Coordinating acute or urgent visit requests in an HBPC practice is essential to helping medically complex patients avoid hospitalizations and unnecessary emergency department (ED) visits. Consider these strategies for taking unexpected schedule changes in stride:
- Develop a clear system for triaging patients to ensure the appropriate clinical staff member is evaluating the patient’s needs and gathering information for the provider. Many times, urgent matters can be resolved via a telehealth visit. Patients receive the care they need, and the practice earns a reputation for being accessible.
- Since geographic scheduling affects both HBPC productivity and provider satisfaction, adopt scheduling strategies that make it easier to accommodate urgent visits such as:
- Reserving one or two “open” appointments per provider per day
- Designating a provider-of-the-day to handle acute/urgent visits
- Prioritizing service area needs to help ensure a provider can be near each of your areas each day
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution for HBPC acute/urgent visits, reviewing urgent encounters as an HBPC team – including patient, caregiver, and additional family member input – will help you identify what worked, what did not, and what can be improved for the future.
HCCIntelligence™ is for educational and informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as medical advice.
