When St. Luke’s Health System (Duluth, MN) announced they would be offering COVID-19 vaccines, calls from the community tied up their 672 phone lines within minutes and prevented them from making any inbound or outbound calls. So the healthcare organization turned to MEDITECH’s self-scheduling solution to improve efficiency.
Three months before the pandemic began, St. Luke’s had implemented MEDITECH’s Direct Appointment Booking feature in the Patient and Consumer Health Portal to support patient self-scheduling at select practice clinics. Upon evaluation, they determined that this functionality aligned perfectly with vaccine scheduling.
“By empowering patients to directly book their own COVID-19 vaccinations in our MEDITECH patient portal, we’ve saved our scheduling staff countless hours, freed up our phone lines, and provided our patients with the convenience of scheduling a time that works best for them,” said Clark Averill, director of IT at St. Luke’s.
Check out two recent interviews with Clark Averill on using the portal to double patient engagement, in Healthcare IT News and on MEDITECH’s podcast.
