Eagles Landing Health Decreases Onboarding Time by 97% with DASH Patient Scheduling
In 2016, Eagles Landing Health found itself at a crossroads. Though they had successfully grown to become Georgia’s largest independently owned family practice, their Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software proved to be inefficient for their long-term business goals.
With tens of thousands of patients and hundreds of employees under their care, and new patients and employees streaming in each week, Eagles Landing Health needed a connected approach to their healthcare, marketing, and patient services if they were going to sustain their growth.
As the team began to implement Salesforce, Director of Marketing and PR Tim Reichert noticed that despite their efforts, they still had one challenge to confront: an inefficient appointment scheduling process. Three-and-a-half years later, we caught up with Tim to learn more about how AppExchange app DASH has both accelerated the practice’s onboarding process and streamlined appointment scheduling.
What was the biggest inefficiency you noticed before implementing DASH?
Tim Reichert: We see a significant number of patients at Eagles Landing Health each week. In order to manage communication with those patients, we rely on a 35-seat call center, which handles centralized scheduling for all of our offices. Prior to Salesforce and DASH, if a scheduler wanted to make an appointment for a patient, they had to work out of the EMR, which can be nebulous to navigate.
On top of using the EMR, the schedulers had to manage appointments for around 60 providers. Many of these providers had different skill sets and required different scheduling protocols which required our scheduling staff to learn and memorize a lengthy set of rules in order to determine where and when patients can be scheduled. This not only strained our employees’ time on the job, but created several issues for us in the onboarding process.
Tell me about your onboarding process now. What impact are you seeing across the entire business?
Tim Reichert: Before DASH, it took about a month or more to have a new hire be able to schedule on their own without any oversight. Keep in mind that in a call center environment, a month can equate to someone’s whole career with us. This meant constant rehiring and retraining.
Today, we can bring someone in off the street who has never seen Salesforce or DASH and have them scheduling appointments by the end of the day. With DASH, there is no thinking involved. All of the rules are implemented inside DASH and connected to Salesforce within the service console.
What challenges did you face due to COVID-19 and how did DASH help solve for those?
Tim Reichert: Part of what DASH offers is a patient self-serve online scheduling tool, called DASH-self. During COVID-19, our phones were blowing up. We couldn’t handle the call volume as much as we would have liked to because everyone was calling to schedule appointments for COVID-19 tests or questions.
With Salesforce and DASH, we were able to deliver communications via SMS and email to patients to point them to the online scheduling tool. This really helped us and slowed the constant flood of calls that was hitting our call center.
For other health practices thinking about switching from a standard EMR scheduling product to something more integrated, what is your advice?
Tim Reichert: If you really want to grow and become a more effective and efficient practice, you’re going to have to invest in better software solutions. I am fortunate that the Eagles Landing Health ownership believes in investing in technology. They aren’t scared to push the envelope and try new things.
Having the right, forward-thinking people in place is key. And I can say from personal experience that switching from an EMR native scheduling solution to Salesforce has been worth it in the long run. It has paid dividends by leading to business efficiency, as well as better customer service and patient satisfaction.
Check out DASH Patient Scheduling on the AppExchange and visit our Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry Collection to learn more about other solutions.
