Best Practices to Improve the Outpatient Experience

Matthew Lewis, Darwin Rivera, and Duane Foote focus on the best ways to improve the outpatient experience. They capture the behind-the-scenes of the technology used to improve visitor security and discuss how reports can help security and personnel planning.

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Speaker 1 (00:05):

Powering trusted identities of the world's people, places, and things every day. Millions of people in more than 100 countries use our products and services to securely access physical and digital Places. Over 2 billion things that need to be identified, verified, and tracked are connected through HID Global's Technology.

Speaker 2 (00:30):

Hello again, everyone. Another session of our Lunch and Learn series. This time still focusing on healthcare. So focusing on our safe product. This time we're gonna talk about outpatient facilities a little bit more specifically, how you can improve that outpatient experience with, let's say a product like Safe. Darwin, if you wanna get into today's topics, we can, we can go ahead and get us kicked off. So we've got three yet again today that we're gonna walk through

Speaker 2 (01:04):

Those starting out why outpatient facilities should think about visitors walk-in visitors at outpatient facilities. Another way of saying that would be unscheduled which will actually get into some of that here in a minute with Dwayne and how that kind of language is actually pretty important for the discussion. And then reports. So how reports can help security and personnel planning. It's kind of some interesting things I think Darwin's gonna show us in the software beyond just the, the person getting checked in or, or the person checking in. So care organizations have a lot of different security considerations across their, across the multiple spaces, multiple regulations. There's a lot of different people walking around a healthcare facility. And you can see some of the different types of individuals that safe might be looking to help address their, their needs, whether it's for the management of them from an identity standpoint or their physical access needs. Specifically today, just like the last one we had we're gonna be focusing in on patients and visitors. This time we're gonna be focusing on the patients and visitors more in an outpatient context as opposed to an inpatient context. So if you didn't catch the last session or you're watching them outta order or whatever, we did have a session similar to this on inpatients last time. So check that out and while we get kicked off into our actual topics, Darwin.

Speaker 2 (02:34):

Yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:37):

Alright.

Speaker 2 (02:38):

So Dwayne, last time we talked about inpatients and, and a lot of that discussion, there's a lot of security that plays into the equation from a visitor management of inpatient and, and inpatient visitors outpatient facilities. Is it a similar thought process to what's going on there? What are they thinking about a little bit when, when they need to be thinking about visitors or why that's so important for them? Yeah, so let's start with that and go from there. Yeah, thanks Matt. So it's slightly similar in the idea that we still want to want to know who's in our building and when they're in our building, and we wanna make sure that those visitors are associated to the patients that are there. Now, specifically with outpatients, you know, some of these facilities are standalone clinics. Some of these facilities are hospitals with inpatient and outpatient.

Speaker 2 (03:31):

And we always want to know why are these people here, right? So that first step is understanding the outpatient perspective of it. So we're actually capturing information from their their, their health medical records system. And we're reading that information to identify whether these outpatients have scheduled appointments and, and to that point, we're allowing them or they have the ability to now check in through safe. So, so we know we're capturing, these patients have outpatient visits for today and they can actually check in using the system so we can track them as well. And any other visitors that are accompanying any of these outpatients, we are also have the ability to track them as well.

Speaker 2 (04:16):

You, you mentioned briefly either standalone facilities or those that are, I'll use maybe some of the wrong words here, but maybe they're co-mingled with inpatient facilities. Maybe it's part of a building or something. One of the things that comes to mind, Darwin, you'll know these, these words kind of similar to a lot of what we hear in cybersecurity, where it's about layered defenses or, or, or whatever. That, that inpatient outpatient kind of co-mingled space. I would think this is also beneficial from that standpoint. Dwayne Darwin chime into here where you don't want the outpatient facility to maybe be your weak link in your overall security posture. You certainly don't want someone to maybe come in through an outpatient facility and move laterally again to use kind of o other phrases. So definitely seems like it'd be important for an outpatient facility that shares a physical space with other inpatient facilities.

Speaker 2 (05:15):

Right? Yeah. That, that makes total sense. 100%. 'cause Again, that could be that, that small little loophole, that small gap. And now when you're managing your outpatient, like I said, you're, you are confirming that, you know, Philip is in here because he has you know, an x-ray you know, that day. So we're checking him in against his scheduled appointment and Darwin's gonna escort him because he's had an eye appointment. He's gonna get his eyes dilated and he's not gonna be able to see, so Darwin's gonna escort him. So now we have Philip and Darwin in our system, and we're vetting them through our internal watch list. We're vetting him through our external watch list and so forth. Okay. Darwin, any thoughts on maybe something other than the security aspect? I mean, we, we talk about safe and efficiencies and processes a lot. Any thoughts on how that may impact some of these facilities?

Speaker 4 (06:04):

Yeah, no, absolutely. So when, when you looking at healthcare facility, there, there are two things that in, in my, in my years, the, you know, discussing with, with, with, with folks in the industry, that is very important. Number one, the, the attainment of workflow of efficiencies. You, you want to strive to provide the, the best patient experience. Some, some cases, you know, that are true north goals where, where they they do they do everything in their power to try to achieve patient enter care and, and, and a solution like say I helps 'em achieve them. That because you are you know, providing a, a, a, a frictionless checking experience. You know, where, where we can, we can take the information that is entered by the, the practitioner in the healthcare electronic mar electronic record system and already preload that information when then you got your, your visitor test people that can, you know, provide that information and they, they, that visit can be pulled up quickly and, and, and captured any of the additional information that they need.

Speaker 4 (07:18):

And you can use peripherals to further increase the, the, the amount of friction that we remove out of the checking process. And by having those, those patients out there already you can, you know, make sure that you are keeping track of who's in there. And, and it, it just, it just has full on benefits. You know, anything from contract tracing to making sure that if you are enforcing patient visits levels that, you know, was then where we're a, you know one feature that we introduced lately also that has been been interesting is, you know, the, the use of mass notifications. So mm-hmm. <Affirmative> sometimes, you know, you, you, you may have have the, you know, if you have the inpatient and the outpatient, you know, when you have both, you have the ability of having all your visitors being notified in case of, of an emergency.

Speaker 4 (08:17):

The last, when the last session we were discussing earthquakes hurricanes you know, tornadoes. So, and anywhere, anywhere in the, in the where in the, in, in the country, there are gonna be situations that you want to have that information, know who's in your facilities, leverage those watch lists to, you know, either, you know, and sometimes watch lists does not mean that, okay, this is, this is somebody, somebody that needs to call the police is that you might have a patient that might had a seizure incident before, or is a person that is pro to false. So, you know, making sure you can put 'em on the watch list and the instructions is instead of calling police, it's just like, make sure that this person has a wheelchair available for them. So that, that is the level of, of service, of level of, of patient experience that you can, by capturing this data and managing it, you can deliver to your patients plus the workflow efficiencies because, you know, instead of like having manual processes that, you know, write writing stuff down, now you have the data, you can reuse it, you can repurpose it, you know, like I said, you know, using information on the watch list, it's like, Hey, this person is front to falls, make sure that they have a wheelchair and, and, and, and so on.

Speaker 2 (09:38):

Y you you mentioned something real quick that I think is also interesting when you think about some of these outpatient facilities. I know some of the facilities I go to with, with my, my child being able to extend, say, a visitor system with like a kiosk so that maybe I want to check in you know, quickly over at the kiosk, maybe not to pick on Dwayne, but he's thousands of miles away. So I can right now though I may regret it later, but you know, maybe, maybe Dwayne does want to actually talk to the, the person at reception. So being able to also give that flexibility within the space, I think has to be a real boon. It, it's, it probably doesn't meet quite the same level as, you know, reducing friction and, and queuing and stress as an inpatient facility, but it's gotta be somewhat beneficial in, in a number of ways. I would think, Dwayne, I don't, since I picked on you and, and you can't, can't get me right now, you know, any thoughts on, on having that optionality and helping outpatient facilities from that standpoint too? No, I, I, I think it's a very beneficial method of doing things. So yeah, it's ag again, very, very beneficial, very simple process for, for us to implement to use or most healthcare facilities to implement youth. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (10:58):

Yeah. And, and, and it just, just adds, you know, like that to the patient experience and, and, and, and meet patients where they want to be. You know, you can, you have your, you can have you in initiate the, the, the, the the, the encounter by going to a kiosk and just signing up on the kiosk and then when they're ready to call you, they can call you. It, it's, it's, it's it's like, you know, you can go up to a kiosk and a kiosk, it can be made out of a, you know, a tablet, you know, a pc. You go, you can either scan and a your, your, your appointment check in and you know, the, the desk will be notified, Hey, you know, this person is here for the appointment and once they're ready for you to do the, the, any, any paperwork that is needed, they can call you up. You know, and it, and it's just having that, that, that flexibility of, you know, providing that patient experience. You know, the ones that went to do the kiosks, wanna do the self-service thing, they can do the self-service thing. They can go up to the, the visitor desk and get their, your, their, their the V M o visitor desk, you know, checking them in, having that, that flexibility. Plus, you know, the, the recording that goes with it.

Speaker 2 (12:16):

So we're talking about scheduled visits and in the next next slide we kind of flipped that on its head and talk about it from a, maybe an unscheduled visit standpoint. Darwin, when we were talking about this the other day, you made a really good point. Some of these facilities there's an urgency factor. So you know, maybe I'm wheeling, I won't pick on Dwayne this time. Maybe I'm wheeling you in for something that happened, just, just, you know, all of the sudden, I think you had an example it's worth relating to. 'cause It's not always gonna be a scheduled visit that an outpatient facility needs to think through. So from a safe standpoint any kind of guidance on how to think of those unscheduled visits in a safe world, either of you actually think of it, think of it like any ed mm-hmm.

Speaker 2 (13:08):

<Affirmative>, any ED facility, typically you're gonna have people coming in with situations. And most of these individuals are probably not inpatient or scheduled visits. Right? So, you know, essentially that's what we consider to be un our, our unscheduled visits. The solution has various ways that you can manage that. Yeah. You know, it really depends all on policies and procedures of the hospital, of the health facility, of the health system overall. But the solution allows you to check in individuals even though they may not be patients in your, your health medical record system at that point, right? So you, you know, your unscheduled visits, you, any and every ED will essentially come across this, this this scenario. And there are workflows defined to be able to, to alleviate this stress. Okay. There anything to add on that one?

Speaker 4 (14:08):

Yeah, and, and you know, this, you know, being able to leverage a, a solution like, like, like, like this one that we were talking about. And so gives, gives a little op operational control to your, your guards to your, to your receptionist to that, that, that checking desk. Because you, you want to have that situational awareness because you want to know right away if the, the the the person coming in, you know, is, is, is, is an actual patient not, not somebody that has, you know, come in in the past and, you know, they, they might have a different, a different goal in mind other than than receive you know, a, a standard of care to, for them to, you know, address an issue that, that they, they really have. And, you know, just, just put in blank, you know, person that wants to do X you know, says that has y and sometimes, you know, you, you might have person that goes facility to facility, try to find out the facility that will give 'em what they're, what they're looking for.

Speaker 4 (15:24):

And that's, you know, that's, that's something that, you know, using that you can use it you know, to, you know, either give a heads up to your, to your, to your desk, you know, on those scheduled visits. Because like when you have an unscheduled visit, yeah. You, you, you, you, you don't at, at, at first, you know, a a first glance, you have no way to validate, you know, is this a, is a, is a, is a valid visit or not yeah. And, you know, having that awareness and being able to maintain that information to give you that situational awareness and can go a way in, in a host of situations. You know, it could be, you know, persons that are, you know, doing venue shopping, others that are you know, that are not supposed to be there because they were order off premises and they're, they're trying to get in, you know, kind of like we were talking about earlier in, in the, the previous example where they're trying to get into the inpatient area out of the outpatient area. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (16:23):

So

Speaker 4 (16:24):

Trying to, to, you know, kind of be sneaky like that.

Speaker 2 (16:27):

Yeah. So we actually have a question about reports, which is perfect. 'cause That's actually the next topic. And you even, you even mentioned contact tracing. We, we've discussed, you know, planning a little bit. So maybe now's a good time to flip over to that. Then we can kind of dive into the software maybe as we're we're talking through some of the reports and some of those things from a reporting standpoint. Dwayne, what, what questions or, or what are some of the scenarios you're hearing about

Speaker 2 (16:58):

Some of our customers that are looking at outpatient or have outpatient some of the reports that they're getting at, you know an advantage from or getting value from? So the, the reports are, let's probably not make the reporting so specific to outpatient, because again, outpatient just typically, Hey, Matthew came in for this appointment, daring, I mean, for this appointment, we do wanna be able to, or we do have the ability to run reports that, you know, these are all the visitors that have accompanied outpatient visitors in the last 30 days, right? Or things like that. Or, you know, this person that had an outpatient visit for a COVID vaccine actually tested positive. Now we want to be able to run a report, almost like a contact, contact tracing report, even to run a report that shows all the visitors that have put, potentially entered that facility in the last 30 days.

Speaker 2 (17:51):

You know, depending on hospital policies, whatever we capture, we can maybe contact those individuals to let them know you might have come in contact with the person who had covid, et cetera, et cetera, whatever policies follow. However, the, specifically with the healthcare perspective, the healthcare side, there's a tremendous amount of new reports that have been, that have been implemented in this solution. One being that contact tracing another one being from a check-in visitor perspective, how many visitors have checked in at this particular location at this particular time, you know, so we can get more specific and granular with the kind of information that we're extracting from safe. So there's a whole plethora of, of, you know, of of reports all patient details. So although we do capture, you know, that, that, that E M R or the p h i coming from your E M R to safe, we're bringing that into safe.

Speaker 2 (18:45):

So we have fairly updated patient details at any specific given time. 90% of our reports are dynamic, so if data changes, it automatically changes and gives you that new report. Right. Very good. Just to our final, final slide, our recap, our final thoughts again, this was fun. I love doing this with you too. We'll do it again soon in fact, really soon. Next one will be on, on kiosks, so might dive a little more into some, some similar related workflows here. Definitely interesting though to think about the healthcare facilities and, and you know, how they need to think about visitor management in all, oh, in all areas. We discussed that there's, there's a ton around process efficiencies that they're gonna get out of this, being able to check in individuals, checking their visitors and a more and a in a quicker basis.

Speaker 2 (19:41):

I think the other thing that was interesting is the thought of kind of that layered approach. You don't want a an outpatient facility that's maybe commingled with other facilities to somehow be the weak link. And so being able to extend a lot of these core concepts around visitor management into these facilities is, is just something I think it's, is, is sorely needed. And so I'm excited to keep talking about this with customers on exploring this space. Dwayne, Darwin, anything you wanna wrap us up with or quick final thoughts? Yeah, I have two points that we, we talked about. I think the most, the two most important things when we talk about outpatient, one is efficiency, and the other one is patient experience, right? Because when you're an inpatient, you're expecting, your expectations are that you're gonna be there for an extended period of time when you're an outpatient, you want to get in, get your appointment done and get out, right? And the seamless streamline check-in process allows that to be done through the application, right? We're listening to those scheduled messages. Your, your information is already in safe, whether you use a kiosk or a guest services desk, we check you in, we add visitors, and then you, you're going about your way. So that efficiency and as well as that experience to allow them to, again, not have to worry about the poor efficiency, but better efficiency of getting in and getting out.

Speaker 4 (21:08):

And I'll, you know, I will just add that, you know, you have a site benefit that you increase the security and, you know, the, you, you, you, the protection of those folks in, in your facility you know, not only your patients, but your visitors and inpatient outpatients. So you, you know, while, while you know, focusing and, and, and, and receiving the work for the efficiencies and, and that patient experience. So we, you know, that patient-centered care, we also you improving our security and, and the, the protection of, of our, our, our visitors or patients that are staff. And I'll, I'll leave you back what to mark Matt to, or closes off. Thank you. Awesome.

Speaker 2 (21:49):

Cool guys, I appreciate it. Like I said, we'll do this again soon. Maybe one more in the offer, maybe two. We'll see. Appreciate those that joined us today. We do have a previous one, which is on inpatients, so similar tone and cadence. I think that one was pretty interesting too overall. And so I appreciate the time. If you've got questions, reach out to, to Dwayne or, or cleat or your c s m your customer success or, or salesperson, you know, we want to keep having these conversations and, and, and Anthony appreciate the time you gave us here today too. So everyone have a lovely weekend and we'll see y all again soon. Take care everyone. Thanks Matt. You guys

Speaker 4 (22:38):

Have

Speaker 2 (22:38):

A great weekend.

Speaker 4 (22:40):

Take care. Thanks

Speaker 2 (22:41):

Anthony. Bye-Bye.