(Originally published in Healthcare Call Center Times in October 2020.)

BETHESDA, MD—In past issues of this publication, we’ve chronicled the evolution of Keona Health and its dedication to reducing the time it takes to handle a telephone triage call. The Bethesda, Maryland-based company is achieving this marker “through automation,” says CEO Oakkar Oakkar. “For example, let’s take a disposition for the caller to be seen within 24 hours. The nurse would have to go into the EMR and find a provider that has an appointment available. This process could take seven to eight minutes. We have automated this so that it can be done within a minute.”

The system goes into the EMR and finds provider preferences matched with the patient’s default location. If that location is not the most desirable (e.g. patient has medical relationships near their work, but lives an hour away and is home sick), then that can be worked out during the conversation.

Primary care scheduling is one thing; specialty scheduling can be something else entirely. Within each specialty there may be different requirements that patients have to meet to be seen, certain tests that may have to be conducted ahead of the visit and time length of appointments that may be quite different from the standard primary care appointment type. 

The company got involved in the specialty scheduling arena after hearing from clients that a lot of errors were occurring after their organization moved toward centralized scheduling. Doctors were pushing back by saying that their prior scheduler in their office truly knew all their preferences and with the move to centralization their books were not as fully optimized. For example, patients would be scheduled with the wrong subspecialist or patients did not have all the requisite materials to bring to the appointment so it was wasted time.

“What we did was bring on a lot of algorithms and machine learning to put in physician preferences,” he says.

On the surface, this would seem to be at cross-purposes with many scheduling centers working hard to reduce the appointment types.  However, Oakkar says that while he does understand the need to standardize, it is also important to give specialty practices the freedom to see who they want to see in the way they want to see them. “We understand how complicated scheduling can be,” he adds.

The company is currently providing specialty scheduling software to more than 1,000 practices throughout the country. More than 20,000 providers are covered with its triage software.