In my previous blog posts, I wrote about the benefits of patient flow management in terms of numbers. In part 1, I focused on the benefits of self service at the front desk and in part 2 I discussed the benefits from the healthcare units' perspective.
Inspired by these blog posts, we developed an ROI calculator for our self-service solution. This calculator counts the estimated payback time for the investment and presents the benefits in a clear and concise way. Our ROI calculator aims to model, at a high level, what kind of benefits healthcare organizations can achieve when their patient flow is monitored and managed more effectively with technological solutions. In this blog post, I will recap how the calculator was born and what lies behind the calculation formulas.
First, we attempted to understand which underlying variables affect the size of the investment and benefits to be gained. The list was obviously quite long: number of waiting lobbies, rooms, visits, no-shows, and different visit types, the average visit duration, and so on. We understood very quickly that the most important requirement for a high-level calculator like this is that it must be easy to use. So we had to eliminate a number of variables. The final version of the calculator contains four underlying variables: number of waiting lobbies and treatment rooms, which reflect the size and layout of the organization, as well as the number of visits and no-show rate, which describe the volume.
Axel Encounter adapts to many different needs, so we didn't want to simplify the calculator too much. Benefits and costs vary depending on the chosen solution, so we came up with the following choices:
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Does the self service take place at a self-service kiosk or with a mobile device, or are both options available?
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Does the solution contain patient flow management tools and guidance (which increase transparency) or payment functions?
The toughest challenge was to find the underlying constants for the calculations. In the real world, there are countless factors affecting the size of the investment and benefits to be gained. These factors are, for example, salary costs, share of self check-ins, utilization rate of mobile solutions in different special fields, internal rate of return, extra work caused by no-shows, and so on. We ended up having around 40 such constants in our calculator! You can imagine how difficult it was to narrow them down to this number. Well, the rest was just riding the wave – first we created the calculator in Excel, then built the formulas, and finally fixed a couple of bugs.
The outcome is amazing! Of course, the results provided by the calculator are not the absolute truth, but for many of those who acquaint themselves with patient flow management for the first time, these results will give a clear enough understanding of the savings (in terms of euros and working time) that can be achieved with Axel Health solutions. Try out the calculator yourself to see what kind of overall benefits Axel Encounter can offer to your organization. If you need more detailed calculations, feel free to contact our experts.
