The hospitals are crowded places with hundreds of patients scampering here and there from one counter to another, nurses and ward boys hurrying about as the doctors moving here and there.
All this tends to create an air of anxiety escalating the tensions of the already-stressed patients and relatives. This is why crowd control at hospitals is a must to help in their smooth functioning.
Imagine a hospital without hurry, noise and din? Is it truly possible? Absolutely with good crowd management strategies, a hospital can become an efficient place of timely medical care without queues, tokens, waiting or stress.
Why crowd management is essential in hospitals?
Crowd management is crucial in hospitals to,
- Enhance the patient experience at the hospital
- Reduce their waiting, cancellation or delay in availing the hospitals' services
- Streamline the hospital's functioning
- Maximize the efficiency of the hospital in terms of service
- To make the hospital a better place to visit.
To achieve all this, every hospital should have a crowd management policy that list and govern all procedures relating to crowd control with a view to making the patient's experience pleasant and productive. The best way to achieve this is by implementing the following crowd management techniques.
5 Hospital Crowd Management Methods
1. The use of technology in crowd control
Technology is the best tool for engagement in crowd control. Hospitals should use technology in the form of mobile apps for appointment booking, drones for crowd surveillance and monitoring and artificial intelligence in patient diagnosis. All these should be integrated with a Hospital Information system for best results.
2. Use a calendar booking system
Hospitals should use a Calendar booking system integrated with the Hospital's Information system (HIS). This system will help the hospital staff to steer the appointments towards the lean or non-busy hours of the day. Due to integration with HIS, calendar booking is automatically updated, thereby helping the rescheduling of appointments due to unexpected cancellation, emergencies etc.
3. Reduce waiting time for patients
A survey by McCarthy, McGee and O'Boyle revealed that 65% of the patients feel that the waiting time in hospitals is unsatisfactory. Reduce the waiting time of patients at hospitals by the use of technology like Online booking systems and queue manager usage in hospitals.
An online booking system helps you to book your appointment online via mobile or internet devices and tracks the status of the appointment till it is met.
4. Increase doctor-patient interaction time with the use of technology.
Most patients look forward to a one-to-one interaction with their doctors and feel satisfied only when they speak to them at length and clarify their doubts. Unfortunately, most of the doctor's time is spent in diagnosis, documentation, etc. which leaves little room for such conversations.
Virtual Assistants are a heavenly help in this area. With inbuilt voice recognition technology, text-to speech conversion and integration with EHR-Electronic Health Records, these virtual assistants help in patient information collection and documentation while enriching the doctor-patient interactions.
Similarly technology is underway to use the Google Glass for to automate the scribing process of physicians and to help them spend less time on computers and more on patients.
5. Automatic patient check-in and patient journey tracking
In a hospital, the reception desks are the most chaotic. Reduce patient queuing or crowding at reception desks by installing automatic patient check-in at hospitals. This automatic patient check-in integrated with HIS reduces staffing by 25% while eliminating crowding.
Using a patient journey tracking system integrated with HIS is another viable option as it will enrich the patient experience by predicting time taken for each visit.
Other valuable crowd control measures
Information is the key in hospitals. Informing a lab technician in advance about the patient’s arrival and his history can enable the technician to make arrangements for blood tests or scans. This will reduce the crowd at scan and blood test centers in the hospital.
Crowd control at the hospital is the vital key to ensuring its smooth functioning, timely delivery of its services and enrichment of the patient experience.
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