The coronavirus pandemic challenged health systems' abilities to effectively schedule physicians; new report measures breadth vs. depth of scheduling software, as well as attributions affecting outcomes.
Following a year where the ability to effectively schedule physicians became crucial due to the COVID-19 pandemic, KLAS recently released a comparison of physician scheduling software, declaring that physician scheduling vendors "have made great strides" driving tangible outcomes,
QGenda Advanced Scheduling and Lightning Bolt took top honors. "Advanced Scheduling has the largest market share and some of the broadest deployments, most often used in very large organizations and academic medical centers," the report stated.
Broad deployment of Advanced Scheduling is supported by the system's rules engine, and QGenda's deep knowledge of scheduling, according to the KLAS report.
Lightning Bolt, a PerfectServe company, historically has been deployed in smaller, departmental settings, but more recently has proven itself able to scale up to a few very large organizations, according to KLAS. Overall, Lightning Bolt produces broad outcomes more consistently that the other software evaluated.
More complex deployments can face more difficulty when enabling reporting and dashboards. For instance, the report KLAS evaluated the offering from Ultimate Kronos Group (UKG), which has fewer enterprise deployments than competitors, and feedback from health organizations to KLAS found it less robust for more complex deployments.
Customers of QGenda Shift Admin require more help from the vendor to get reporting and dashboard functioning well, but the vendor is responsible and willing to help, KLAS' report stated.
The complexity of the leading software, QGenda Advanced Scheduling, is such that gleaning insights is difficult, KLAS' report stated. Thorough training of customers is a success factor, and those organizations that buy QGenda's add-on analytics package see more outcomes, though they are frustrated by the extra cost, the report added.
The report includes a grid measuring each of the four software packages' impact on outcomes for four attributes: scheduling transparency, scheduling efficiency, physician satisfaction, and data management. A separate evaluation places each package on an X-Y grid where the X axis represents deployment breadth as measured by the average number of facilities, and the Y axis is the average number of different departments per facility.
Scott Mace is a contributing writer for HealthLeaders.