk-in clinic and unless you find you are so busy with the walk-in clinic that you have to hire a provider, you could always work the patient into the closest specialist or closest advanced practitioner in that subspecialty that you have,” Reimers said. – by Casey Tingle
Reference:
Moore N, et al. Metrics that matter: Measuring and managing your urgent care clinic. Presented at: American Alliance of Orthopaedic Executives Annual Conference; May 1-4, 2020 (virtual meeting).
Disclosures: Moore and Reimers report no relevant financial disclosures.
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Moore N, et al. Metrics that matter: Measuring and managing your urgent care clinic. Presented at: American Alliance of Orthopaedic Executives Annual Conference; May 1-4, 2020 (virtual meeting).
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