Empowering Patients at Ochsner

Project Details

“The Kiosks have provided great improvement on our access to care for our clinic areas. It is not only the financial gain, but the overall coordination and patient satisfaction that is difficult to place a value on. The Kiosks allow for us to minimize the circus staffing commotion for early opening days, for the lunch breaks, for the bottle necking, for when a registrar is delayed with a financial counseling event, and for the stretched staffing with employee absences . Our Self-Serve kiosks allow for the business to continue, and for limited obstruction to our arriving patients. My personal benefit is that the kiosks have been a great staffing supplement, to handle operational growth, and the structure itself is readily understandable for all generations to utilize. The desktop model has been much more approachable for our patient’s confidence in the equipment, and with the perception of a more secure and private registration.

Specific to a numeric benefit, the Kiosk is a .5 FTE or better in savings. In some avenues, semi-attendance is necessary. However, I have had frequent “Save the Day” events with staffing constraints. Depending on the complexity of appointments and the volumes of same day appointments, there is a range of the number of check ins that a registrar can feasibly handle. The industry standard is approximated at 45-65/day, which includes a pre-scrubbing of the accounts for various factors. One of our Ochsner kiosk centers located in Covington, Louisiana, had a higher volume of 300 scheduled appointments in one sector for one day. Normally we would have 3 to 3.5 FTEs to man the registration area, to be able to timely arrive our patients. With the benefit of 2 kiosks, we had only one registrar successfully check in over 250 patients single-handedly. That would not have been feasible without our kiosks.”