Online Patient Self-Scheduling for Imaging: An academic outpatient practice’s initial experience with ticketed scheduling through the electronic health record

Purpose: Online self-scheduling, standard in many industries (e.g. airlines, hospitality), is increasingly being utilized in healthcare. Despite evidence that online scheduling is preferred by many patients, imaging practices have been slow to adopt due to the need for orders and complexity of scheduling. This electronic poster illustrates ticketed scheduling as a paradigm for radiology self-scheduling and presents initial data from implementation at an academic outpatient practice.

Methods/Materials: Ticketed scheduling was implemented through the enterprise electronic health record (EHR) for a multi-site academic outpatient practice consisting of 7 outpatient offices for x-ray (XR), computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MR), ultrasound (US), bone densitometry (BD), and fluoroscopy (FL). Ticketed scheduling provides patients a link to self-schedule an appointment after their provider places eligible orders in the EHR. Metrics on usage and effectiveness were measured for CY2022.

Results: 22881 orders generated self-scheduling tickets with 10,831 used by patients resulting in an appointment (47%). The number (with % total) of scheduled examinations by modality was XR 1779 (16.4%), CT 1981 (18.3%), US 2169 (20.0%), MRI 4064 (37.5%), BD 788 (7.3%), and FL 50 (0.5%). 88.5% of appointments scheduled through a ticket resulted in a completed visit, similar to 86.9% for non-ticketed appointments. Self-scheduled appointments resulted in a savings of 54,155 minutes total of scheduler time, using conservative estimates of 6 minutes average of scheduler time for a synchronous scheduling event versus 1 minute average required to validate and, if necessary, correct a self-scheduled appointment. This equates to 112 workdays of a scheduling agent.

Conclusions: Our pilot demonstrates that ticketed self-scheduling within an EHR can be an effective paradigm for imaging practices. Future work should include more detailed analysis of access and patient experience metrics and addressing limitations that the initial experience revealed.