The Challenge
The staff at NHS Walsall Community Health were looking for a way
to increase the uptake of their community based lifestyle service
courses. These included both one-to-one and group sessions to help
their customers get fit, loose weight and quit smoking. At the same
time, they were looking to effectively manage the bookings made
both via the website and over the telephone and wanted to improve
staff efficiency, monitor the results and, where possible, reduce
the number of no-show appointments.
The Solution
Working together with the client, we developed a two tiered
approach to the system. The first concentrated on allowing members
of the public to come to the NHS
Walsall Community Health website and view information on
the available services and then register and book themselves onto a
session. The second allowed the team to utilise the same system at
the back end to take telephone bookings, entering the data in to
the same database but in a simplified way – therefore allowing data
from both booking streams to be managed from the same single
point.
Email and SMS reminder functions were developed to ensure that
customers were reminded at relevant times of their
appointments.
The system was developed as web application (utilising the
Umbraco CMS solution to enable integration with the website CMS)
not only to encourage customers to make their own bookings but to
enable all registered staff members to be able to access the same
system from multiple access points.
The Results
The new booking system launched in April 2010 and had recorded
almost 900 bookings by mid-July. The monitoring and back end
reporting that had been developed enabled the client to detect
where the bookings were originating from (GP referrals / website /
other Health Professionals such as Family Support Workers or Health
Visitors etc), how many were cancelled and how the bookings were
broken down (such as age, gender, postal district etc).
The client are really happy with the service, and in a recent
questionnaire, cited benefits such as reduction in administrative
times, a reduction in missed appointments and the 24 hour
availability of the system as some of the most beneficial
outcomes.