The challenge: wait times within the clinic. Serving 18 to 20 thousand patients per month, Retreat operates over capacity. Long wait times and a lack of updates lead to frustration amongst patients.
Retreat Community Health Centre 2013 | Cape Town, South Africa To help reduce on-site wait times in one of the highestvolume public community health centers in the Western Cape, MIT students worked closely with staff at all levels to generate a set of improvements that together helped save time, improve patient flow, and streamline paperwork. The team pinpointed the management of booked and unbooked patients as a major opportunity to improve patient and staff experience. An early indication of success: average time to triage was immediately reduced.
Triaging the “unbooked� — patients arriving without an appointment. Unbooked patients waited an average of two hours before even being seen by a triage nurse. This delay in reaching triage posed an impediment to patient safety.
A great deal of time could be lost in simply locating patient folders.