Challenge
Baptist Health Care operates in a highly competitive Florida market. The organization puts an emphasis on providing the best patient and provider experiences possible. Like most, Baptist struggled with the time-consuming process to obtain prior authorizations, which often resulted in delays and last-minute reschedules.
Solution
Baptist partnered with R1 to address these challenges by digitizing and integrating order management, rules-based scheduling and financial-clearance processes — key capabilities now available as part of R1 Patient Experience, the integrated patient experience solution for the healthcare enterprise.
By starting with digital orders and automating authorizations, Baptist has reduced administrative burdens and accelerated time to schedule. Today, automated prior authorizations workflows are triggered as soon as an order is received. This eliminates administrative bottlenecks and gets to a “schedule-ready” state much faster.
Efficiency
51%
reduction in auth-related reschedules
Productivity
17%
improvement in scheduler productivity
Satisfaction
94%
of patients rated Ease of Scheduling Appointment When Wanted as “Good or Very Good” across all three hospitals
Results
By centralizing, standardizing and automating these workflows, Baptist has realized improvements in several key areas.
Improved revenue cycle and patient-access processes:
- Reduced front-end denial rates with centralized, heavily automated pre-service clearance
- Accelerated turnaround times for prior authorizations — 78% of orders are cleared in less than one day (average was 5–7 days)
- Reduced authorization-related reschedules by 51%
Optimized the patient scheduling experience:
- Simplified scheduling with more convenient location and time options driven by rules-based, cross-location scheduling
- Improved scheduler productivity by 17% with rules-based workflows
- Enabled appointment volume to nearly double from ~8,000 to 15,000 without increasing diagnostic schedulers
Strengthened relationships with referring providers:
- Expanded electronic orders utilization by providers to 77% — well above industry average
- Increased volume and reduced leakage with employed providers
- Improved alignment with independent providers while increasing referral volume
