• E-mail
• Print
• RSS

Self-service kiosks: A multi-purpose solution

Patient Access Weekly Advisor, October 10, 2007

Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Patient Access Weekly Advisor!

After Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana in 2005, closing 75% of New Orleans' hospitals during the disaster, hospitals had to consider how they could handle future crises and the patient surge that could accompany them.

West Jefferson Medical Center (WJMC) in nearby Marrero, LA, was one of the few hospitals that remained open during the entire disaster period.

"But our volume increased dramatically overnight," says Fran Landry, WJMC's patient access director. "And we lost 75% of our staff."

WJMC struggled to move patients through registration and to the treatment they needed. In October 2005, the facility began discussions with the McKesson Corporation to develop a self-service kiosk to ease patient flow problems in the event of a crisis.

"There were conference calls, online visits, just us mapping out what we wanted in the kiosk," Landry says. "We were very careful to include everything we'd need to have in order for it to be completely seamless for the patient. In a perfect world, we wanted the kiosk to make sure everything was taken care of, even though we knew that was hard to do."

Officials decided the kiosk would need to:

• Direct a patient to see a registrar to change his or her medical record
• Ask HIPAA questions
• Ask MSP questions
• Ask questions in verbiage all patients would understand

"The challenge was to make it so that a person off the street could use it," Landry says. "We needed to know that 80-year-old ladies coming in for a mammogram once a year could use it."

WJMC began the pilot in September 2006 after nearly a year of planning. One year later, the response from patients has been overwhelmingly favorable.

Before the kiosk, the average patient wait time was 20 minutes. Now, WJMC has it down to seven minutes. The wait for a Medicare patient is less than three minutes. The wait for a managed care patient is two minutes.

Want to receive articles like this one in your inbox? Subscribe to Patient Access Weekly Advisor!

• E-mail to a Colleague
• Print
• RSS
• Archive