scheduling in healthcare

Why is scheduling important in healthcare

4 min read

Introduction

An efficient healthcare scheduling workflow is important to ensuring quality patient care. In this blog post, we will dive deeper into scheduling in healthcare, the challenges faced when implementing scheduling, and how improving the scheduling workflow improves patient care. We will explore different APIs that can be used together as a powerful solution for addressing healthcare scheduling challenges.

The significance of efficient healthcare scheduling

When scheduling is efficient, it impacts patient overall satisfaction. Being able to allocate resources and streamline workflows enables healthcare providers to optimize operations and improve patient care. Benefits of efficient scheduling include reduced wait times, increased access to health care, and ensuring patients receive time-sensitive attention.

The challenges of healthcare scheduling

Resources are limited in the healthcare industry, creating challenges when it comes to scheduling and resource management.  Managing appointments, equipment, and unexpected circumstances adds complexity to healthcare scheduling.  These challenges highlight the need for scheduling solutions to scale manual or fragmented processes and surface real-time availability. This also improves both the health care provider and patient experience overall.

Benefits of streamlining healthcare scheduling

Let’s go over the benefits of streamlining healthcare scheduling. Improving scheduling workflows help reduce overall wait times and enables better access to healthcare through availability transparency. Patients can book appointments as needed by knowing a healthcare provider’s availability. Healthcare providers can better manage resources such as staff and equipment availability to improve the patient experience.  This helps improve overall operational efficiency and overall patient experience.

Nylas’ Calendar API: Empowering efficient healthcare scheduling

Let’s look at ways to use the Nylas Calendar API to address healthcare scheduling challenges. The Nylas Calendar API allows healthcare providers to share their availability using virtual calendars. Virtual calendars work like existing calendar solutions (i.e. Google Calendar) and offer a way to separate personal and work calendars to share availability for patient booking. We have a guide to virtual calendars on our blog and a video walkthrough on how to create virtual calendars:

In addition to creating and using virtual calendars for healthcare provider availability, we can also consider using the Nylas Scheduler to embed a user interface for providers and patients. We’ve previously covered creating a calendar scheduler with different user types, such as a provider and patients that may need to administer availability or book appointments. This is useful in scenarios where you want to leverage an existing user interface instead of creating one from scratch.

Compliance is also important when handling patient data when considering a scheduling solution. Nylas is HIPAA Type 1 / HITECH Compliance.

This section covers leveraging Nylas Calendar API and Nylas Scheduler to build scheduling solutions.

Combining Nylas and Stream APIs for healthcare applications

In addition to addressing scheduling, exploring ways for patients to connect with healthcare providers online will take improving patient care to the next step. Combining scheduling and real-time communication will improve patient care for many different scenarios:

  1. Screening patients before an on-site consultation
  2. Addressing patient health care issues online with a quick turnaround time
  3. Completing follow-up appointments once the health care provider is more aware of the patient’s circumstances

We can combine scheduling and real-time communication using the Stream’s Chat API with Nylas’ Calendar API.

The Stream Chat API is an all-in-one solution for real-time interactive communication. Stream provides the features such as group chat, active typing indicators and message threads. Using Stream’s rich features creates an environment for patients to have a secure real-time conversation with care providers. Consider checking out Stream’s Chat API-related tutorials to learn more.

Check out our work with Stream, Integrating Chat and Scheduling To Transform Online Care Appointments, where we integrated Nylas’ in-app scheduling the Stream’s in-app chat.

In addition, to chat, Stream recently launched an in-app voice and video calling. In addition to using chat, what better way to connect with your healthcare provider over in-app audio or video calling.

Build time!

In this blog post, we went over why scheduling is important in healthcare. We explored API solutions, Nylas and Stream, to build scheduling solutions that improve health care provider and patient experience.


You can sign up for Nylas for free and start building! Continue building with Nylas by exploring quickstart guides or visiting our developer documentation.

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