Reduce Cancellation Rates To Improve Your Bottom Line

By Dennis Schiraldi

A number of years ago I started my career in imaging as regional marketing manager for a mobile imaging company in the Midwest. One of my responsibilities was to grow same-store-growth in scan volume for our customers. This was accomplished by marketing services to physicians in the surrounding community, adding a day of service to an existing customer, working with the radiology department to optimize throughput, and one area no one was ever really managing; cancellation rates.

I created a strategy called “The Push to 90.” This was a region wide effort to achieve a 90% completion rate for all patients scheduled. Each week we would go through the painstaking process of manually tallying up the number of patients that were scheduled vs. the final number completed. I actually had to hire a part-time person to crunch the numbers.

Radiology techs and operation managers were responsible for completing patients that made it to the unit. Scheduling was working diligently in the pre-certification effort, follow up reminder calls, and moving patients into open slots (which was a significant challenge with no IT system in place). Marketing was communicating with operation managers to identify trends in cancellation rates vs. physician offices and adjusting their marketing strategy, accordingly.

We had the entire region on “The Push to 90” campaign. Each week I would publish a region wide report on individual site and mobile unit (coach) performance with an overall region number. We would complement the high performers with a basic reward and special mentions via email and asked those who needed to improve what we could do to help. It was not an overnight sensation. In 6 months we achieved our goal of completing all patients across four states, 20 mobile imaging units with MRI machines, 140 customers and 20,000+ MRI examinations.

When we started this initiative we were completing scans around a 70% rate. With our new program, we directly impacted bottom line revenue by 20% and contributed an additional $2M in revenue. As crazy as the idea sounded at the time, our leadership backed this effort, partly because there was a solid plan to deliver and everyone was held accountable for driving the numbers.

Looking back, one of the key elements to our success was the communication factor via email. However, everything else was pretty much a manual effort, since this pre-dated the sophisticated technology we now have at our disposal. The amount of effort it took in all facets of the business to get to the goal was completely insane, and I am not 100% sure how accurate the numbers were that were being reported.

Everything was being completed manually with spreadsheets. Scheduling was somewhat still the in dark ages, and there was a limitation to identifying reasons for cancellations. medQ’s - Q/ris 3000 takes the guessing games out of cancellation rates. When exams do not get completed, that information is captured and reported real time. It no longer takes a week of crunching data to understand why a patient did not get scanned. More importantly, you will not need to hire an additional person to do this. Instead, it takes a matter of minutes to run a cancellation report which will identify the reason, e.g., insurance, a claustrophobic patient, someone running late, no script, etc. This capability gives administrators in radiology departments and imaging centers the ability to diagnose and manage the root causes of cancellations.

This online, real time capability empowers staff workers by giving them the ability to pinpoint the cancelation reason, proactively catch issues and address them before it’s too late. In scheduling (in Q/ris 3000) there are key identifiers that will flag the data points that are not complete and not allow a patient to be completed as scheduled. Moving patients around the schedule into next open time slot is a very easy procedure. Since all data on patients is stored, the process is super easy as is placing reminder calls each evening for patients being examined the following day.

Paperwork flows with the patient, e.g., written orders from physicians (Rx), insurance cards, etc. By the time the radiology tech looks at the system they can see who is checked in and ready to be scanned. This helps to keep everything flowing smoothly and on time. As tardiness and long wait times are big contributors to patients getting frustrated and walking out.

With visibility to the schedule, administrators can monitor performance real-time thus impacting cancellation rates much more effectively. Keep in mind one the hardest things to do in an imaging business is to get the phone to ring. Once it does, the next step is to make sure the patient is scanned.

I believe strongly that a sophisticated RIS system like medQ’s Q/ris 3000 will give radiology department managers and center administrators the ability to set and manage towards an overall performance goal, empower all staff members to make it happen and do it with relative ease!

For more information about medQ's Q/ris 3000 visit www.medq.com

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