Maximizing Clinic Capacity: How Little Spurs Expanded Patient Access with Online Booking
Little Spurs, a 20+ location pediatric urgent care group in Texas, has always strived to increase access to care in their community. Previously walk-in only, Little Spurs made the jump to offering online bookings with Solv in 2018. Since then, the Solv platform has helped them maximize clinic capacity by blending book ahead visits with walk-ins and load balancing visit volume throughout the day.
Challenge
Before partnering with Solv, Little Spurs was a walk-in-only clinic. Each clinic had to depend entirely on their EMR and front-desk team for handling patient check-in. This setup made it harder to attract patients and left predicting patient numbers into a guessing game, rather than something the leadership could confidently measure and manage.
Without a way of capturing online patients, Little Spurs was often left hoping that patients would remember their brand and come through their doors for care.
Operating with just their EMR also affected leadership's ability to make data-informed decisions. Little Spurs leadership often found themselves piecing together the operational picture across scattered pieces of data. Key metrics like patient throughput, wait times, and feedback were siloed across systems. Since the process to stitch that together was manual, management wasn’t monitoring these metrics as frequently as they wanted and often questioned the accuracy of the data.
We had a general idea of wait times and reviews, but we had nowhere near the granularity that we have today. It’s been very helpful in identifying issues within our clinics. Maybe a provider is slower than others or a clinic has longer wait times -- we have access to all that now.
Solution
Every urgent care faces unpredictability in walk-in volume, so your online booking system needs to adapt for the on demand workflow. With a flexible system in Solv’s AI-powered queuing, Little Spurs found that these features just work.
Through their partnership, Little Spurs and Solv have introduced several innovations to further enhance access and efficiency through online booking. A recent solution is the Save My Spot feature, allowing patients to save their spot remotely, fill out forms, and wait their turn outside the clinic. This feature has been instrumental in optimizing patient flow without overburdening the clinics, even during peak times.
Beyond tSave my Spot, a pivotal aspect of patient access at Little Spurs is the convenience of booking online and completing paperwork ahead of time. "The world has changed. Being online means we now capture patients actively seeking care, rather than hoping that patients would show up at our door, they could now go online and reserve their spot. That lets patients plan their day out and come in when it's their turn to be seen."
Simultaneously, staff benefit from a comprehensive portal that aggregates all operational metrics, allowing for communication between front desk personnel, back office teams, and management.
“We can start pre-registering patients before they ever get to the door, and that is big for our door-to-door times.”
Results
The operational dashboards from Solv have given Little Spurs real-time insights into clinic activity. This means management can now swiftly reallocate resources where needed, directly from the dashboard, without the hassle of digging through separate systems.
The dashboard also helps track patient volume & throughput trends, providing a clear view of the busier days to aid in staff scheduling and resource management. This data is crucial, not just for day-to-day operations but also for long-term planning, helping to forecast weekly patient volumes with greater accuracy.
“Solv reporting has been a game changer. I’m able to log in and see what is happening at every location. Now I can see weekly clinic trends and make decisions in real-time to meet the needs of the clinic. While there is no perfect method to it, Solv gives me the tools to try and predict the future.”
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