Intelligent Scheduling from Notable Aims to Eliminate Call Centers From the Health System

New AI-powered scheduling technology is the only one that matches patients with the right provider no matter their care needs, simultaneously eliminating manual work for staff

Notable, the leading intelligent automation company for healthcare, announced Intelligent Scheduling, the only digital solution that helps patients schedule appointments based on their desire for care or guidance from a provider, eliminating the need for phone calls. In addition to allowing for patient self-scheduling, Intelligent Scheduling proactively and automatically reaches out to patients throughout their care journey to ensure appropriate appointments are scheduled. For example, the solution knows to prompt a patient to schedule only when requirements like referrals or prior authorizations have been satisfied.

Why existing scheduling technology has failed to meet expectations

Until now, health systems have managed the patient scheduling process by relying on a patchwork of call centers and unsophisticated digital tools. This limits a health system to be reactive, driven solely by inbound patient requests for care. The existing digital tools do not allow for the scheduling of all appointment types. Because some procedures or providers require unique booking processes, patients are forced to schedule their appointments over the phone.

Existing digital tools have also failed to gain provider acceptance because they struggle to accurately match patients to providers due to the variance in provider preferences and the fluid nature of patient needs. As a result, the current set of tools available depends on call center staff to manually make appointments. The inability of patients to schedule appointments when and how they want to leads to them seeking care from competing organizations, out-of-network providers, and emergency departments – and some may even forgo care entirely.

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• Pranay Kapadia, Chief Executive Officer, and Co-Founder at Notable: “As patients ourselves, we can empathize and attest to the fact that healthcare can be a source of frustration and anxiety when we are most vulnerable. Intelligent Scheduling is the first scheduling solution designed to ensure patients can easily be matched with the right provider. No matter what their care needs are, our solution eliminates the need to book appointments by phone. With the launch of Intelligent Scheduling, Notable gives health systems the ability to acquire, retain, and engage patients across multiple episodes of care – creating a sustainable competitive advantage that captures and grows market share under all payment models.”
• Kristen Guillaume, Vice President, Chief Information Officer at North Kansas City Hospital and Meritas Health: “As the provider of choice in Northland and surrounding Kansas City communities, we are making great strides with our personalized, proactive scheduling and registration experience. By leveraging AI to match each patient with the correct provider, Intelligent Scheduling has increased provider adoption of online scheduling. We are excited to expand Intelligent Scheduling across primary and specialty care areas after achieving 99.3% patient satisfaction and scheduling 80,000 appointments within three weeks of deployment.”
• Mark Thiel, Vice President of Primary Care at ThedaCare: “We’ve been working with Notable to replace repetitive, manual tasks with efficient automated workflows based on the unique needs of each of our patient populations. Closing care gaps in a timely manner can result in prediction, prevention, and proper diagnoses, leading to the best clinical outcomes for our patients, as well as managing total costs of care. We started with automating digital care gap outreach and those campaigns enabled ThedaCare to connect with roughly three times as many patients as outreach from our call center, to ensure they receive the care they need and deserve. Manual outreaches for this would have otherwise required support staff to spend an estimated 350 hours calling patients, allowing them even more time to spend with their patients in clinic.”

Notable’s hybrid approach to integration overcomes technical limitations

Most digital scheduling tools are limited to application programming interface (API) level integrations to access health records and other systems. While this method can handle scheduling some simple appointments, for complex ones, like referrals that require prior authorization, they fall short and need to have them manually processed. A significant amount of scheduling for a health system falls into the complex category. This is why these digital scheduling solutions have not been able to make an impact on the amount of scheduling-related phone calls. In fact, over half of the call center volume today is still appointment scheduling. Notable utilizes a hybrid approach of both API and robotic process automation (RPA) for integrations to overcome this with digital assistants that directly access any field, even custom ones on behalf of staff to automate scheduling entirely.

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Creating a better experience for all parties

With Notable, health systems can meet the full array of complex scheduling needs for patients, staff, and providers by removing the most manual and burdensome aspects of the scheduling process:

• Patients: Intelligent Scheduling proactively matches patients to the correct providers and appointments they need throughout their healthcare experience – including establishing care for the first time and following up on a referral to a specialist provider. Patients are automatically engaged to complete all pre-visit requirements and follow up with pending post-visit items, such as diagnostic testing.
• Staff: Intelligent Scheduling decreases the majority of scheduling-related call center volume, including scheduling, rescheduling, and cancellation requests. It also eliminates the need for staff to manually manage incoming appointment requests across multiple platforms and send appointment reminders.
• Providers: Predefined appointment rules precisely capture provider availability and individual preferences, such as visit-specific timeslots, ensuring patients are correctly scheduled with the best providers for their care needs every time.

Built on an AI-powered intelligent automation platform

Intelligent Scheduling is built on Notable’s platform, which automates any healthcare workflow through the unique combination of:

• Clinical AI: Our clinical AI is used to determine when and how to perform a workflow on behalf of staff or clinicians.
• Personalized engagement: We communicate with patients, providers, and staff via SMS, email, web app, portals, and the EHR, to prompt all parties to take the correct action.
• Comprehensive integration: Our platform can access every field in every system via APIs and RPA, allowing Notable to seamlessly link together disparate systems.
• Self-serve configuration: With our unique no-code approach to optimization for automation, we can meet the needs of each organization.
• Root cause analytics: We drive continuous improvement in staff, physician, patient adoption, as well as visibility into workflows that require optimization.

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