Queue management system is used in various industries. One of the industries that benefit from it is the healthcare sector. Hospitals use them to reduce their wait time. Time is gold and every minute you spend in the waiting room cost money. Instead of being able to do other things, you end up being stuck inside the waiting room. To reduce waiting times, hospitals are now using systems to manage their patient queues, and the results are good.

What’s Wrong with Appointments?

In the ideal world, appointments can help reduce the waiting time. As long as people arrive on time, then there will be little to no waiting times. However, this is far from what is happening in the real world. Even with appointments, it is rare for patients to be early. More often than not, they come in late. When that happens, appointments of next patients are pushed back.

Tardiness is not the only issue with appointments. The length of each scheduled appointment takes much longer than the allotted 15 to 20 minutes for each. Almost half of the appointments take much longer than 20 minutes.

Then there are the no shows, but you can’t blame them for it. Because of the bad customer experience, there are patients who don’t bother showing up for their appointments.

These are just some of the disadvantages of appointments. The good news is that there’s a new system that can help hospitals improve their customer experience, and improve their queues.

 

Advantages of Queue Management System

One of the obvious reasons why hospitals should implement a queue system is to save time. There are systems that allow patients to book an appointment online. This is more convenient than going to the hospital in order to book an appointment that is a couple of days in advance. That means going to the hospital multiple times. With a patient queue management solution, the job is made simpler, and the patient doesn’t need to make unnecessary trips to the hospital.

The queue solution is convenient to both the patients and the staff. Patients are able to see the availability of the doctors at different locations. And the staffs don’t need to look at the patients’ files because they are automatically updated by the system.

Electronic healthcare records are reliable. They have been designed to handle medical records of the patients in a secure and safe manner. There will be no human error involved such as mixing up or misplacing reports.

The queuing solution is also a stress-free service. There are patient record management systems that allow patients to access reports on any device. There’s no need to adjust your schedule in order to know the results of the lab test.

Lastly, the queuing system results to less paperwork. There’s no need to fill out numerous forms for appointments. The forms can be filled out digitally and saved on cloud. Only authorized personnel have access to the files.

As you can see queue systems in hospitals are helpful for both patients and clinical staff. It is important for healthcare providers to have a reliable queue solution to provide good customer experience and make the facility more patient-friendly.